Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, The

Los Angeles Times Kristine McKenna

Those who can surrender to the Quays' poetic logic will find The Piano Tuner to be nothing short of a masterpiece.

The New York Times Jeannette Catsoulis

Flaunting elements of "Phantom of the Opera" and "The Island of Lost Souls," the movie, with its haunting, claustrophobic environment, allows the living and the merely lifelike to interact with an eerie beauty.

The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett

The film is about vanity and pride, and the caging of beauty. Its elaborate fabrication has an intoxicating quality that captures the imagination like all good horror stories.

New York Post V.A. Musetto

Mainstream audiences will be put off by the lack of a straightforward narrative, but adventurous moviegoers will find pleasure in the hypnotic originality of the images.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Seething with suggestions of perverse pleasures and inchoate horror, this dark fairy tale won't win the Pennsylvania-born, London-based Quay brothers any new fans -- it plays to the converted, and the converted know who they are.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Their film is a fiendishly detailed toy -- the sort found at the back of a forgotten museum -- and while the shadow play it presents is an old and eternal one, you never cease to hear the whirr of the gears.

Variety Leslie Felperin

Impresses as a visually exquisite, rigorously intellectual but dauntingly obscurantist fable about automatons, opera singers and herniated desire that will appeal exclusively to arthouse auds with rarefied tastes.

Village Voice Karen Wilson

The story--is only important in that it gives the Quays a foundation for their fabulous animated tableaux.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Like a dream, this film is wispy and ethereal; like a nightmare, it lodges in your hindbrain and gnaws away with gleeful abandon.

Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan

The result is a cast of characters who are little better than automatons themselves. This wouldn't be a problem if the rest of the film were as captivating as it was surely meant to be. Instead, the Quays work overtime to make both their story line and images as obscure as possible.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

Perhaps the film will connect with those attuned to the Quays' allusive wavelength, much as a dog responds to a whistle. Others won't hear a thing.

LA Weekly Tim Grierson

Once the Quay brothers confidently establish their film's astonishing look, they merely repeat their techniques until the images no longer delight or surprise, leaving all too visible the Quays' struggles with the trickier demands of storytelling and character development.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

With the film's hypnotic emphasis on artistry and architecture, most viewers will probably get their satisfaction from the striking visual elements, particularly the stop-motion animation.

Film Threat Phil Hall

By the end of the 99 minute running time, there is a terrible sense of been-there/done-that. And for artists of the Quays' caliber, that is a huge mistake.