Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Thorkell August Ottarsson ★★★★½ 24

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  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…

• 

  Review by Louise Weard ♃ 4

  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…

• 

  Review by amaya ★★★★★ 9

  tim roth is on full rat mode for this one. i have never seen a more rat performance

• 

  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½ 2

  "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,…

• 

  Review by BRAT ★★★½ 6

  this is the grossest movie i've ever watched and i've seen the human centipede three times

• 

  Review by sarah squirm ★★★★★ 3

  it got the stinky, it got the smelly, it got the sexy, it got the poopy,  it got helen mirren’s full bush? that’s gonna be a five stars from sarah squirm industries LLC

• 

  Review by Edgar Cochran ★★★★★ 31

  ***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…

• 

  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★★½ 2

  [extremely Michael Gambon cockney accent] profiteroles

• 

  Review by Ayush Das Adhikary ★★★★½ 28

  Brutalised. Ravaged. Treated like property and unable to escape her husband's stranglehold. The inevitability of bruises and abuses hovers over her hollow existence, ready to strike down on her any and every time. Right under her monster's nose does she find her spots of rendezvous; making her what-could-have-been a temporary reality.

  Fleeting glimpses into the romantic and the ordinary as the sole source of her escapism. Doomed sprinkles of warmth and lust refusing to submit to overwhelming odds of mortal harm once the secret comes out. The fact that their little paradise was not eternal was never in question. But when it came crashing down, it stung despite its inevitability.

  One of the most exquisitely shot films that I've ever…

• 

  Review by braden ★★★★★ 3

  “It's called artistry. I'm an artist, the way I combine my business and my pleasure.”

  Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is the kind of film that’s just breathtakingly immaculate in every possible way; from a brilliant screenplay, to absolutely gorgeous set design and costuming, elegant cinematography, and amazingly impassioned performances that all lead to something completely delectable and beautiful. Its pure delicate dedication to the craft and attention to detail make for such wonderful, perfectly refined filmmaking that few movies can ever seem pull off so magnificently, and I just adore every part of this flawless film so much.

• 

  Review by Justin Peterson ★★★★ 11

  I was not prepared for this hyper-stylized satirical tour de force of food, sex, artistry, and excrement.

  "Now, you behave yourself in the future and pay for what I ask you or next time I'm gonna make you eat your own shit."

  There were so many times when this poster on Letterboxd of Helen Mirren looking sexy caught my attention, along with that long obscure title. Right from the start the intense avant-garde style of my first Peter Greenaway film caught me off guard, and I would not recommend going into it blind.

  Similar to a film like 'Dogville', you can tell 'The Cook, the Theif, His Wife & Her Lover is taking place on a set and has the feel…

• 

  Review by spap1 ★★★★★ 18

  what a wonderful film… remind me never to eat again.

  to start, although starting seems impossible, i will ask the question: what would your initial instinct be when seeing an old woman crossing the road in a sloth-like manner before your car - as well as being when you’re in a hurry? 

  if you’re like me, and i’m sort of hoping you are, you’d be a bit irked in the least. this is where ‘The Cook’, as i will call it for the sake of spelling out that name each time, makes its entrance. 

  Greenaway looks us in the face and asks us these questions over.. and over.. and over for two whole hours. he forces us to look upon…