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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

More mediocre than magical.

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.

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.

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

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.