SOURCE: Alleva, Richard. “Something to Gag On.” Commonweal 117, no. 11 (1 June 1990): 351–53.

In the following negative review, Alleva argues that although The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover can be viewed as a political allegory, Greenaway's over-indulgences in the film quickly become annoying.

The English film director Peter Greenaway is a startling picture maker and a lousy storyteller. In Cinematic Utopia he would be commissioned to create short, abstract works packed with dazzling and abrasive images linked together only by formal aptness and some kind of dream logic. But, because he works in a business which produces mainly fictional features, Greenaway goes through the motions of doing what most other directors do: the making of movies that tell stories that have characters, settings, emotions, and that seem to take place somewhere on our planet, some time in our history.

Seem to, but don't. Greenaway's stories not only begin...