Svensk Filmindustri (SF) | Release Date: April 6, 1990 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
62
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 23 Critic Reviews
Positive:
13
Mixed:
7
Negative:
3
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30
Greenaway is a man of distinctive ideas and insights who this time out has expended his abilities and perceptions -- and those of many others -- on an exercise in grossness that depresses rather than enlarges the human spirit. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is sensational, all right, but hardly entertaining. [13 Apr 1990, p.F12]
25
In Drowning by Numbers, there is a strange character called Smut, a precocious boy genius fascinated by sex and obsessed with death: his avocation is the compulsive cataloguing of dead animals. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover feels as if it could been made by that child. [31 March 1990]