On Greenaway's 8½ Women (1999):

The critics may have a point in this being his least impressive feature film, though it is still considerably more conceptually and narratively original and visually seductive than a lot of other films, which might be a weak defence. If the acting seems unusually wooden (the script is great, but the delivery seems forced and unnatural at times) then at least it's in line with Greenaway's quest for an openly artificial cinema. The females here are all shot in a self-consciously beautiful way (Polly Walker, in one of her final scenes, and the one used for most promotional posters and DVD covers, is ravishing), the dialogue is almost always in reference to sex, and it handles emotional devastation in typical Greenaway fashion: that is, he puts a lot of faith in the "sophistication" (his word) of his audience, and doesn't manipulate them in the exploitative way; whether you connect to the film's dark, strange and provocative father-son relationship will depend not only on personal philosophies in life, but how close you connect with Greenaway's work as a whole... Indeed, ironically, this seems to be one of his most accessible films, and yet accessing it seems dependent upon familiarity with the director. There's something fantastic about certain, isolated images: the father holding a drill to his head is abstract and effective in showing his state of loss; the scene, even earlier than that, of him falling back into the bath, screaming and splashing, is a visual abstraction of complete grief; the aforementioned, unforgettable shot of Polly Walker's shadowy flesh as she sits with her back to us, masturbating the elderly protagonist; and the Herzogian shot of a pig with its front legs buried beneath it, its arse in the air.