An aging but actively tomcatting Columbia professor develops an erotic obsession with a “thirty-odd-year” younger Cuban student, who, in his eyes, resembles Goya’s Maja. (Penelope Cruz, the student, actually played Goya’s Maja in Volaverunt, and here repeats the desnuda pose.) Isabel Coixet’s rendition of the Philip Roth novel, The Dying Animal, is slow, pensive, adult, and cultured, if a bit overdependent on facile avenues of expression: first-person voice-over and classical mood music from Satie and Pärt (yes, “Spiegel im Spiegel” again, for at least the seventh time in the decade). Ben Kingsley, even apart from the polished dome, is well able to impersonate an egghead. With Patricia Clarkson, Dennis Hopper, Peter Sarsgaard. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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