Voice of Danny Elfman, Catherine O'Hara, William Hickey, Chris Sarandon.

Running time: 86mins.

. . .

MASS consumerism has so conditioned us to live everything before it happens . . . notoriously the millennium . . . that by the time it actually happens, it's deja vu. Tim Burton got the idea for his 1993 Academy Award-nominated stopaction animated musical when he noticed shopping malls taking down Halloween displays and changing them for Christmas merchandise. Nowadays, they don't even wait for Halloween before bringing out the Christmas tinsel. The original Nightmare Before Christmas was a great spoof on this soulless social malaise.

Jack Skellington, bored with dreaming up new scares for the inhabitants of Halloween Town, by chance discovers Christmas Town and decides to take it over. He abducts 'Sandy Claws' and takes his place, flying off into the sky on a sleigh of skeletal steeds and distributing gifts of vampire dolls, man-eating wreaths and fanged rubber ducks to terrified children.

It's a brilliantly exuberant variation on How The Grinch Stole Christmas, now enhanced by Disney Digital 3-D which is light years ahead of the old cardboard green-and-red filter glasses. Now you get to plunge into a fantastical world of crazy creatures, yawning chasms and creepy crawlies that pop out of the darkness. It makes all other Halloween celebrations seem like a damp squib.

Razzle Dazzle (Darren Ashton):

Kerry Armstrong, Jayne Notelovitz, Ben Miller, Nadine Garner, Denise Roberts, Tara Morice, Jane Hall.

Running time: 92 mins . . .

Razzle Dazzle, adopting the faux documentary Christopher Guest approach, attempts to do for Australia's teen dance competitions what Little Miss Sunshine did for pageants. Rival teachers Mr Jonathan (Ben Miller) and Miss Elizabeth (Jane Hall) pitch their ambitious pupils into a flurry of nail-biting play-offs before going toe-to-toe in a gaudy grand final showdown. All the stereotypes are jokingly dissected by director Darren Ashton, but not unkindly. A showpiece number about the liberation of women in Afghanistan comes close to rivalling the Mel Brooks's 'Springtime With Hitler' as an exercise in delirious bad taste.

Nancy Drew (Andrew Fleming):

Emma Roberts, Daniella Monet, Kelly Vitz, Josh Flitter, Rachel Leigh Cook.

Running time: 99 mins . .

Back when I was a small boy, before I discovered John Dickson Carr and Ross Macdonald, I sometimes read Hardy Boys detective stories. Their female equivalent was Nancy Drew, a schoolgirl sleuth with a similar talent for solving mysteries. The idea of her still having any appeal in the era of Spears and Lohan is surprising, yet here she is relocated from small-town River Heights to Beverly Hills where punk classmates ridicule her prim way of speaking and retro-pleated suits. When Nancy finds out the mansion rented by her dad once belonged to a glamorous film star who died mysteriously, her curiosity gets the better of her.

Helped by a plump 12-year-old called Corky who has a crush on her, she's soon annoying some seriously dangerous thugs, but being a stubborn little miss, refuses to back off. "Excuse me while I defuse a bomb, " she says, polite as always. Director Fleming uses irony to give Nancy some cool, but it's hard to warm to Roberts's self-aware cuteness.

Daddy Day Camp (Fred Savage):

Cuba Gooding Jr, Richard Gant, Tamala Jones, Joshua, McLerran, Lochlyn Munro.

Running time: 89 mins.

. .

From Boyz 'N The Hood and his Oscar-winning "Show me the money!" performance in Jerry Maguire, Cuba Gooding Jr has slipped off the radar, apart from a lively supporting role as Greg Kinnear's agent in As Good As It Gets. Now he seems content to get by on kids' stuff like giving a reprise performance as a harassed child carer in this sequel. It's a harmless slapstick romp, putting him in charge of a summer camp where he rallies a gang of misfit kids to see off a takeover attempt by an unscrupulous rival.

The Last Legion (Doug Lefler): Colin Firth, Ben Kingsley, Aishwarya Rai, Peter Mulla, Thomas Sangster.

Running time: 102 mins.

.I'll buy Colin Firth as Mr Darcy and even as Vermeer, but an action hero he ain't. The Last Legion looks like a toga drama Dino De Laurentiis might have produced on the cheap in the 1970s, or maybe a prequel to Antoine Fugua's King Arthur. Firth is cast as battle-hardened Roman legionnaire Aurelius who rescues the last of the Caesars, 12-year-old Romulus, from the clutches of the Barbarian hordes and smuggles him away to Britannia to link up with the one legion still loyal to Rome. Such feats require a Russell Crowe, but even then are improbable. Poor CGI effects don't help.