SOURCE: Wilmington, Michael. “Dreams Razed in The Belly of an Architect.” Los Angeles Times (22 June 1990): F8.

In the following negative review, Wilmington criticizes the sense of artificiality in The Belly of an Architect.

Like a jewel with a huge flaw, Peter Greenaway's The Belly of an Architect simultaneously dazzles and disappoints. Made in 1986, and released now in the wake of the art-house success of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, it's another of Greenaway's comic-erotic parables about the artist's nightmare: struggling to produce or celebrate something timeless and perfect, weighed down by the boils and lusts and excretions of the flesh.

Here, Greenaway gives us the deliciously named Stourley Kracklite, a seemingly sturdy, successful Chicago architect (played, superbly, by Brian Dennehy) who's become obsessed with his opposite, a little-known visionary French architect named Etienne-Louis Boullée. Boullée, a real-life eighteenth-century figure, designed magnificent buildings...