I just saw The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover again or as I would call it, The Church, The Devil, Mankind and Jesus Christ.

There are probably many ways to look at and read The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover but one of the most obvious one has to be a religious interpretation.

Through out the film a young boy with blond hair, who looks like a Cherub, sings verses from Psalm 51, where sins are admitted and regretted and God is asked to wash them away, so everything will be white as snow. While the boy sings this he washes dishes and his voice is so high that it sounds like something otherworldly, like music…

I don't know if I need to discuss the politics at the heart of the film or not, so I will address them really quickly at the start and then move on to a purely aesthetic analyses of the film. The movie can easily be looked at as a reaction to Thatcherism and the consumer culture created under her conservative regime. The political allegory isn't even thinly veiled and Greenaway doesn't shy away from showing what he thinks of the key players (there is literal "cannibalism" in the film). The movie isn't just about Thatcherism (or Reaganism or any other "ism"s for that matter), it works as an critique of western values and us as people in general; we only…

"What you've got to realize is that the clever cook puts unlikely things together, like duck and orange, like pineapple and ham. It's called 'artistry'. You know, I am an artist the way I combine my business and my pleasure: Money's my business, eating's my pleasure and Georgie's my pleasure, too, though in a more private kind of way than stuffing the mouth and feeding the sewers, though the pleasures are related because the naughty bits and the dirty bits are so close together that it just goes to show how eating and sex are related. Georgie's naughty bits are nicely related, aren't they, Georgie?"

Five notions come to mind, almost immediately, when I begin to think about The Cook,…

***One of the best 150 films I have ever seen.***

As any brilliant avant-garde film, Peter Greenaway's absolute masterpiece is an attack to the senses. This attack, however, has the sensual danger of awakening the most primitive instincts of the human being. It has always been interesting to notice Greenaway's past focus on architectonic stillness and provocative imagery with symbolic representations. This film is no exception. Conglomerating bizarre elements and a literally unbeatable sense of humor that abounds in cleverness and intellectualism, this groundbreaking story has obviously received a mixed balance of positive and negative reviews. For those who can grab a book and read between lines, for those who appreciate Ernest Hemingway and Wim Wenders, for those who have…

In the aftermath of having seen Hereditary last summer, I became aware of this film from an interview with Ari Aster, who cited it as one of his biggest inspirations as a film maker. I've been lingering on the recommendation since, and finally committed myself to checking it out. It very well lives up to the expectation.

The graceful, lingering camerawork is wonderful, sweeping across gorgeously detailed sets, saturated in color. It perfectly captures the feeling of watching a stage play, and the transitions between rooms are handled seamlessly, with carefully coordinated costume changes to match. The cast is superb across the board, with an incredible performance from Mirren, and a boisterously repulsive Gambon. He must have more lines than…

An almost surreal near-nightmare of color, food, murder, sex, and revenge, Peter Greenaway's "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover" is an endearingly bizarre and engrossingly depraved slice of cinema. With its stellar cast, loud emotions, and artful assembly, the film tells a dark story that never ceases to engage.

Revolving around the wife of a crime boss, the film finds that wife involved in an affair with a man less violent and more human than her husband. When the blowhard husband learns of the affair, his retribution is swift. His wife's, however, may be bolder. The story is violent, allegorical, and darkly alive.

Greenaway mixes color, light, shadow, and composition to create a look that is theatrical…

Didn't know what to make of this for the first 15 minutes or so, but once you adjust to the extreme formalism, it's a total blast. A romantic crime drama presented as an Baroque opera (complete with with a cherub kitchen boy who's always singing), this thing has style for days. Shot mostly in wide panoramas with camera movements that treat the restaurant, kitchen and loading dock as one massive stage-like set, the film feels like it was adapted from a play. It's disregard for realism is bracing in a lot of ways; my favorite was the actual color of Helen Mirren's dresses changing to match the coordinated lighting of the rooms: red for the restaurant, green for the kitchen,…