In Short

Back to the Future Part III (PG)
Director Robert Zemeckis and executive producer Steven Spielberg must have been exhausted by all the hurtling back and forth along the space-time continuum that Michael J. Fox did in Back to the Future Part II. In Part III, they simply plop down Marty McFly (Fox) and Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) in the Old West and leave them there. This last entry in the series is also the first dud. It plays like a campy Western episode from a '60s sitcom, and the time-travel logic seems shakier than ever. D+

Fire Birds (PG-13)
An elite crew of Army helicopter pilots wages war against a Central American drug cartel in this third-rate knockoff of Top Gun and Blue Thunder. As the hotdogging hero, Nicolas Cage wraps his grousy monotone around lines like ''They killed our people and they killed our friends! Their drugs kill Americans every day!'' The climactic air battle is about as exciting as something you'd pop a quarter in a machine for. D

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