30
Here both Greenaway's strengths and weaknesses are on show as he toys with the viewers' capacity to ingest blurring metaphors and convoluted content.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
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.
75
ReelViews by 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.
80
The New York Times by Janet Maslin
The film is best watched as a richly sensual stylistic exercise filled with audaciously beautiful imagery, captivating symmetries and brilliantly facile tricks.
50
Los Angeles Times by 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.
89
Austin Chronicle by 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.
67
Entertainment Weekly by 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.
88
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
The Pillow Book, starring Vivian Wu, is a seductive and elegant story.
50
San Francisco Chronicle by Ruthe Stein
The Pillow Book sometimes seems like three different movies, each one an eyeful but together too much of a good thing.
50
San Francisco Examiner by 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.