Love in the Time of Cholera Critic Reviews

Shot on location in vibrant Cartagena, the film's strong suit is aesthetic. Cinematographer Alfonso Beato, designer Wolf Kroeger and costume designer Marit Allen evoke aged exotic locales, rugged rural settings and dimly lit period interiors. A closing, aerial image has a breathtaking, spiritual beauty.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

Newell's rendering of the iconic novel is dull and creatively off-kilter, lacking the surreal magic and robust passion of Márquez's signature magical realism style and never fully engaging the viewer.Read the full review

Newell's film arrives loaded with problems. The most superficial, but undeniably distracting, involves the way characters age at different rates and under makeup of varying believability.Read the full review

Eventually arrives at a lovely place, but it arrives limping. Small but nagging problems drag it down, such as weird acting choices, bizarre casting and strange aging makeup.Read the full review

Despite a magnificent performance by Javier Bardem, the film not only falls short of the novel's magic, but fails to generate much of its own.Read the full review

Little of the fragile wisdom with which García Márquez imbued that idea has survived this timid Hollywood treatment.Read the full review

That, after all these years of playing hard-to-get, the novel has made it to the screen in the form of a plodding, tone-deaf, overripe, overheated Oscar-baiting telenovela smacks of just the kind of deliciously ironic prank an 80-year-old Colombian Nobel laureate could really get behind.Read the full review

Faithful to the outline of the novel but emotionally and spiritually anemic, it slides into the void between art and entertainment, where well-intended would-be screen epics often land with a thud.Read the full review