The Pillow Book

Cinépix Film Properties (CFP) | Release Date: June 6, 1997

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

64	METASCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 20 Critic Reviews

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Mixed:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

Richard Corliss

Wu is a fine, supple tabula rasa; McGregor (Trainspotting) shows again that he is one of the boldest, most charming young actors. Read full review

Marc Savlov

Greenaway and his picture-perfect cast weave so many interlacing threads into the story, and so many curious subtexts - stylistic and otherwise - that it sometimes leaves us scratching our heads in wonderment. Read full review

Roger Ebert

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

Jay Carr

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]

Gene Siskel

Greenaway is a unique filmmaker in that he layers images upon one another in a single frame and doesn't require dialogue to make his films arresting. [18 Jul 1997]

David Ansen

Greenaway uses the screen rather like the calligraphers of the story use the body so that the film becomes a kind of visual "pillow book;" a multi-layered series of inscriptions and reflections with almost hypnotic power. Read full review

Janet Maslin

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

David Stratton

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

James Berardinelli

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 full review

Owen Gleiberman

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 full review

Maitland McDonagh

With its attractive cast, beguiling score and relatively straightforward narrative, this dark fable of letters and lust is one of Greenaway's most accessible works. Read full review

Rick Groen

There's as much to draw us in, but far less to put us off. [13 Jun 1997]

Tim Appelo

Greenaway's latest, The Pillow Book, might disappoint purists because it is relatively intelligible. [27 Jun 1997]

Kenneth Turan

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. Read full review

Ruthe Stein

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

Walter Addiego

At 126 minutes the movie is excruciatingly long, but it is still too short to pack in all the subtle changes in character he means but fails miserably to convey. Read full review

Desson Howe

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

David Sterritt

Peter Greenaway's unorthodox drama treats the movie screen less as an entertainment device than a postmodern canvas upon which he writes, photographs, and records an intricate multicultural collage. [06 Jun 1997]

EmpireLeah Jewett

Here both Greenaway's strengths and weaknesses are on show as he toys with the viewers' capacity to ingest blurring metaphors and convoluted content. Read full review

J. Hoberman

The Pillow Book's pretentions are boundless, for all its desperate fashion and layered imagery, it's a staggering bore-as vacantly petulant as Kate Moss's stare. [10 Jun 1997]