SOURCE: Moore, Suzanne. “Body Horror.” New Statesman & Society 2, no. 72 (20 October 1989): 48–49.

In the following review, Moore praises the visual style in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, but criticizes the film's lack of substance.

This week I don't need an excuse. I can talk serious crap. I mean excremental culture, I mean the new Peter Greenaway film. Which is, after all, about eating and shitting and dying and fucking, but not necessarily in that order. It is about the capacity of human beings to turn everything they consume into shit. It is about greed and evil and revenge. It's the bottom line according to Greenaway, bottom being the operative word.

This is the subject matter of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. Although, as we have come to expect from this idiosyncratic filmmaker, the subject is also inevitably the process of making a...