The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
The Frida Cinema's seating is first-come, first-serve. For our Midnight Screenings, please plan on arriving by 11:30pm to ensure ample time for parking, picking up concessions, and securing optimal seats. Screening will begin promptly at midnight.
Director: Peter Greenaway Run Time: 124 min. Rating: NC-17 Release Year: 1989
Starring: Alan Howard, Helen Mirren, Michael Gambon, Richard Bohringer, Tim Roth
This August, The Frida Cinema proudly presents Greenaway & Nyman, a film series celebrating four of the most iconic collaborations between filmmaker Peter Greenaway and composter Michael Nyman. We close our series with Greenaway’s 1989 masterpiece The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, a lurid, operatic masterpiece of gluttony, sumptuous beauty, and brutal vengeance, all set to Nyman’s famously haunting score, and almost entirely within the lavish confines of a French restaurant.
Albert Spica (Michael Gambon), a grotesquely boorish gangster, terrorizes guests and staff with his vulgarity and violence night after night at a fancy restaurant named Le Hollandais. His long-suffering wife Georgina (Helen Mirren), who quietly endures his abuse, begins a passionate affair with a gentle bookseller (Alan Howard), meeting him in secret among the restaurant’s corridors, kitchens, and storerooms. What unfolds is a richly stylized operatic tragedy, with color-coded sets that shift with each room, vibrant costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier, and one of Michael Nyman’s most iconic scores.
Transforming the restaurant into a world of moral rot where food, flesh, and vengeance are all served with theatrical flourish, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is a cinematic feast that’s both decadent and disturbing, sensual and sickening, and completely unforgettable.
Rated NC-17. No one under the age 0f 18 will be admitted.
About GREENAWAY & NYMAN
Peter Greenaway Michael Nyman on the set of Prospero’s Books. Photo by Jacques PRAYER/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images)
British artist, writer, and director Peter Greenaway’s cinema is unmistakable — baroque, cerebral, and boldly theatrical, his films unfold like elaborate paintings, rich with symbolism, obsession, and wry absurdity. Equally distinctive is fellow British composer Michael Nyman, whose hypnotic, minimalist scores pulse with alternating elegance and urgency. Together, their collaborations form a sublime marriage of image and sound, a cinematic alchemy that’s as unsettling as it is exquisite. In our series Greenaway & Nyman, The Frida Cinema presents five of their most iconic collaborations, providing filmgoers a rare opportunity to immerse themselves in these signature masterpieces of sight and sound.
Our series begins with The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), a visually lush mystery that sets the tone for Greenaway’s preoccupations with artifice, geometry, and sexual politics. The surreal A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) dives into symmetry, decay, and evolution, setting its tale of twin zoologists against time-lapse decompositions and haunting harpsichords. In Drowning by Numbers (1988), three women named Cissie Colpitts methodically dispatch their husbands in a darkly comic ballet of murder and counting. Our series ends with perhaps their most infamous collaboration, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), a lurid, operatic fable of gluttony and vengeance, drenched in color and scored with tragic grandeur. Each film is a sensuous, intellectual puzzle, all the more provocative and mesmerizing in the hands of Greenaway and Nyman.