Not for one moment in the entire run of this film did I believe that Cruz and Kingsley's characters had any attraction to each other. A great deal of this starts in the fact that, as one friend of mine put it, "Kingsley has all the sex appeal of a pickle." Cruz puts in a rather languid performance which is stronger than most of her acting due to the fact she is working with a Spanish (specifically, Catalan) director. But she falls flat on the screen anytime she's there. She a very pretty woman, but as an actress, she consistently sub-par. The only redeeming scenes of the film are with Dennis Hopper and Kingsley where Cruz isn't present. These two old actors have a wonderful charisma on the screen and I would posit that it is one of Hopper's best performances of his career. It just goes to show that Coixet can indeed get great performances out of actors as long as they're not Penelope Cruz. It was a tricky story to adapt and in general the plot is slow and meandering. The film fails in the end in that it presents characters that 99.9% of us can't relate to and doesn't ever really make us care what happens to them in the end. Undoubtedly this film will be well-received in NYC where these types of films seem to ply well to a sympathetic audience, but for those of us outside the Big Apple, it's just short of being an extremely painful film to watch. I need to add that I first saw this in Madrid when it opened in Spain. There may have been some edits to the film upon US release that made it more tolerable, although I doubt how they would have been achieved.