Part of Staff Picks and programmed by Ter

The cook serves up gourmet masterpieces in a beautiful restaurant. The thief holds his tyrannical court in the restaurant, terrorizing all around him. His wife has a dangerous and illicit passion. Her lover is having the riskiest affair of his life. Peter Greenaway’s notorious film is a modern day revenger’s tragedy spiked with jet-black comedy, starring Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren, Richard Bohringer, Alan Howard and Tim Roth.

“If the most crass and sadistic people gained power, what would happen to the social order, to art and, above all, to love? This is the question Peter Greenaway explores in his elegant, stylized and brutal new film…. Mr. Greenaway turns this tale of a bullying criminal and his unfaithful wife into something profound and extremely rare: a work so intelligent and powerful that it evokes our best emotions and least civil impulses, so esthetically brilliant that it expands the boundaries of film itself.” —Caryn James, New York Times (Apr 6, 1990)