One of the most accomplished chapters in Peter Greenaway's quest to turn movies into books, this may be the writer-director's metaphorical autobiography.

| May 2, 2016

In The Pillow Book, text and texture meet so exquisitely. Sex is a visual art, Greenaway says, and writing is a matter of life and death.

| May 2, 2016

It is exciting that in an age of mass book signings and disrespect for literature, Greenaway is able to sexualize the author's signature as it sweeps up a woman's neck.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 2, 2016

The Pillow Book is an experiment in the potential of film. It rejects convention and asks the viewer to forget traditions and entrenched assumptions. Those willing to go along will be hypnotized.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 2, 2016

Greenaway is a dedicated aesthete and sensualist who creates his own little worlds of cruelty, delight and artistic trickery. With tremendous brio and skill, he cuts his patterns into our minds, tickling our skins with his brush.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 2, 2016

I can, with many reservations, recommend The Pillow Book for graphic artists and, of course, for Star Wars completists. People who simply can't get enough nudity might also want to take a look.

| May 2, 2016

A surprisingly humane, satisfying film.

| May 2, 2016

The Pillow Book is obsessed with obsessive erotic obsessiveness. If you've ever trembled at the thought of having Japanese characters painted on your nude body, this is the film for you. Bring a lunch; it feels like it'll never end.

| May 2, 2016

Greenaway is a unique filmmaker in that he layers images upon one another in a single frame and doesn't require dialogue to make his films arresting.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 2, 2016

At first daunting but ultimately awesomely impressive and beautiful.

Full Review | Mar 26, 2009

A very intimate, sensual film, and a torrid, lurid melodrama, full of passion, jealousy, hatred and revenge.

| Jun 24, 2006

A seductive and elegant story that combines a millennium of Japanese art and fetishes with the story of a neurotic modern woman who tells a lover: "Treat me like the pages of a book."

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 9, 2004

Greenaway, whose mind is one of the most impressive, complicated organs that ever sat on the shoulders of a filmmaker, seems to be playing connect the dots to himself, almost dumbing himself down to be commercial.

| Jan 22, 2002

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.

| Feb 14, 2001

Finally the film just isn't very interesting, let alone engaging, and, at its worst, is simply too silly to appreciate on even a visual level.

| Jan 1, 2000

Such Greenaway films as "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover," "Prospero's Books" and now this make one wonder if they're really as deep as they pretend to be. Perhaps, as his actors, this emperor has no clothes.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 2000

What it is is breathtaking moviemaking. Against all odds, it works, magically, transcendentally, perfectly.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 1, 2000

''The Pillow Book'' finds the filmmaker at his most atypically seductive, creating a spellbinding web of cruel elegance and intricate gamesmanship, exploring the exotic, haunting beauty of the bizarre.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

I can't say that I've ever entertained fantasies of writing on someone's body. But Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book does, at least, succeed in making it look like an erotic activity.

| Original Score: B- | Jun 6, 1997