The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

An aging lothario professor seduces recently-graduated students one by one. However, he is undone my a mature Cuban-American student, whose beauty, sensuality and love expose his vulnerability. There is much to admire here, notably the performances by the two leads. Kingsley plays the academic as stiff and contained, a perfect interpretation of a man fighting to maintain control of his emotions, and losing badly. Cruz is magnetic, bringing depth and nuance to a role that could have been exploitative. Unfortunately, other elements of the process are not up to par. The framing and composition are flat and unremarkable. Dialogue is often stilted, as if translated directly from another language. The father-son relationship seems false from the get-go, and lacks coherence in the way it evolves. Having a character declare in the final third that they have a life-threatening disease is shoddy and amateurish writing. This is a plausible portrayal of male mid-life crisis, and more noteworthy, female devotion and love. Given a better supporting context, this film could have been so much more.

This film Elegy which is adapted from Philip Roth's novel entitled "The Dying Animal" provides a tale of thought-provoking obsession as it deeply explores the relationship between a respected professor and a gorgeous graduate student.Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz stars in this movie directed by Spanish director Isable Coixet. Dennis Hopper,Peter Sarsgaard and Patricia Clarkson co-star.David Kepesh is a professor that is experiencing sexual freedom like no other single or married man around.Being previously married and now single,his encounters with women are brief,casual and sexual.Added to that,he is also in a casual 20-year relationship with a former student Caroline.One time,his best friend Pulitzer Prize-winning poet George O'Hearn suggest to him to get married to enjoy having a wife and keep the other sexual encounters around.Then he meets Consuela Castillo,an extremely gorgeous student and starts having encounters with her.But he instead enters a serious relationship with her and the circumstances surrounding them become extremely challenging particularly since his idea of liberation and sexual freedom are put on a test in it.This was an intelligently drama about a male fantasy that would provide insights on love,romance,sexual freedom and liberation.Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz did a wonderful job on portraying David and Consuelo respectively as well.Both thespians are really wonderful in the sense that one would feel for their love for one another and their committed relationship with each other.It was also nice to see the changes they are willing to undergo and the things they would give up to be with one another.Added to that,we are presented with the theme of love and romance and how true love truly conquers everything in this modern world of ours.

David Kepesh(Ben Kingsley) is a professor with a really colorful personal life. After leaving his wife and son, he has a string of casual affairs. At a lecture he is giving, he meets Consuela(Penelope Cruz) and is smitten by her beauty. They start dating but Davey also has another girlfriend, a former student he has been seeing for 20 years. Consuela invites him to her graduation party so that he can meet her parents but he is afraid to meet them in addition to his commitment phobia, so he makes up an excuse to miss the party. Dave's best friend dies, his son has a blow out with him over the old mans infidelities and then admits to one of his own; like father, like son. Back to Consuela and more drama which becomes a little far fetched, most especially a ridiculous scene involving Dave and a camera; I'll just leave it there. The cast is superb but the ending silly, so it is a slight recommendation.

As many of the reviewers on this page have noted, the movie "Elegy" is beautifully filmed, stunningly acted, and ferociously under-motivated. It is the story of a much older professor and his much younger student, who pass through each other's lives with minimal emotional contact with each other and virtually none to engage the viewer. I find both characters superficial, foggy, and distant. Is that the point of the film? Penelope Cruz is pretty, fresh, and shallow. What does the professor, Ben Kingsley, see in her? A diversion only? His rhetoric promises more, but what? He is pompous, cold, old, and filled with NYC intellectual abstractions that are thinly disguised veils for his creepy (read "cultural critic") narcissism. Is she simply deluded in her interest in him and he so "self-individuated" as to be rigidly remote? Where is real feeling here? As for story structure, two deus-ex-diseases--Hopper's stroke and her cancer--are more than my tolerance for fatalistic sentimentality can bear. At the end, when she is dying (I presume) of her disease and the professor crawls into her bed at the hospital, it would not surprise me if Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw joined them.