"Windows" is a movie like that, a thriller in which we suspect right at the beginning that so-and-so is going to turn out to be the villain ... and then, an hour later, after the plot thickens, there is the less-than-astonishing revelation that so-and-so is indeed the villain - just as we suspected. "What's this?" we ask ourselves. No twist? No double-reverse plot switch in which the villain turns out to be framed and the good guy winds up with a knife in his hand and a sneer on his lips? If there's anything worse than a thriller with a totally unbelievable twist at the end, it's a thriller with no twist at all.

"Windows" plays that dirty trick on us, and I can't figure out why. Maybe it thinks it's giving us a deep psychological insight, in its creakingly obvious story of a voyeuristic lesbian knife-murderer, but what we're actually getting are ancient clichés in which the killer dyke turns out to be a pussycat at heart.

The movie stars Talia Shire as a shy young woman, in the throes of a divorce, who is attacked one night when she returns home to her empty apartment. The killer holds a knife to her throat and forces her to plead for mercy into a tape recorder. And then, a few days later, she finds herself in a cab driven by, you guessed it, the same guy.

But there is more. The guy claims he was paid to carry out the attack. And the person who paid him is none other than . . . well, I won't give away the surprise, but the movie does. The real villain has Talia Shire in view all the time through a telescope, and since we know who the villain is, there's no plot thrill to grow out of Shire's own eventual discovery of that fact. After Shire does discover who's after her, and why, there's a long and embarrassing sequence of threats and moans and pleadings and deep breathings, and then the movie's over as arbitrarily as it began.

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