Smokin' Aces isn't a story, it's a premise with a madhouse of characters flung into a collision course that ends at the same finish line.

There's just no juice to this thing, merely a bunch of fitfully funny gags and a climactic football match that, under Skolnick's direction, fails to show us why the Europeans find this so exciting.

Willis and Breslin are stuck in a charmless, predictable picture they can't escape.

It's just one more competent but routine, midlevel ($70 million) late-summer action movie filled with the usual explosions, shootouts and male bonding.

Playful, predictable and more than a little precious, this entertaining if slight romantic farce makes it's hard not to mourn the loss of the adult romantic comedy.

By the time the film plummets to its rock bottom, we find ourselves in a flag-waving no-brainer of the first order, and one of the most thoroughly confused morality tales in recent memory.

Thornton has made so many bad movies and become so notorious as a talk-show eccentric that it's easy to forget what a good film actor he can be.

The Rock manages to play both with a crude candor more genuine than the entertaining if contrived spectacle around him, and a surprising big-screen charisma and ease that makes him a natural-born screen hero.

A pathetic sports comedy that aspires to be a college-football version of "Major League" and doesn't even get close. [27 Sept 1991]

Legends of the Fall is one of those movies that is so sloppy and so poorly written and so clumsily directed that every dramatic scene seems to either insult your intelligence or come off as being unintentionally hilarious. [13 Jan 1995]

Ben Stiller provides a jolt of personality as a past victim who rouses himself from exile, but otherwise Todd Phillips' fitfully funny script never delivers the crude creativity or the raw energy that feeds this genre of proudly crass male-centric comedies.

Progressively sabotaged by poor technical quality, terrible plotting, a glaring lack of directorial skill and finesse, scenes that have no credibility and/or motivation and an astounding sloppiness to its historical detail.

The plot contrivances in which the story is ultimately sewn include the death of a father, an unexpected pregnancy, the sale of a house and the rest of the rigmarole that bad writers are prone to drag in at the last moment. It's too bad, because these characters deserved a better story.

The best scenes belong to Tucker and director Brett Ratner keys in to his timing, whether it's a Chinese twist on "Who's on First" or a seduction scene in which Tucker blurts out every impulse.

As directed and produced by Steve Miner, the film is gory (eyes gouged out, a tongue bitten out, children murdered), but it also features better than usual actors (including Richard E. Grant as a 17th-century warlock-hunter who also jumps into the future) and has such a giddy sense of humor that it's hard to ever get too indignant about its splatter violence. [12 Jan 1991]

There is action galore (the deaths, by my rough count, may run somewhere in the triple digits). It's very cartoonish and not upsettingly explicit. But it's all so predictable and pointless that it quickly becomes monotonous, lulling the viewer into numbness, apathy, and perhaps even a peaceful sleep. [20 Sep 1996]

The real problem here is that director Krueger has no flair as a writer or a director for inspired screwball comedy.

Brokedown Palace does have some plot implausibilities but Kaplan, manages to turn some hashed story lines into something substantial and emotionally affecting.

Exotic Ninth Gate breaks down into clichés.

Breiman brings nothing new or insightful or even all that clever, for that matter, to the familiar questions of love and sex.

The cast is engaging, the overall visual effects are tremendous and I found myself fairly swept away for most of the fast-moving, three-hour running time.

With a title like Chaos Theory, one might expect a little runaway energy or a dash of wild spirit under the antics, but there's little punchy anarchy in this controlled experiment.

Maybury's attempt at a more mainstream movie is really just a simple love story cloaked in a lot of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo.

Ends badly, with a clumsy, nihilistic coda that leaves one uncertain how to feel about the story, confused as to what point has been made and not at all convinced that the new South Africa will be that much different from the old one.

The ads for Stomp The Yard play like a music video and, thus, they are not misleading; the film consists of a series of phenomenal dance sequences, all highly entertaining and expertly choreographed.

This may sound like a satiric comedy, and its intriguing setup carries a faintly comedic tone, but the movie becomes more straight-faced as it moves along and ends up being a fairly serious examination on the nature of, and necessity for, faith.

It's messy and painful, eased only the admirable modesty of Stockman's writing and direction.

There's a gripping thriller between the gaps in logic. Director Florent Siri has a tough style and an unforgiving attitude, but it drowns in the queasy blood lust.

A kind of homage to that more simple and elegant time.

It still celebrates the vigilante spirit and justice delivered with a biblical swiftness, but it has been cleansed of much of its gratuitous violence and more offensive red-neck sensibilities. Mercifully, it's also a full 40 minutes shorter than the original.

Director John McTiernan is normally a competent director but he's simply not at his best here. He shows little flair for comedy, his performances are one-dimensional, and his action sequences are predictable and sometimes amazingly sloppy. [18 Jun 1993, p.5]

Sober and serious and downright glum, ultimately an all-too-familiar portrait of lonely souls unable to break through their own isolation.

Much of this movie is very funny, it has some genuinely endearing moments.

There's not an original idea rattling around in the empty-headed but gorgeous-to-behold period film.

This is one family reunion where you need someone to act up or pick a fight, anything to bring a little life to the party.

When Rock hits he's dangerously funny. If he didn't try so hard to be liked, he'd be even more dangerous.

The film works up to a totally conventional ending: It's never much of a comedy or an exploration of the phone-sex phenomenon, and it often seems to be just an excuse for Madonna, John Turturro, Quentin Tarantino and other Lee pals to make cameo appearances and mug for the camera. [22 Mar 1996, p.24]

It's a complete by-the-numbers daddy-day-care movie that doesn't have a genuinely enchanting moment or shred of inspiration in its overlong running time.

So familiar you may have moments of deja vu.

Mary Reilly has the distinction of being the most pretentious, the most ponderous, the most utterly suspenseless. [23 Feb 1996]

The film is a dud in the tradition of such weak horror sequels as "Exorcist II" and "Dracula's Dog."

Never quite shakes itself free of the tired cliche that street people are quirky, sometimes cute, and somehow privy to a spiritual purity lost to us social folk.

Unknown seems fairly stale and unoriginal, mainly because it's yet another movie with the short-term memory loss premise ("Memento," "Fifty First Dates," etc.), and it comes so late in the cycle that it feels like a dying gasp.

It's the chemistry between Vardalos and Collette that gives the film its magical dazzle. Despite Vardalos' ingratiating, big and breathy presence, Collette, as the pulse and conscience of these two dreamers, very nearly steals the film.

The Village goes up in smoke (and mirrors). It wants to find a profoundness that hints at something deep and dimensional, but it hasn't the courage of conviction to stay on course as an unabashed ode to innocence.

Absurdly over the top and not especially funny.

Directed with a Scorsese-ish flair by actor John Shea (who also plays a small part), the film is loaded with gritty atmosphere and touches of authenticity. [12 Jun 1998]

Its combination of maudlin sincerity, cruel slapstick, exotic romanticism and boogie-down dance sequences may befuddle more than it entertains.

Despite Sheen's earnestness - and despite the movie's obvious good intentions - the script is confused and unfocused, and clumsily borrows elements of movies like From Here to Eternity and Bridge Over the River Kwai without any of those classics' higher meaning. [18 Jan 1991]

For all of its admirable intentions, the awkward melding of movie-of-the-week tragedy, non-denominational salvation drama and teen sex comedy mistakes banality for conviction.

Despite its title, the movie could hardly be less erotic. Indeed, promiscuity has never looked more totally unappealing, and its final scenes of Wilmot's advanced venereal disease are enough to make you take a vow of celibacy. A great date movie, this is not.

It's an ambitious film, but that doesn't mean it's good.

Utter lack of irony and curiosity.

As good as it is in many ways, the film is not as emotionally gripping as it should be, and comes off as a rather predictable liberal statement.

Though an uneven, often confused, mixed bag -- the movie gradually comes together to be a fairly hilarious inside-Hollywood farce.

A big dud.

This larger-than-life cartoon of a trained dog has more character than the two-legged co-stars.

Too bad the film, which Kennedy spun from a stand-up skit, remains as blissfully unaware of its possibilities as B-Rad is of his absurdity.

Racing Stripes is oddly torn in tone: is it an old-fashioned family drama, a coming-of-age story or a crass comedy? Live action or animation? Unlike "Babe," it fails to integrate its conflicting personalities.

The movie is so engrossing as an intellectual puzzle and such a solid thriller in every other department that it's probably actor-proof.

While Madison is earnest and inoffensive, it offers no surprises, few fascinating characters and a hackneyed script.

New director John Moore just doesn't have original director Richard Donner's filmmaking flair, so the same scenes done the same way on phony-looking Prague locations without the benefit of Jerry Goldsmith's Oscar-winning score just seem terminally slow and flat.

Together, the two of them (Pitt, Roberts) are cute as a bug.

For all of its good-natured guff, Jersey Girl chooses uncomplicated sentiment over the messy complications of real life.

Michael Winterbottom's erotic drama isn't so much a story of a love affair as an anatomy of a sexual relationship.

Hot Rod is a cousin to the comedies of Will Ferrell (for whom it was developed) with a younger skew, a kooky '80s nostalgia (complete with a pitch-perfect synthesizer score by Trevor Rabin) and a low-key amiability that keeps you rooting for Rod and company to triumph.

The movie is just this side of terrible. It misses all the charm and fun of the original. Allen's mugging is incorrigibly unfunny.

It has moments of effectiveness, some of the performances -- especially Whitaker and Robert Ri'chard -- are moving.

Hardly sophisticated, but it's as inspired as teen sex comedies get.

It doesn't really come off, but it's an admirably ambitious, and mostly very engaging, coming-of-age adventure that apes the spirit of Joseph Conrad.

It's so irrelevant, unambitious and lazy it almost seems to be thumbing its nose at the daring filmmaker Woody once was.

No movie that stars Sean Connery can be completely worthless but Medicine Man comes about as close to it as anything the actor has done in a long time - probably since Meteor in 1979. [07 Feb 1992]

Like Lurie's previous two films, it's also simplistic and somewhat muddled.

What emerges is a funny and sometimes aching movie that treads familiar dysfunctional family turf but still manages to eke out an emotionally toned balance.

The bogus Seattle setting creates an additional problem for local moviegoers. Because we know Seattle doesn't have a subway, giant FBI building or newspapers called Telegraph or Tribune, we're jarred out of the story so regularly that it leaves us slightly punch-drunk.

Hocus Pocus also offers a slightly different kind of movie role for the Divine Miss M, which she carries off fearlessly. In fact, with her campy makeup and wildly extravagant gestures, she is probably closer here to her cabaret roots than she has been on film before - and her oldest, purest fans are sure to love her for it. [16 July 1993]

Beautiful but empty.

The story is so sure-fire that it surmounts these obstacles to be passable entertainment, getting frequent infusions of excitement from the performances of Charlie Sheen, who is likably ironic and deadpan as Aramis; Kiefer Sutherland, who is splendidly charismatic and appealing as the world-weary Athos; and Oliver Platt, who confidently steals the movie as the comic Porthos. [12 Nov 1993]

Like most Price movies, it's challenging, engaging and free of the usual thriller cliches.

There's every reason to believe the creators stopped taking it seriously a long time ago. What's bothersome is that they don't take the audience seriously enough to deliver an actual movie.

There's no real wit or cleverness to the script.

More mediocre than magical.

There are too many unearned runs to fully embrace this underdog triumph.

Goes down like a cool glass of lemonade on a hot day.

It's often helplessly hilarious in its adolescent gross-out way, yet the cast periodically invests the film with sweetness.

Black's apoplectic fits and sardonic rants are strictly a bonus for the parents dragged along for the adolescent shenanigans.

The film is not very convincing as sociology, but it is mildly amusing as comedy, has an unpolished charm to its visuals and performances, and showcases so many rock songs on its soundtrack that it qualifies as a musical. [19 Apr 1991]

The film is so truncated, so obsessed with style and composed of so many self-contained episodes that it fails to say anything new.

This new version has absolutely none of the distinctive tongue-in-cheek black humor that was the keynote of its model and the trademark of its original director, Paul Bartel.

Director Bill Duke may believe the message but he never invests himself in the characters or their story, which becomes an illustrated lesson with reflective interludes and comic relief.

It's well-acted by a likable cast and is well-intended, but it misses: It doesn't come off as the powerful socio-environmental statement it wants to be.

It struck me as the most exciting and original Hollywood thriller, occult or otherwise, since "The Sixth Sense."

The cast tries hard and a sprinkling of laughs results, but the project is defeated by a concept that is not very novel, a script that is not especially witty, direction that is neither sharp nor insightful and one-note characters that are simply not very interesting.

Unlike "Crying Game" (which, despite the gender confusion, definitely works as a love story for a general audience), the only emotion this movie evokes for its star-crossed lovers is an unpleasant sense of incredulity. [08 Oct 1993]

Pretty silly stuff, designed to appeal more to older kids and adults than the toddler brigade.

The movie is all action. But there's no pacing, no suspense and no vulnerability for the protagonist so it all soon gets numbingly tiresome.

Fans of the first "Princess Diaries" will find enough laughs and diamonds in the rough to sustain them on their way to this important moral.