The Pillow Book Critic Reviews

The Pillow Book is Peter Greenaway's most stunning and accessible film since "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover." Dense, gorgeous and inexorable - once you give yourself over to its logic - it's a boldly erotic explosion of Asian chic, taken to places no film has gone before. [20 Jun 1997]Read the full review

The Pillow Book, starring Vivian Wu, is a seductive and elegant story.Read the full review

The film is best watched as a richly sensual stylistic exercise filled with audaciously beautiful imagery, captivating symmetries and brilliantly facile tricks.Read the full review

It is at first daunting but ultimately awesomely impressive and beautiful.Read the full review

The great irony of this film, which is (at least on one level) about the power of writing, is that the words are of secondary importance to the overwhelming visual presentation.Read the full review

I can't say that I've ever entertained fantasies of writing on someone's body. But Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (Cinepix) does, at least, succeed in making it look like an erotic activity.Read the full review

The story, which includes a prolonged display of McGregor’s no-longer private parts, is simplistic and banal rather than exacting and mannered.Read the full review

The Pillow Book sometimes seems like three different movies, each one an eyeful but together too much of a good thing.Read the full review