The Guardian

Tweaked ending aside, Madden stays largely faithful to his source material and showcases his stars in an expert, picturesque blockbuster in the style of latter-day David Lean.

The one nagging fly in the ointment is the rash of cod-European accents. The otherwise impressive Cruz, for a start, is still apparently struggling with the English language, while Cage's sing-song Italian at times comes flavoured with a heavy dose of the Sopranos. Turn a deaf ear, however, and you'll probably be OK.

The Times

One scene in particular seems to encapsulate all that is terrible, slow and dead-seeming about Captain Corelli. Cage, Cruz and Hurt are all sitting around the table admiring Corelli's mandolin (which Cage looks ridiculous playing - a method-acting George Formby with biceps). When they speak, it's like observing a dialectic car crash.

Too much emphasis has been placed on a couple it's impossible to care about, presumably in an effort to turn Corelli into "The Italian-Greek-English Patient".

The Independent

The film makers never really explore the complexities of the relationships between the Italians and the islanders. Nor are we offered any explanation why the one sympathetic German officer, Weber (David Morrisey), turns against his former friends.

There is a dispiriting sense that the death and bloodshed is being trivialised, and that all the film makers are interested in is serving up a big, cheesy, Dr Zhivago-style finale, one that in the event proves surprisingly easy to resist.

The London Evening Standard

Director John Madden knew how to show Shakespeare In Love. But on the evidence of this conventional and dull movie, underpowered in every respect, he doesn't know how to show Corelli in love.

He's not helped by the giant miscasting of Nicolas Cage, who doesn't seem to possess a romantic bone in his body and whose well-worn American face and badly fitting Eye-talian accent can't salvage a romance that falls from wishful epic into a string of clich�s.

The Daily Telegraph

Working Title, the film's producers, have fallen into bad company - co-backers Miramax, the people responsible for nearly every faux-European idiocy from Il Postino to the unspeakable Chocolat. The result, with Captain Corelli, is a film so utterly cultureless that you can only wonder at the forces in modern film-making that make such talented people behave so unnaturally.