Rating: 
Summary: Sick movie, done well...
Review: This film gets three stars because it clearly was a wonderful movie for a lot of people -- including a lot of reviewers here. And I can respect that. The acting was fine and the movie beautiful, but the story itself left me with the taste of bile in my mouth.
The sick, twisted "romance" portrayed in this movie is not my cup o' tea. The ending just seemed wrong to me, and the "romance" seemed a lot more like abuse of women, and I don't find that entertaining, thank you very much.
Rating: 
Summary: Remarkable
Review: Schindler's List may have won the best picture oscar, and rightfully so, but a lot of other years this masterpiece would have took home the award. Holly Hunter was phenominal in a very difficult portrayal of a mute woman whos only love is her piano. It has an original and fascinating premise. I loved everything about it. The DVD shows off how beautiful the cinemotography is.
Rating:
Summary: The Piano
Review: Since the release of The Piano in 1993 I have purchased the video three times. Whenever I loan it out I never get it back because it is so spectacular. The soundtrack is absolutely hautingly beautiful. I purchased that immediately after watching the movie and it is one of my favorite cd's. This movie is very unique and depicts true love on all levels. We are reminded too that life is too short to not be happy! BUY IT, KEEP IT, BUY IT AS GIFTS SO YOU DON'T LOSE YOUR COPY!
Rating:
Summary: If you understand it, you'll love it! If not, well....
Review: I had heard great things about this movie ever since its release. When I finally bought it (7 years later) and watched it, I was blown away....by the story, by the acting, by the direction, by the scenery, by the music, by the piano playing (Do you know how difficult that music was? And Holly Hunter played it all herself!)When I read the reviews here at amazon.com (82 of them as of today), all the negative ones seemed to have one thing in common....they didn't get it. And apparently they still don't. The Piano is one of the most emotionally gripping movies I have ever watched, and is now certainly on my list of favorites.
Rating:
Summary: for the passionate!!!
Review: I own this movie and have watched it many times and have cried many times. A friend once asked me what my favorite part was and was quite stunned when i told him the part where Hollie Hunter's "husband" chopped off her finger. I told him it was because of the passion....the passion of the raging storm and the passions raging inside of the actors. Which, i believe were very well portrayed by all of the cast. I'm sure you've guessed by now that i am a very passionate person and i have a love of music, as well. This movied touched me tremendously....it portrayed passion to the extreme. It was a bit of softcore porn....but it was more erotic softcore porn. It was lovely and beautiful in the way it was portrayed. If you want to understand the true measure of a persons' loves...then i highly recommend owning this movie!!
Rating:
Summary: Lovely movie...
Review: A temperamental, mute German (?) woman travels to remote New Zealand with her daughter and her beloved piano for an arranged marriage. She has problems adjusting to her new surroundings, possibly because her husband refuses to carry her piano, her sole means of communication, from the shore to their new house. A neighbor offers to bring it up, in return for some lesons, and a love triangle develops.... This movie has a very original story line, good characters, and very good acting that bring up the best in the movie. The soundtrack is terrific, and combines very well with this movie since this is Ada's voice and her only way to express herself, even if she is miosunderstood by the surrounding society. This movie is especially worth watching for all music lovers out there!
Rating:
Summary: Astounding!
Review: The beauty of this movie is unparalleled. It is the second best movie of 1993 (Schindler's list is the best).
Rating: 
Summary: Woman finds voice, natives get robbed
Review: Let me be clear, I got ahuge lump in my throat when I saw this movie. It's beautifully shot, realistically grubby and the violence is not at hair out of place for the period or for modern New Zealand (on a spiritual if not "Once Were Warriors" level). Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill and Anna Paquin were all stupendous. Campion here presents us with a wonderfully expatriate view of New Zealand as it was, and to her credit, uncovers many of the dirty secrets in the NZ psyche. In fact, as a movie about white New Zealanders, this was a 5 star piece of cinema. With the right foregrounding you can see many of the things that are intensely problematic about New Zealand society both historically and now: the blinkered provincialism, the contempt for indigenous people (except as trendy accessories), the horrific valorization of commerce over art (anti-intellectual, anti-artistic and anti-spiritual) and the systematic devaluing of women and love of violence that thrive in the standard blokes-are-us set of understandings of NZ both past and present that you can find in any pub or wine bar in any part of the country on a Friday night. That being said, the movie also plays the natives for laughs and inexplicably places the character of Bain as a partially-tattooed culture broker for Maori who have English muskets but apparently no command of the English language themselves. While figures like Bain were certainly important during the early years of the New Zealand colony (1800-1840), the following decades when the film is set saw their importance decline rapidly. In any case, relations between Maori and European for almost the whole of the 19th century were much more intensive and intimate than this movie makes out. This historical elision is actually important because it provides a way for white people to be the sole group at the center of the movie and ignores the fundamental inter-relatedness of the Maori and European communities during this time period. In this vein, Campion can make a movie which does not challenge our understanding of European settlement of this (and other countries) as a heroic endeavor against the odds in some sort of cultural vacuum. For the record, during the intial phases of English settlement in Aotearoa, Maori in many areas became fluent in English (at least to trade) very quickly. If Sam Neill's little outpost had been established long enough to have an amateur dramatic society there would have been more than a dozen local men and women who would have been fluent enough and canny enough to be giving the English a hefty run for their money. Maori successes in commerce (the Waikato tribes for instance were sending tons of salt meat, potatoes and other vegetables to Australia on their own merchant ships by the early 1860s) actually led to colonists deliberately starting wars with Maori in order to eliminate superior Maori economic competition. This probably qualifies as one of the most blatant interferences in the free market (too bad there wasn't a World Trade Organization back then!). Maori in some parts of the country owned flour mills, fishing vessels, and toll booths and ordered china tea sets from England. We have no notion of English barbarism in their own country during this period either. The subtext is that we do not need to know about the burgeoning Industrial Revolution with its smoke stacks and polluted rivers, the Poor Laws which forced debtors into prison and made hundreds of small farmers destitute, the riots over bread, the public hangings or the sale of small children in the streets of London. Like Martians, Holly Hunter and her piano are transported to the beach, no one cares where from. It is the quintessential Euro-settler fantasy: "I come from nowhere with nothing, land here and make the earth productive with my own bare hands and bring civilization." What this movie shamelessly replicates is a Kiplingesque story of plucky European triumph over the native landscape (and the Philistine colonists as well to be sure - here Sam Neill is placed outside civilization as surely as the Maori). Holly Hunter's character finds true love in a restored genteel setting without any thought to the costs paid by the native people. It's a great mood peice but lousy history. Thank you sir, may I have another?
Rating:
Summary: An everlasting tune keeps playing in my heart
Review: What a triumphant piece of pure art ! Having always loved art movies, The Piano impressed me at a very young age. I remember being in the 3d grade and not allowed to watch this movie. Now that I have seen it almost...I don't know...more than 10 times, I cannot forget this sensual movie experience. Gifted actors like Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin lights up the screen in a perfect mother and daughter pair. Wonderful performance by Harvey Keitel ! Hunter and Paquin deserves every ounce of their Oscar gold ! The Piano is an undoubted winner and bound to be cherished by dozens of generations to come. This is and will forever be my favourite movie.
Rating:
Summary: Disturbing and brilliant
Review: People seem to either love or hate this film, which is understandable because it wants to be approached on an emotional level more than an intellectual one. My boyfriend complained that none of the characters were compelling enough to care about, whereas I could see that the central character is, indeed, the piano and how everything revolves around its voice -- Ada's voice. Listening to her voice, being moved by it, is the key to the entire film. One of the several engaging themes is that of who is on center stage at any given time. Count the number of times someone is watching someone else: Baines watching Ada play her piano on the beach, actors in a play looking through curtain eyeholes at the audience, the natives in the audience watching the play and believing the actors to be "real", Stewart looking through gaps in the planks to see his wife with another man, Flora watching Stewart attempt to destroy his wife's voice. (Interestingly, this is an assault not on the piano itself but on something more fundamental. And those who believe that Ada's gift of the piano key to Baines is a major faux pas perhaps don't realize that he will know exactly what that white key means though he can't read the words burned into it.) The disturbing moments, and there are several, are entirely about the piano's (Ada's) voice and how these men attempt to either restrict or manipulate it to get what they want -- one endangering her sense of self while simultaneously using and liberating her, the other denying her self-expression while trying to be her protector and "a good man". It's a very fine movie for those of a mind to listen.
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