Elegy

"Sparse, 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."

"For a story about a man blinded by his own lust and a couple confronted with their own mortality, its emotional kick is strangely muted."

"The 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."

"By the time it's over, Penelope Cruz has slipped away with it, and transformed Kingsley's character in the process. It's nicely done."

"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."

"Cruz'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."

"While the supporting actors are engaging, the turgid screenplay lets the whole thing down."