Click here to copy URL

Elegy

2008

Isabel Coixet

Ben Kingsley, Penélope Cruz, Dennis Hopper, Patricia Clarkson ...

5.8

7,852

Romance. Drama Cultural critic & university teacher David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) finds his life -- which he indicates is a state of "emancipated manhood" -- thrown into tragic disarray by Consuela Castillo (Penélope Cruz), a well-mannered and gorgeous student who awakens a sense of sexual possessiveness in her teacher.

	Author	Review
United States	Leslie Felperin Variety	"[It] intelligently translates Roth’s meditation on lust and mortality without soft-pedaling its narrator’s brutally honest, unabashedly sexist views"	POS
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"It's nicely done (...) Cruz is quietly powerful and very true (…) Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Manohla Dargis The New York Times	"There’s very little pleasure to be found amid this film’s penumbral lighting, careful compositions and muffled, muffling good taste. There isn’t much juice here either"	NEG
United States	James Berardinelli ReelViews	"Penélope Cruz makes an alluring and seductive Consuela (...) There is much tragedy and truth in what the makers of this movie have brought to the screen (…) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)"	POS
United Kingdom	Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"Coixet has brought off a creative and corrective account of Roth nonetheless: an intelligent film for grown-ups (…) Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Richard Schickel Time	"This is a good, serious and absorbing movie"	POS
United States	Nick Pinkerton IndieWire	"'Elegy' never satisfactorily counterbalances Kepesh’s forbidding interiority with what could broadly (and vaguely) be called 'cinematic' textures."	NEG
United States	Marjorie Baumgarten Austin Chronicle	"[A] smart and self-deprecating story about love and mortality: It’s merely a winter’s tale told with a summer’s palette (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS

Return to movie

We encourage you to check the reviews' original sources. Intellectual property rights of these reviews belong to their authors and/or the correspondent media from which they have been extracted. If you'd like to help us to add more reviews to your favorite movies, just send us a message.