ScoobyMint Disappointment for a huge fan!

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Roxie The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

paul2001sw-1 Isabel Coixet's film begins with Ben Kingsley's academic ruminating about art on a peculiarly highbrow television program; but unfortunately the film is to concentrate on a less interesting subject, the eternal attraction of younger women for older men. The rest of the movie invites us to sympathise with poor, elderly Kingsley as he has to deal with the stresses caused by having Penelope Cruz as his girlfriend; even when she gets cancer, it appears that the main consequence of this is that Kingsely is forced to unpleasantly confront his own mortality. If the film was a satire of an inanely self-centred man, it might work: but we're invited instead to view Kingsley's position as an essential tragedy of the human condition. Personally I prefer to take my own sympathy elsewhere.

Syl Sir Ben Kingsley played David Kepesh, a British Jewish professor at a New York City university perhaps Columbia in Manhattan. David Kepesh is really Philip Roth, an American Jewish writer and professor, at a crossroads in his life where he faces aging and dying all at once. The book title was really the Dying Animal. Anyway, the cast is excellent with Ben Kingsley in the role. Penelope Cruz is brilliant as the young student Consuela who wins David's heart in a passionate love affair. Dennis Hopper is also wonderful as David's friend and colleague. Patricia Clarkson is also wonderful as Caroline, David's sometime girlfriend. I think the film does a decent job even though they filmed the movie in Vancouver and not New York City. The relationships among the characters are believable and even likable. Peter Saarsgaard plays David's estranged son, Teddy. The film is worth watching especially for Penelope Cruz who does the best job in her role.

Mihaela_Lacramioara I totally loved this movie. I am really surprised it wasn't more popular.... or maybe it was but I didn't know :) This is the kind of movie that proves it isn't a high budget and special effects that make a great film.The acting is superb. Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz made a great pair. The movie sets you in kind of an anxious nervousness the whole time and you can see the wrong decisions being made. It's a romance film that keeps you on your toes.I'm not sure if I was happy or sad at the end but I might have cried a little :) If you haven't seen it already, see it.

secondtake Elegy (2008)I happened to have read the novel that led to this movie, by Philip Roth, who I had always admired, at least in theory (not all his works are equal, for sure). But I was really repulsed the single minded old man lust of the original story. And I was equally unconvinced that a young (and necessarily beautiful) woman would need and be satisfied by that lust to some kind of simplistic narcissistic degree. It's rare I hate a novel that might at least be well written, and I found myself hating the movie for the same reasons. So to temper things, I'll say that both Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz are superb in their roles. Kingsley as the lonely professor hitting on a young and vulnerable college student is subtle and convincing. And Cruz as that returning (slightly older) student in her odd obsession with this man, and then with a personal tragedy that falls on her, and between them.But that might be the extent of my entry here. There are issues here that are interesting, the first being a relationship built on physical love (and appreciation, in some non-aesthetic sense but relating strictly to beauty) from the man, and on a more cultural appreciation and almost adoration on her part (he shows her high culture). And those are elements in many relationships. But what about the rest of their lives, the psyches? Is this just a fulfilling of two defined needs, one to the other in vary different but compensating ways?Maybe. But then the movie doesn't make enough of it. Oh, sure, we get Kingsley's worldly confidence and education, and we get an eyeful of Cruz's physical beauty, all of it, and so in literal terms the movie goes where the book does. But it is told with linear simplicity. Interspersed are some really painful old man "guy talk" sections, at regular intervals, and the other guy, improbably played by Dennis Hopper, is really just a kind of non-comic relief from the other simple story.There is true tragedy by the end, and if you know anyone who has had breast cancer, or had to deal with disfigurement, there might be a small sense of recognition, that very palpable feeling that appearances matter. But a more likely feeling will be one of poison and cheapness, that the movie (and Roth) exploit a deeply disturbing psychological and almost spiritual issue, about identity and wholeness, and about survival, with enormous insensitivity and superficial ignorance. I know there will be those who understand the movie's point of view, but I think there are more who will not.Oddly enough, the director is a woman (though Roth, of course, is not, and he wrote his book as an older man after years of teaching literature at a college, and the screenwriter is also a man). A puzzling and unrewarding movie.