Marketic It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

moonspinner55 Sloppy comic book adventure from Robin Cook's bestseller. Female Egyptologist in Cairo, a nervous ninny prone to screaming, is under investigation by a member of the United Nations after witnessing the murder and robbery of an art dealer; he follows her to Luxor, where she believes a tomb at the Valley of the Kings holds a legendary treasure. Despite a great deal of production expense and travel (not to mention Michael J. Lewis' booming, over-dramatic score), the spiritless film fails to function as a sand-swept travelogue, and it's too silly and annoying to work as a thriller. In the leads, Lesley-Anne Down and Frank Langella are an enervating pair. Sir John Gielgud has a little fun in a cameo role, and he exits far too soon. *1/2 from ****

JohnHowardReid A great piece of skulduggery and high adventure, set against the authentic and fascinatingly exotic backgrounds of Cairo and Luxor, Sphinx also boasts some equally fabulous interior settings (filmed in Budapest) that make a perfect match. In fact, here's a movie that would seem to have all the vital escapist elements for a smash success, including its basis on a bestseller by an "in" novelist, its interesting cast, its award-winning director (even if he is a little too inclined to over-use close-ups that undermine the conviction of some of the performances), great camera-work, terrific music score, plus $14 million worth of dazzling production values. Yet Sphinx failed to top even the $1 million mark in worldwide rentals. Why did the critics hate it? Why did moviegoers give this flick the flick? Perhaps the heroine, although superbly played by Lesley-Ann Down, was seen as too eager, too liberated for either male or female picturegoer identification? Or perhaps the mass audiences just won't accept a girl – any girl – as an action lead in the cinema? On TV, no problem. People leave their critical faculties dormant if the show is ostensibly free. (Perhaps that's why TV's Wonder Woman chalked up such high ratings?) Maybe the movie's plot was regarded as too facile and contrived? Maybe what the critics said about the characters being both too enigmatic and too one-dimensional hit home (even though audiences don't usually care a damn what critics say – and it didn't stop people from buying and reading the novel)? Perhaps the background was too authentic, the recreation of the real Egypt too meticulous? Or maybe it was simply that by 1981, Egyptian curse pictures had had their day, so that even a superior story like this Sphinx could make no box office headway?

Lee Eisenberg OK, so we should all know by now that any westerner who sticks even a hair strand into an Egyptian tomb is forever cursed. So many movies have dealt with this that another one hardly registers. "Sphinx" consists mostly of Lesley-Anne Down shrieking whenever something unpleasant happens (and with how she was dressed - without a veil - the people in Egypt would have taken her for a prostitute). I couldn't tell whether or not Frank Langella's character was supposed to be Arab or white: he had an Arab name but looked and talked like a Euro-American. And then John Gielgud plays an Egyptian man; was it still acceptable to cast white people as non-white people by this point? For the record, the title statue only appears in one or two scenes.I should say that the movie isn't terrible. I learned some interesting stuff about archeology. But a far cooler movie in this genre is the Charlton Heston movie "The Awakening". This one is the sort of movie that you rent if there's absolutely nothing else to rent. I read that director Franklin J. Schaffner (most famous for "Planet of the Apes", "Patton", "Papillon" and "The Boys from Brazil") ended his career on a down-slide; with this sort of movie, I can see why. Also starring John Rhys-Davies (Sallah in the Indiana Jones movies) and Victoria Tennant (Steve Martin's first wife; she co-starred with him in "All of Me" and "L.A. Story").Not that this is really related, but I wanted to talk about this movie getting released through Warner Bros. When I was little, I always associated WB with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, etc. Had I known then that the studio also released this movie - plus horror movies like "The Exorcist", "The Pack", "The Shining" and "The Nesting" - I probably would have asked something like "Why did Bugs Bunny make a bunch of scary movies?" This movie however, is not scary.

Robin Silver This movie follows right along with the book, but adds MUCH more due to the on-location sets and the very authentic ancient Egyptian stage sets. Most definitely worth the $5.00 you can get it for at flea markets!!!