Love him or hate him, John Hughes certainly hit upon a winning formula with Home Alone. Here he comes up with another successful spin on the small-things-humiliating-adults theme, with a wee baby standing in for Macaulay Culkin. The little tot - the precious child of a wealthy family - is snatched by a bungling trio of kidnappers and blithely proceeds to make their life hell. Unsurprisingly, wit and subtlety are hardly to the fore and at times the film is a little too cosy for its own good. However, the action does rip along at a cracking pace, the comic set pieces are executed with precision, and Joe Mantegna, Joe Pantoliano and Brian Haley are good fun as the incompetent crooks.

Baby Bink couldn't ask for more: he has adoring (if somewhat sickly-sweet) parents, lives in a huge mansion, and he's just about to appear in the social pages of the paper. Unfortunately, not everyone in the world is as nice as Baby Bink's parents—especially the three enterprising kidnappers who pretend to be photographers from the newspaper. Successfully kidnapping Baby Bink, they have a harder time keeping hold of the rascal, who not only keeps one step ahead of them, but seems to be more than a little bit smarter than the three bumbling criminals.