Cebalord Very best movie i ever watch

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Griff Lees Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Red-Barracuda You always know going into a Peter Greenaway film that, for better or for worse, you are going to get something a bit left-field. The Belly of an Architect is really no different in this regard. This one tells the tale of an American architect who travels to Rome with his young wife to supervise an exhibition celebrating the 18th century architect Etienne-Louis Boullée. Very soon after arrival both he and his wife experience contrasting activity in their bellies, for him it is severe abdominal pains while she falls pregnant. To complicate matters, they soon begin affairs with other people. The film essentially then details the architects mental deterioration, which includes writing postcards to his long deceased doppelganger Boullée.This one has to go down as one of Greenaway's more accessible films. It has an actual story that is underpinned by a good central performance from Brian Dennehy. But its maybe the very fact that it skirts so close to realistic drama that is one of the main problems, as Greenaway is usually best when he does precisely the opposite. The story is really quite boring and the acting aside from Dennehy not all that good – Chloe Webb being particularly flat as his wife; look out also for Stefania (Suspiria) Cassini sporting an unfamiliar cropped 80's barnet. The visuals, while certainly nicely composed, aren't all that memorable. Given that the setting is Rome, there are many shots of that cities peerless architecture, although that all gets almost a bit travelogue to a certain extent. I think this film, therefore, is one for Greenaway devotees almost exclusively as in order to get a lot out of it you have to be interested in his ideas. While I have liked several of his films, I can't deny that, even in the cases of the ones I liked most, his films can be somewhat annoying. Dennehy really helps draw us in to events though and makes a good stab at involving us but it's difficult to care too much about these stiff characters populating a narrative that is both distant and very cold emotionally. Boullée himself is a typically absurd Greenaway figure, in that very little of his architecture ever came to be built, so it's difficult to ever imagine a high profile retrospective of his work ever happening. His rounded, domed buildings mimic the belly of the title, as does his name. So there are many links and symmetries in the story if you are at all interested in that kind of thing. But, while some of the photography was nice and it did have a good score from one of the members of Kraftwerk, it was overall a little tedious for me.

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx It was a shock for me to discover having watched several of Peter Greenaway's films, and having loved many, that this for me, is easily his best from what I've seen. I will temper that by saying that I saw this in the cinema, and the cinema does wonders for many films. I find Greenaway's Baby of Macon, for example, has too much detail and visual complexity to be particularly accessible via home viewing. Greenaway has indeed been criticised for an overly painterly approach to detail in his films, which some deem not fit for a medium with a moving image. His long time collaborator cinematographer Sacha Vierny for example considered Prospero's Books a failure for the over-cluttering with visual detail that was cinematically indigestible.The late Sacha Vierny doesn't get talked about nearly enough, other than Belly and most of the famous Greenaway films, he shot Last Year in Marienbad for Resnais, as well as the majority of the famous pre-80s Resnais movies; The Three Crowns of the Sailor, amongst others for Ruiz; Bof Anatomie d'un Livreur for Faraldo, a marvellous though little seen film; Belle de Jour for Bunuel; La Femme Publique and others for Zulawski; as well as collaborations with Chris Marker, Maguerite Duras, and Sally Potter. The critical part he played in these great movies is rarely sung. As Vierny was not interested in fame and rarely gave interviews, how much direction he took and how much of his own artistry he plyed will forever remain an enigma. As with most of this work, The Belly of An Architect is a really great looking film.The story of this film is about an architect played by Brian Dennehy, called Stourley Kracklite, if you can believe such an indigestible name, hinting at gastric stagnancy and duodenal eructations. In consonancy with his name, he spends the movie plagued by sluggish prickly guts. Kracklite has always admired an obscure 18th century French architect called Étienne-Louis Boullée, a real-life architect who was famous more for his astonishing designs than for actual won commissions (this has often been a hazard for architects I believe). Make good use of the internet or your library and look up his magnificently insane design for Newton's tomb, which was never taken up, or his sprawling design for the Bibliothque Nationale. Due to his overreaching ambition he therefore ended up making mostly private homes, and there's only a handful of his built projects left in existence.So Kracklite has finished with making his own buildings, and spent the last ten years of his life planning an exhibition on Boullée to be held in Rome. There are a lot of typical Greenaway features here, obsession with food, cuckoldry, a battle between an older and younger man. Somehow Greenaway managed here to take his usual stuff beyond an academic game to a place where there is mythos, and poesy. Greenaway for me is a director with a deep feeling for lifecycle, he doesn't present children as small adults, or middle aged men as ephebes with jowls and paunches.For me it's a film about lifecycle and meaning, and homage to genius. I just adore it.

dromasca Peter Greenaway is a complex artist, which seems to dedicate one decade to each of the various forms of art he engages in - painting, fiction films, documentary, multimedia. The 80s were the times of the fiction films and 'the Belly of an Architect' is one of his best and most known.This is the story of an American architect coming to the eternal city to prepare an exhibition dedicated to the revolutionary 18th century architect Etienne Louis Boulee. He soon finds he is sick, and his life and career go down on spiral, as his younger and pregnant wife starts to cheat on him with one of his Italian assistants. The principal role is played by Brian Dennehy who plays probably the best role in his career of more than 140 films (by now), a role so far from the typical Irish cop roles he is usually cast in.The story line is quite linear, but the quality of the acting and the special cinematography makes it stand in front of the crowd. Very few films succeeded to catch in image Rome so beautifully, and certainly Greenaway is one of the few to have done so. The film is full of references to architecture and art, and it is a delight to follow the composition of the scenes, resembling paintings from the masters. It is not an usual film, its unusual beauty asks to be discovered and lies in the details, but it's worth exploring and finding it.

Erik This is possibly the most painful and yet bland love-drama I've seen. It's also a film about clashes between cultures. Why? you ask. (SPOILERS)Well, in the beginning, when we see the happy couple making love on the train, everything is so relaxed and comfortable. Then they arrive in Rome, Italy. And ever so slowly, the Italian sun-beaten culture with a whole different set of values, start creeping in.At first, both "Senior Cracklite" and his wife are met with great respect as if they were both filmstars or something. And then they start interacting with Italian people, eating late, beginning to get sluggish by the everyday heat, being hit by the ever-present "yada-yada" of the Italian language (it's a beautiful language, but still "yada-yada"), etc. And then Louisa meets the ever-smiling and charming Italian men, who takes her by storm. Mr. Cracklite is so immersed in his job that it's hard not to see where this is going.And so, it goes the way we all fear. And I could really feel a strange recognition in this. Not that I've been in Italy and have experienced this first-hand, but I've traveled to other countries in southern Europe, and seen/listened to this almost invisible world of "alcoholic fumes", generated by a culture raised on wine instead of milk, siestas instead of lunch-breaks, the double standard of the unmarried woman being protected to the death and the brutal male shovinistic tradition of 'hitting on' married women instead.And Mr. Cracklite is a sitting duck for this kind of 'ambush' on his relationship with his wife. Just as she is. Because they are the products of a more western view of peoples conduct. Not to say that infidelity is any less a product of our culture as well. I myself is from Sweden, and I recognize more in the way that the Cracklite's reactions than the Italian's. Also, the absolutely wonderful photo stresses this love-crisis even more. The immaculate Italian architecture, reeking of history and centuries past, the great heritage from thousands of generations of poets, musicians, statesmen, the whole civilized culture of the Romans only accentuates the feelings of estrangement between Mr. Cracklite and his wife, and between his visit to this 'alien culture' and his own distant home.And that is what ends his part in this story. But not his ex-wife's.Oh... Those women and that love. Never absolutely trustworthy. I give this film an 8 out of 10.Dracopticon out.