Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Kirpianuscus the poetry of image. and words and gestures. subtle, cold, delicate, brutal, strange, seductive, intense, convincing, mysterious. letters and a book.sensuality. and the trip in a world so different to be more than phantasm. the poetry of a meet and the roots of a relationship. and the forms of faiths. in force of writing, in sensuality of a bizarre ritual, in the other, in the purpose of skin as paper for words who becomes sacred. it is not easy to define the air of this special film. an art film. it is not enough. a masterpiece. many viewers are far to give this definition. a beautiful film by a great not comfortable director. it could be a decent explanation. but not the most inspired. because to see it is a kind of game. the joy of play is superior to the victory.

Andres Salama Ewan McGregor, playing an English translator in Hong Kong, has a love affair with a Japanese woman with a very curious fetish: writing in fine Japanese calligraphy the body of her lovers. Sex and literature can be a good combination, but not if the chef is Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover). The movie is very silly, but is sort of watchable (the obvious beauty of Vivian Wu, who plays the Japanese lover and appears naked several times - as does McGregor - certainly helps). This was the last film of Greenaway to have some sort of commercial impact. After that, he made the awful 8 1/2 Women and then retreated to the art world (where he probably feels more comfortable).

act123 I really wanted to like The Pillow Book. Intriguing story, interesting character outlines, Ewan Macgregor in the utterly glorious altogether. Unfortunately, I hated every minute of it. Greenaway got so enamoured with presenting the movie uniquely, and not to the film's benefit. I won't even get into Vivian Wu's abysmal acting.You get distracted from the story with 4 billion teeny windows and calligraphy that rolls on the bottom of the screen displaying the lyrics of the music that's playing. It seems he lost sight of presenting the actual story and developing the plot, and got entangled with foo-foo embellishments that have nothing to do with anything. It's a bit like presenting a John Singer Sargeant portrait in a chintzy Hallmark frame that says "GRANDMA LOVES ME!" in big sparkly letters.This movie seems to be a casualty of the director auteur's ego instead of what it could have been - disturbingly and horrifyingly beautiful. In another director's hands (Jeunet? Coppola?), it could have been a masterpiece. In Greenaway's hands, it's best relegated to fine arts classes that also take themselves too seriously.

Brown Mouse Bob Visually cluttered, plot less, incredibly mind-numbing rubbish. Not even close to Greenaway's better work. Avoid at all costs!The overlapping 'split screen' effects do nothing more than confuse, the film is very dark for a lot of the time and the 'artistic' composing of images is pretentious in the extreme.There is absolutely nothing to recommend about this film; even the nudity is incredibly unerotic, which seeing it fills a large part of the film soon gets very boring.Plus, how anyone can say that the acting of Ewen MacGregor is brilliant is beyond me. He showed more ability in the Star Wars series, and that's saying something.I've not been so unimpressed with a film since I saw 'Darby O'Gill and the Little People'!