Backwards - its title referring to the wisdom that life is lived forward but understood backward - has no forward propulsion.

Strictly for adventurous moviegoers, a peculiar experience -- a polemic that is at once watchable and repellent.

The movie bogs down in tiresome good guys vs. bad guys action cliches.

Wincer shoots the whole thing - which is dressed up with cherry-red vintage fighter planes and boxy Pan Am Clippers and offers a few sequences in Thai lagoons of gloriously shocking turquoise - in a manner that renders even surefire stuff (collapsing rope bridges, horseback rides through crowded Manhattan streets) ho-hum. Kids of a certain age may be distracted by the bright colors and broad acting - the film is, at least, devoid of any gratuitously nasty violence - but most audience members who find their way into the theater will wonder when the Ghost Who Walks is going to walk off into the sunset. It ain't soon enough. [7 June 1996, p.03]

Curiously, despite Johnson's imposing physique, it's the kids who do most of the smashing and grabbing, right up until the climax, when it's all-hands-on-neck.

How bad is Prince of Persia? Whether or not director Mike Newell is to blame, the action sequences lack verve and scope.

Hemsworth looks a good deal more like NFL receiver Jeremy Shockey than he does the immortal Avenger.

When the films sticks with heart-tugging soldier stuff, it's not bad. When it goes beyond that premise, it becomes so entirely outlandish that it's not enjoyable anymore.

The best stuff in this dopey, intermittently amusing live-action cartoon is the look that the film's effects and computer crews have given New Angeles - the ruined urbanscape of Southern California after an 8.5 quake and a massive tidal wave have sundered the city. [04 Nov 1994, p.05]

To the delight of gadgetheads and the dismay of the rest of us, Spy Kids' paraphernalia is better developed and considerably more fun than its story.

Life of Crime is like an errant golf putt that appears headed for the hole, but just keeps rolling and rolling, all the way off the green. In other words, just missed . . . by a mile.

It's an awkward mix, and Simon Wincer, a director with considerable experience in animal movies, can't make the ingredients work consistently. [28 Jul 1995, p.14]

Although it is based on a true story, the dramatization doesn't make much sense psychologically.

To paraphrase one of its few laughs, it's a zombie movie directed by Vera Wang.

She may not be the most cinematic of film artists, but Heckerling will make you smile.

What ensues may be predictable, but the slapstick performances of Rudd and Bell are anything but. They court, they spark, and a few times they catch comic fire.

This mostly vulgar, but never explicit, comedy resolves itself surprisingly, revealing depth just when you think it's going to continue its skip across the shallows. In other words, Just Married might not be good, but it's just good enough.

For every laugh that Zoolander 2 elicits, there's a pang that all this was funnier the first time around.

It's hard to know whom to blame for this futile exercise: Morris or Rumsfeld.

Illsley's fine cast, with a riotous contribution from William H. Macy as the sheriff who falls for Harry, plays out the comedy without condescension.

Rogue One is a minor little story with a likable cast and familiar Star Wars themes. But it tries so hard to be an epic masterpiece – with self-important speeches and an insanely outsize orchestral score – that it ends up a laughable parody of itself.

The Jacket is both a genre movie and a symptom, a gothic treatment of Gulf War syndrome.

For high-speed action, eye-popping locales, and chopsocky fight-fests galore, watch The Transporter - on video.

The extent to which The Princess Diaries succeeds is the result of how pretty Hathaway at first mimics, then internalizes, Andrews' essential majesty.

The twist of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, a laugh-out-loud if not-exactly-good stoner comedy, is that its heroes, an entry-level investment banker and a brainiac pre-med student, are not dimwits.

Tonally, Casino Jack is all over the place: exaggerated comedy, cartoonish high jinks, then heavy-handed melodrama (a third-act face-off between Abramoff and his wife, played with no center of gravity by Kelly Preston, comes out of nowhere).

A heartfelt, '70s-era coming-of-age story with a prologue and epilogue set in the present day, marks the filmmaking debut of actor David Duchovny, who also wrote the symbol-studded screenplay.

For those who want nothing more than a thorough scare, Gothika is effective. But for those of us who want some psychological insight with our frightfests, the film is sadly lacking.