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89Smart and self-deprecating story about love and mortality: It’s merely a winter's tale told with a summer's palette.
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75Kingsley dims divine Elegy.
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63Elegy drifts helplessly into melodrama, and it loses its bearings and its head in a ridiculous final act.
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70Extraordinary.
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75By the time it's over, Penelope Cruz has slipped away with it, and transformed Kingsley's character in the process. It's nicely done.
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63Elegy is a curious example of misplaced good taste.
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83While this may seem like an apologia for randy older men, it doesn't come off that way, and Cruz gives her best performance to date.
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40While the supporting actors are engaging, the turgid screenplay lets the whole thing down.
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100There's a poetic irony to the idea that it took a female filmmaker to finally do justice to Philip Roth on screen.
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50Elegy's last act is a mournful smorgasbord of bathos in which major and supporting characters alike drop like flies. The body count is practically Shakespearean. The same, regrettably, can't be said for Coixet's touch when it comes to tragedy.
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Elegy seems determined to make real every ageist dig that could be thrown its way -- out of touch, balefully slow and, for a film at least partly about the zesty enterprise of sex, awfully lifeless.
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75As formidable as Kingsley is, Elegy wouldn't work if his object of obsession wasn't worthy of him.
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40Roth's works are particularly hard to do justice to onscreen, perhaps because the celebrated author's personality is really in his words
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50A spare, melancholy film that is so far in spirit from its source, Philip Roth's "The Dying Animal."
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A windbaggy film of Phillip Roth's novella "The Dying Animal."
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75If Coixet's film is substantially more restrained than its explicit source material (Nicholas Meyer, himself a fine novelist and director of the second and best Star Trek film, adapted), it is no less provocative as a poetic meditation on love, sex and death.
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83The film is exquisite on every level, full of sadness and emotional surprise.
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88This is an offering for mature viewers thrown out amidst a sea of summer flotsam. The title, Elegy, is perfect for the material. There is much tragedy and truth in what the makers of this movie have brought to the screen.
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70While excellent in many technical respects, is a muted, pretty, anesthetic concoction that's never fully satisfying.
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100A richly textured and compelling film.
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75An absorbing but somber drama.
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75As an acting showcase that builds to some unexpectedly moving moments, Elegy has much to recommend it. Had Coixet found better ways to connect those moments, she might have REALLY had something to rival what Roth does on the page.
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75The result, Elegy, isn't a great film but it is a good one, and better for Coixet's perspective, her ability to interpret Roth's world from the other side of the gender fence.
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50Cruz's performance deserves to be seen widely, and it should place her again in line for prizes, but the story's pretensions and downbeat mood will not endear the film to audiences.
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50The problem with Elegy has nothing to do with faithfulness and everything to do with interpretation. The film is an overly polite take on a spiky, claustrophobic, insistently impolite novel.
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80The Spanish director Isabel Coixet works with candor, directness, and simplicity. She isn't afraid of lengthy scenes of the two actors just talking to each other, mixed with lavish but respectful attention to Cruz's body, especially her bare chest, which is treated as one of the wonders of all creation.
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80This is a good, serious and absorbing movie -- especially, perhaps, for a reviewer who is roughly Kepesh's age and, of course, eagerly evading the issues his story forces up.
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88This melancholy mediation on aging and desire hangs on an exquisite performance from Penelope Cruz.
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88True to its title, Elegy is a spare, meditative and melancholy film. It is a deeply affecting and profoundly observed saga about love, art, beauty and, especially, mortality.
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70Sparse, low-budget drama, helmed by Spaniard Isabel Coixet, intelligently translates Roth's meditation on lust and mortality without soft-pedaling its narrator's brutally honest, unabashedly sexist views.
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Spanish director Isabel Coixet's hushed and understated Elegy is a flat, joyless affair.
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50What line is thinner than the one between confession and narcissism? Upon that line, exactly, does Elegy dwell, before tumbling off on the bad side.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 15 out of 21
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Mixed: 3 out of 21
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Negative: 3 out of 21
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5This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.
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Maurice8
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ElizabethK10