The Piano remains a masterpiece, thanks to Campion's remarkable direction. It is also worth mentioning Michael Nyman's sweeping score, and Stuart Dryburgh's gorgeous cinematography capturing the beauty and the awe of the New Zealand landscape.

| Oct 4, 2024

There's a masterly score by Michael Nyman and splendid photography from Stuart Dryburgh, and Campion coaxes stupendous performances from Hunter and Paquin.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 30, 2024

The Piano insists that women’s voices are most important when they refuse to adapt to patriarchal demands and meanings.

| May 10, 2024

The Piano is Campion's most accessible film, yet mainstream audiences spoon-fed on formula love stories will find themselves wondrously lost in its unpredictable turns of events and its explosive, spontaneous sensibilities.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 21, 2022

Marking New Zealand's Campion as one of the world's great filmmakers, The Piano boasts unnervingly brilliant performances by Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill, and an uncanny child actress, Anna Paquin. It's the best film of the year.

| Sep 21, 2022

In film after film, with ever-increasing depth and intensity, [Campion] invites us to contemplate human beings lost in the sleep of reason.

| May 3, 2022

This is a deliberately arty film riddled with blue-filtered photographs of the landscape, but at the last, it commits one of the most egregious errors of taste that the cinema has ever known.

| Apr 6, 2022

Beautifully gothic.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 11, 2022

Campion seems to understand sexual attraction and isn't afraid to delve deep in this exquisite, lyrical look at one woman's triumph over the patriarchy.

| Original Score: A | Feb 7, 2022

The Piano is without a doubt a work of Art - inscrutable at times, and not without its flaws, but constructed so confidently that they are, in the end, forgivable.

| Jan 30, 2022

One of the all-time greats.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 29, 2022

Deeply felt and entranced by Hunter's near-silent performance, this is Campion at her best and great starting place to an underrated auteur's career.

| Oct 22, 2021

...swirls in melodrama and metaphor.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 6, 2021

Self-pity is a very poor foundation on which to construct a work of art, or much anything else for that matter.

| Feb 16, 2021

Flawless filmmaking abounds throughout, building to a gripping climax that is impossible to forget.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 13, 2020

Campion uses the jaw-dropping beauty of the west coast of New Zealand as the stunning backdrop for her febrile tale of obsession, desire and passion.

| Oct 31, 2018

"The Piano" is dark, Gothic romance at its best. It's a quiet, intensely emotional film, where everything is depressing and beautiful at the same time.

| Oct 24, 2018

From a distance, "The Piano" seems too preposterous for words; but then, as Ada knows all too well, words merely get in the way.

| Sep 6, 2018

It means nothing, and teaches nothing, but it reaches us in some intense and direct way.

| Aug 15, 2018

Hunter's gothic heroine is complemented by Stuart Dryburgh's dark cinematography and gaspingly restrictive widowy petticoats.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 27, 2018