"When a giant trowel is plunged into the floor of Monument Valley, it's as though John Ford had hired Claes Oldenburg to dress his set. The film, O'Neill's most ambitious to date, with a dreamy, narrative subtext underlying its sensuous surface, is framed by abstract animations which denote scratches or scraped-off emulsion in much the same way that Roy Lichtenstein offered a benday-dot brushstroke as a painterly gesture." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

"Almost every sequence in SIDEWINDER'S DELTA concludes with a rough end - punches, flares, white flashes, etc. But unlike the academy leaders of RUNS GOOD with their rhythmic, emblematic and referential functions, as well as their purely reflexive alienation effect, these glimpses of film technology in SIDEWINDER'S DELTA serve primarily to delineate and verify the conceptual unit of O'Neill's filmmaking, for we can see directly at what stage his idea was completely formulated, and in the case of some early scenes with sync-punch mattes, exactly what elements were compounded in what way to compose this particular idea structure of ideograph." - William Moritz