30
Easily the worst adaptation of a major novel by a Nobel Prize–winning author. Easily.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
It’s a well-crafted, handsome period piece, and pleasant to watch, but the intensity of an obsessional style--something that matches Florentino’s crazy single-mindedness--is beyond Newell’s range. The director of “Donnie Brasco” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral” doesn’t paint with the camera; he doesn’t seize on certain visual motifs, as he should, and turn them into the equivalent of a lover’s devotion to fetishes.
38
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
Newell has followed up a respectable adaptation of a Harry Potter novel with an ignominious translation of something more delicate and literate. It's hard to recommend this movie to anyone except perhaps the MST3K crew.
50
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.
25
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
As for the splendid Spaniard Javier Bardem, now knocking socks off in "No Country for Old Men," his lot is worst of all. He's miscast as the romantic Florentino.
50
Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips
Newell has done some fine work in all sorts of genres, from “Four Weddings and a Funeral” to “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” but in “Cholera” he seems to be chronicling a half-century of events, passions and desires as a tourist, not a native.
38
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
Is there another great modern writer so hard to translate successfully into cinema? Saul Bellow? Again, it's all in the language. The only thing Saul and Gabo have in common is the Nobel Prize. Now that's interesting.
50
Seattle Post-Intelligencer by William Arnold
More mediocre than magical.