Movie Spotlight

3 Ninjas Kick Back (ABC Sunday at 7 p.m.) is just as lively and engaging as the 1992 original. The sly and ingratiating Victor Wong is back as the Japanese American martial arts whiz who coaches his three grandsons in the art and philosophy of self-defense. They’re off to Japan to rescue their grandfather, who’s gone there to present a ceremonial dagger, which according to legend can open the door to a cave of gold hidden beneath an ancient castle.

Why watch Children of the Dust (CBS Sunday at 9 p.m., completed Tuesday at 8 p.m.), an 1880s-era, four-hour 1995 miniseries about doomed lovers and racism? Two words: Sidney Poitier. Poitier’s commanding presence as Gypsy Smith, a half-black, half-Cherokee gunslinger, gives this roiling potboiler the only measure of epic status it strives for so mightily. Gypsy leads a wagon train of former slaves to the Oklahoma Territory, newly opened to settlers after the grim U.S. military containment of Indian populations.

In Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (NBC Sunday at 9 p.m.), Steven Seagal is back as Casey Ryback, ex-Navy SEAL and current cook, and he’s as snidely catatonic as ever. Ryback spends most of the movie cracking necks and clambering atop speeding trains. Taken strictly as an action sequel, the 1995 film is a lively show.

The Quick and the Dead (FOX Wednesday at 8 p.m.) is a careful knockoff of Sergio Leone, complete down to the blighted, surreal landscape and the grotesque characters with awful teeth. As the female Clint Eastwood, a woman with a mission, Sharon Stone proves she can smoke a cheroot and stare down a dunce with the best of them.

Ron Howard’s 1994 The Paper (KNBC Saturday at 9 p.m.) is rife with the motion and commotion that characterize all newspaper films, and the kind of manic “get the story� energy is especially suited to knockabout comedy. The story of a single day in the life of a great, albeit fictional, New York tabloid, it centers on its metro editor (Michael Keaton) who clashes with the managing editor (Glenn Close) a bottom-line oriented ice queen, over running a story on page-one about two black youths whom even the cops disown as serious suspects in the killing of two white businessmen. The crusty editor-in-chief (Robert Duvall) gives Keaton, who doesn’t want to ruin the youths’ lives, five hours to prove that they are innocent.

Mildred Pierce (KCET Saturday at 9 p.m.; TCM Sunday at 3 p.m.) is the 1945 melodrama that won Joan Crawford an Oscar as a self-made woman who winds up competing with her daughter for the same man.