Captain Corelli's Mandolin: Critic Reviews

The result is far from perfect, but to its many merits, add timing. You never get a movie with this kind of story in mid-August, when studios usually dump youth-audience dogs before the kids go back to school.

Cage's ancestors may have come from the Old Country, but he's no more Italian than Franco-American SpaghettiOs.

The movie duplicates exactly my experience with the book, although I must say I was thankful to be spared serial outbreaks of hearty Greek dancing.

Strikes too many false notes on the dramatic side to add up to a satisfying emotional experience.

The film's linguistic problems might be overlooked, where it not for the complete lack of believable romance between the pouty Cruz and the frisky Cage.

The movie's craft is dead and dutiful. It's an Oscar machine.

It's from a wry, teeming novel, but director John Madden (or someone) has left out a lot of connecting material, so Cruz seems to go for Cage only because it says so in the script.

Nicolas Cage and Penelope Cruz are ill-matched, and the range of heavy accents is distracting.

The film's perfectly watchable, but it's never more than that.

A romance as spectacular as this novel is, it still has a difficult job making the leap to the screen.

...Touching and at the same time brutal, brimming with the emotional conflict that surges within its characters.

Gorgeous to look at and well-played, it's definitely watchable, yet strangely uninvolving.

A lot of talent was squandered on this incoherent grab bag of war-movie moments.

A historical drama that simply fails to make convincing human connections.

Here's a film with all the right ingredients which somehow manages to taste bland as a hell.

The stunning look of this film took my breath away and overcame its shortcomings for me.

Yet another WWII love triangle that suffers from bad acting, but looks great!

...feels as if it has been manufactured in a chop shop of former Oscar winners and nauseating Miramax 'prestige' puff pieces.

The Greek tourism board couldn't have turned out a more persuasive commercial. Buying the various twists and turns of Shawn Slovo's screenplay, however, is more difficult.

La novela, disponible en cualquier libreria, es una gran realizacion; desgraciadamente al llevarla a los 24 cuadros por segundo, perdio mucha de su fuerza.

If there is one word to describe this movie, it would be 'safe.'

Obviously, the novel's sprawling, multi-strand structure has been streamlined here, but Madden and screenwriter Slovo have included so much subtext that it's still a remarkably complex film.

"Captain Corelli's Mandolin" fails to achieve its goals

Not as good as it might have been but better than the negative press it has received, which has unfairly doomed it to severe losses at the box office.

Una de las mas frustrantes y decepcionantes historias romanticas que se han hecho en mucho tiempo para la pantalla grande