Gene Siskel

The movie could reasonably be rated S for slow because director Alan Parker seems more concerned with style and with hiding the film's big mystery than with pacing. We develop no empathy for the Rourke character, and so watching the movie, as attractive as it is physically, is like riding on a slow conveyor belt. [06 Mar 1987, p.A]

Guilty by Suspicion isn't a bad movie, but it isn't compelling entertainment either. [15 Mar 1991, p.C]

Our Flick of the Week is The Bedroom Window, which begins as a gripping, Hitchcock-like thriller about an innocent man wrongly accused, but then turns into an unintentional laugh-a-minute with a preposterous conclusion. It's a shame that the film couldn't sustain its tension, because in some ways it is the best traditional thriller since "Jagged Edge." [16 Jan 1987, p.A]

The character played by Ryder is really the centerpiece of the story, and she is the best part of this slight story...The rest of the movie is a fairly standard portrait of small-town life, with characters in more pain than is typical of such films. [12 Oct 1990, p.C]

Pale Rider may be a risk simply because westerns are not in vogue right now at the box office, but fresh and challenging westerns with Clint Eastwood always will be in vogue.

And yet if Re-Animator offers only a few laughs, that still puts it smiles ahead of George Romero`s awful ''Return of the Dead,'' the third in his zombie series, which suffered from tired blood. At least director Gordon`s ghoulies drool on naked women and decapitate each other with shovels. Hoe, hoe, hoe.

Although the film isn't an empty picture, it is too much of a good thing. Voight delivers a wonderful speech to Roberts about survival, but it's only one of many such monologues. Similarly, Roberts is tiring in his frantic reactions.

The point is: When Sweet Dreams' as it is now constructed, is over, we remember and are intrigued more by Charlie Dick than by Patsy Cline, played by Jessica Lange in a performance that comes up short when necessarily compared with Sissy Spacek`s tour de force as Loretta Lynn in ''Coal Miner`s Daughter.''

Coppola has raised the stakes, promising the definitive version of the vampire story. What he has created, however, is fresh and original yet boring, an exercise more in art direction than storytelling. [13 Nov 1992, p. C]

There's really nothing wrong with the movie; it delivers exactly what Arnold's audience wants, but I'm not part of that crowd. I'm tired of jungle fights and creatures with weird fangs. [12 June 1987, p.A]

The major problem with the sequel therefore is really the script, which was not written by Diane Thomas and which, coincidentally, did not meet with immediate approval by Turner. And so instead of surprising us in the rapid-fire manner of the original, ''The Jewel of the Nile'' takes people we know and runs them ragged through a new but unappealing location--the Arab desert--as they get caught in the middle of a holy war that doesn`t have much entertainment value given the recent number of incidents involving real-life terrorism in the area.