Peter Greenaway's first fiction feature (after the mock-documentary The Falls) made him immediately famous and was named one of the most original films of the 1980s by British critics. The action is set in the director's beloved 17th century. Ambitious young artist Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins) is invited by Mrs. Herbert (Janet Suzman) to make 12 ...
This twisted black comedy is obsessed in turn with swans, twins, and decay. Alba Bewick (Andréa Ferréol) is involved in a swan-related car accident near the zoo. The accident kills two other women, the wives of two twin zoologists, Oliver and Oswald Deuce (Brian and Eric Deacon). Alba is lucky enough to escape with one leg. Eventually her doctor ...
Peter Greenaway wrote and directed this typically surreal and iconoclastic black comedy. Three generations of women who share the same name -- 63-year-old Cissie Colpitts (Joan Plowright), her daughter Cissie Colpitts II (Juliet Stevenson), and granddaughter Cissie Colpitts III (Joely Richardson) -- have all discovered the same way of dealing with ...
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Lumière brothers' first films, filmmakers Sarah Moon and Philippe Poulet challenged 39 renowned international directors to each complete a 52-second film using the original Cinematographe camera under the conditions endured by the brothers. The result of the project was this film, Lumière et Compagnie ...
This is probably Peter Greenaway's most famous (or infamous) film, which first shocked audiences at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival and then on both sides of the Atlantic. A gang leader (Michael Gambon), accompanied by his wife (Helen Mirren) and his associates, entertains himself every night in a fancy French restaurant that he has recently bought. ...
Peter Greenaway directed this elliptical and visually intricate tale of the far side of erotic and intellectual attraction. As a girl, Nagiko would receive a special gift each year from her father: a calligrapher (Ken Ogata) who would carefully paint a poem on her face, as her aunt (Hideko Yoshida) read aloud from The Pillow Book, a classic ...
Puzzle-master Peter Greenaway exposes another aspect of his peculiar obsessions to the filmgoing public. Prospero's Books uses Shakespeare as a foundation and then skips along to define its own lush territory. The books of the title are briefly referenced in The Tempest -- Prospero is a magician who gets to keep only a small fragment of his ...
From Peter Greenaway, one of Britain's most controversial directors, 8 1/2 Women is a laconic black comedy that examines the age-old phenomenon of male sexual fantasy, its roots and consequences. A rich businessman from Geneva acquires eight and a half pachinko parlors in Kyoto, Japan. They are run by his son who is fascinated by earthquakes. When ...
Director Peter Greenaway explores the life of Dutch Golden Age artist Rembrandt in a biographical feature that uses the 1642 painting "Night Watch" as a launching point to explore the 17th Century artist's life from an entirely new perspective. British film and television star Martin Henderson assumes the role of the prolific painter, with Eva ...
American architect Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy) comes with his young wife Louisa (Chloe Webb) to Rome to supervise an exhibition devoted to Etienne-Louis Boullée, a French architect of the 18th century. Suffering from severe abdominal pains, Stourley doesn't pay much attention to his pregnant wife, and she finds consolation in the arms of ...
After cutting his teeth on 14 years' worth of short subjects, director Peter Greenaway made his feature-film debut with the pseudo-documentary The Falls. The added length does nothing to dilute Greenaway's singular sense of the absurd. The story, if one can truly call it that, deals with a phenomenon involving birds and anacronymically known as V ...
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