SOURCE: Klawans, Stuart. Review of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, by Peter Greenaway. Nation 250, no. 18 (7 May 1990): 644–46.

In the following review, Klawans offers a negative assessment of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, calling it “a film of ideas by a man who hasn't really got any.”

Albert Spica doesn't know much, but he knows there's a connection between sex and food. It's the sort of Freudian tidbit of which a gangster—or any upwardly mobile lout such as Albert—may feel proud. Similarly, he's proud of owning an elegant restaurant, Le Hollandais, and an elegant wife, Georgina, and abuses them both—for their own good, of course. Fat, sputtering, violent, vain, Albert is the bogeyman with whom Peter Greenaway tries to frighten the audience in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. As portrayed by Michael Gambon, Albert is...