Positive Reviews:

• Alan Stone. Boston Review. 1993
• Brian Webster. Apollo Movie Guide. 1993
• James Berardinelli. 11/19/1993
• Barbara Quart. Cineaste Summer 1993
• Roger Ebert. The Washington Post. 1994
• Harvey Greenberg. Film Quarterly Spring 1994
• Hal Hinson. The Washington Post. 11/19/1993
• Desson Howe. The Washington Post. 11/19/1993
• Linda Lopez McAlister. "Hers"
• Russell Fortmeyer . Kansas State University.
• moviediva

Short reviews:

• Film Critic: "We can't leave the piano!" Anna Paquin's precociousness and grating voice may have turned a lot of people away from The Piano, but her Oscar a few months later redeemed her somewhat. Paquin has since grown up, but her debut film is unforgettable: The haunting tragedy-with-happy-ending of an 1800s-era mute woman essentially exiled to New Zealand with her emotionally dead husband. Jane Campion does her best directing ever, working a miracle out of the bizarre Harvey Keitel, with whom Holly Hunter's Ada falls in love. Forbidden romance on a deserted, cold, and rainy island?. www.filmcritic.com
• Chicago Tribune / Michael Wilmington: In Jan Campion's The Piano, the emotions are deep, fierce, primordial. Sexuality overwhelms the film's characters like ocean waves blasting against a cliffside. [19 Nov 1993]
• The New Yorker / Anthony Lane: The story worms further into the guts of Victorian experience than most historical dramas, because it aims at the most neglected aspect of that age, and the most alarmingly modern: its surrealism. [29 Nov 1993, p.148]
  
  

Negative Reviews:

• Dragan Antulov. 1999
• David Walsh. World Socialist website. 01/17/1994
• The New Republic / Stanley Kauffmann: An overwrought, hollowly symbolic glob of glutinous nonsense... I haven't seen a sillier film about a woman and a piano since John Huston's "The Unforgiven" (1960), a Western in which Lillian Gish had her piano carried out into the front yard so she could play Mozart to pacify attacking Indians. [13 Dec 1993]