The Pillow Book Reviews
rec.arts.movies.reviews
Full Review
| Original Score: -1 out of -4..+4
Top CriticGreenaway, whose mind is one of the most impressive, complicated organs that ever sat on the shoulders of a filmmaker, seems to be playing connect the dots to himself, almost dumbing himself down to be commercial.
Nashville Scene
Greenaway's characters may work fine as painting surfaces, but they have no interior life or independence that would arouse passion, and the director practically handles their couplings with tongs.
Philadelphia City Paper
Occasionally moving, always pretty, it also veers into pretentiousness, especially when it comes to Nagiko's aphoristic writing (for instance, "Closed eyes cannot read").
Such Greenaway films as "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover," "Prospero's Books" and now this make one wonder if they're really as deep as they pretend to be. Perhaps, as his actors, this emperor has no clothes.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Despite its arresting visual style, its wave after wave of creative and hypnotic images, "The Pillow Book," as its name hints, slowly but inexorably leads to sleep.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Boston Phoenix
The interplay of the metaphoric and the literal, of artistic form and arbitrary symmetry, might still amuse Peter Greenaway, but for most of the rest of us the game is getting a little old.
A seductive and elegant story that combines a millennium of Japanese art and fetishes with the story of a neurotic modern woman who tells a lover: "Treat me like the pages of a book."
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
At first daunting but ultimately awesomely impressive and beautiful.
A very intimate, sensual film, and a torrid, lurid melodrama, full of passion, jealousy, hatred and revenge.
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
This one's pure Greenaway.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Spirituality and Practice
Manages to carry on Peter Greenaway's tradition of cherishing both the erotic and the exotic.
