SummaryAn architect supervising an exhibition starts to have mysterious stomach pains while his life slowly falls apart.
Directed By:Peter Greenaway
Written By:Peter Greenaway
The Belly of an Architect
Metascore
Mixed or Average
56
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Available after 4 ratings
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Metascore
Mixed or Average
56
40% Positive
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
60% Mixed
6 Reviews
6 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
80
The exquisitely framed images, the allusive script, the droll witticisms are counterbalanced by Dennehy's literally enormous performance, which threatens to tear the film's formal symmetries to vividly memorable shreds.
63
Obsession is central to the film's thesis, such as it is. The characters don't converse so much as hold forth, and Greenaway presents the landmark buildings of Rome tableaux with a devotion that seems quite fierce. Dennehy is eye-rolling good as the tormented Kracklite. But what does it all mean? [20 Nov 1987, p.D6]
63
The Belly of an Architect is less a movie than a filmed script--it lacks the sense of surprise and discovery of a world freshly unfolding before the camera that makes the cinema come alive--but it remains an intelligent, provocative effort. [14 May 1987, p.7N]
60
The Belly of an Architect does have a humanizing element in the form of Mr. Dennehy, who brings a robust physicality to Kracklite without missing the essentially cerebral nature of the role; this is one of the best things he has done.
50
All the characters are uniformly obnoxious, and director Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) lingers over suffering even more than in his other features.
50
Greenaway's narrative and his direction of actors -- two elements which only recently has he concerned himself with -- are without foundation. After the effects of the visual presentation have worn off, the film becomes rather tiresome to follow.
40
This is a gassy, overbearing, pretentious little bit of art-in-your face, from the director of "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover," and it revisits some of the filmmaker's favorite places (the men's room, for example) and favorite themes (life as consumption and elimination). Most of the film's meanings are buried inside the artist's big, intellectually high-rolling metaphors.
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Jul 16, 2024
9
(Mauro Lanari) Cracklite and the "memento mori" as he passes in front of the busts of the 7 kings of Rome: the winners write not history but the news, in history no one has ever won, it is an uninterrupted sequence of losers. Biological decay and Newton's gravitational law: Darwinian natural selection extended to the inorganic, from "struggle for life" to "struggle for existence". A couple of audiovisually devastating concepts, and there would be dozens more.
Production Company:
- Callender Company
- Mondial
- Tangram Film
- Film Four International
- British Screen Productions
- Hemdale
- SACIS
Release Date:Oct 1, 1987
Duration:1 h 59 m
Rating:R
Awards
Cannes Film Festival
• 1 Nomination
Chicago International Film Festival
• 1 Nomination
