Love in the Time of Cholera: Critic Reviews

Literature is poorly served.

Though Love is a handsome production, it lacks the novel's distinctive blend of passionate intensity and fanciful whimsy.

Lush, extravagant, sad and touching, Love in the Time of Cholera still feels weirdly insubstantial when all the febrile passion has abated. Like a fever it breaks, passes and is forgotten.

Often watchable (and listenable) without ever being good.

Easily the worst adaptation of a major novel by a Nobel Prize-winning author.

There's a little cholera in the middle and some love at the beginning and end, but Love in the Time of Cholera is mostly about romantic obsession and never-ending frustration -- the latter of which may jibe with the audience's reaction.

That's really missing is a sense of rapture -- a touch of magic on this course through the decades.

It's a well-crafted, handsome period piece, and pleasant to watch, but the intensity of an obsessional style is beyond [director] Newell's range.

Is there another great modern writer so hard to translate successfully into cinema?

Newell has done some fine work in all sorts of genres, from Four Weddings and a Funeral to Harry Potter, but in Cholera he seems to be chronicling a half-century of events, passions and desires as a tourist, not a native.

This romantic drama by director Mike Newell preserves the odd playfulness of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's international best seller but sacrifices its eroticism and intricate nonlinear plotting.

Bardem's hypnotic presence, like that of an Easter Island statue come to life, is one of the film's many pleasures. As is its intimations of a love everlasting.

The overambitious script [tries] to hold onto too much of the sprawling novel.

Epic in its ambitions and romantic to its core, Love in the Time of Cholera may not please everyone, but it has to be admired.

When it belongs to a character played by Bardem, it's a treat, indeed.

Both too literal and too thorough.

If you've seen Gone With the Wind, you've seen what Love in the Time of Cholera isn't.

Bardem, Elizondo, Bratt and Moreno bring enough to the banquet to make this feast worth sitting through, and best of all, make you want to read the book, Oprah endorsement or no.

Admirers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera will be heartbroken to see how dull translators have drained the magic from his worldly romance.

Forget the heat of passion: The movie never breaks a sweat.

It's the kind of motion picture that's crying out to be featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Handsomely appointed but disappointing.

It's the actors themselves who all too often feel out of place.

Doubtless it's an enormously daunting task to adapt a book at once so sweeping and internal, so swooningly romantic and philosophical, but it takes a lighter touch and a more expansive view than Newell and Harwood seem to bring.