Video Reviews : ****Excellent***Good**Fair*Poor : <i> Recent releases, reviewed by Times critics.</i>

Movies

** 1/2 “Adventures in Babysitting.” Touchstone. $89.95. PG-13.

A fairly amusing, likable directorial debut by screenwriter Chris Columbus (“Gremlins,” “Young Sherlock Holmes”), whose movie charts the wild, down-and-dirty night of a jilted suburbanite high-school baby-sitter and her rambunctious charges and visitors. They all end up in the raunchier streets of Chicago, with gangsters on their heels and cliffhangers on the glass-slab skyscrapers. The script is the usual, whip-paced, stereotyped, illogical ragbag--a little John Hughes and a little “After Hours”--but the youthful cast has a lot of personality, freshness and simpatico. And in one blues-club scene, defying your qualms, they bring the house down.