Audience Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
Binding: DVD
EAN: 0505058211175
Format: PAL
Label: Universal Pictures UK
Languages: EnglishOriginal LanguageDolby Digital 2.0EnglishUnknownFrenchUnknownSpanishUnknownDutchSubtitledGermanSubtitledPortugueseSubtitled
Manufacturer: Universal Pictures UK
Number Of Discs: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Universal Pictures UK
Region Code: 2
Release Date: November 10, 2003
Running Time: 119 minutes
Studio: Universal Pictures UK
Theatrical Release Date: April 06, 1990

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Editorial Review:

Amazon.co.uk Review:
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is both adored and detested for its combination of sumptuous beauty and revolting decadence. Few directors polarise audiences in the same way as Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker as influenced by Jacobean revenge tragedy and 17th-century painting as by the French New Wave. A vile, gluttonous thief (Michael Gambon) spews hate and abuse at a restaurant run by a stoic French cook (Richard Bohringer), but under the thief's nose his wife (the ever-sensuous Helen Mirren) conducts an affair with a bookish lover (Alan Howard). Clothing (by avant-garde designer Jean-Paul Gaultier) changes colour as the characters move from room to room. Nudity, torture, rotting meat, and Tim Roth at his sleaziest all contribute the atmosphere of decay and excess. Not for everyone, but for some, essential. --Bret Fetzer




Rating: - great film
one of the classics from that era,if you can get past Helen Mirren naked (difficult I know),its very deep and disturbing.

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Rating: - Disgusting, entriguing and utterly, utterly mad...
You'll either love or hate this film. It is both utterly grotesque and beautifully amusing. Gambon is masterful and dominates throughout, as his character is wont to do. As this is very much an abstract film (Being set around a single elaborate restaurant) where the colour of the character's clothes is dependent upon which room they're in, the characters are also very abstract. The characters, bar Gambon and Tim Roth and his cronies, tend to be rather static, not moving much, and the lovemaking is ... Read More

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Rating: - Back cover
Ace film I cannot recommend it enough but please do not look at the back of this DVD until you've seen it as there is a MAJOR spoiler.

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Rating: - Brutal and grotesque...and a great film
This is a movie many people either love or hate; and I like it a lot. It's all style, all color, all rage. A thief (Michael Gambon as Albert Spica) and his wife, Georgina (Helen Mirren) with his toadies and gang members dine each night at the restaurant of the cook (Richard Bohringer). Spica is a monster; crude, loud and a bully with the table manners of a hog. The first scene in the movie is Spica, his gang and their women getting out of their cars in a dark, wet alleyway and preparing to enter the ... Read More

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Rating: - Not for the faint-hearted..
I saw this film with a group of friends when it first came out. I think we were expecting to see something different. However, the film had a huge impact on me. Never have I been so revolted or fascinated by a film. It is so graphically brutal and so beautifully visualised, it skewers all of our peccadilloes about sex, food and bodily functions but then disarms you with its observations about love and sacrifice. Michael Gambon is in career-best form as the vicious Spica whose treatment of his wife ... Read More

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