SOURCE: Turan, Kenneth. “Greenaway's Pillow Book is Another Exercise in Style.” Los Angeles Times (6 June 1997): F11.

In the following negative review, Turan argues that the beautiful visuals in The Pillow Book do not make up for the film's “mechanical” style.

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.

Written and directed by Peter Greenaway, The Pillow Book is more coherent and plotted than his last film, the understandably little seen The Baby of Mâcon. But it shares with that and earlier works like The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover and Prospero's Books both an air of smug pretension and a cold and gleeful delight in the poetry of excess.

There can be no doubt that Greenaway, working as usual with veteran cinematographer Sacha Vierny (who...