Like Water for Chocolate

Like Water for Chocolate creates its own intense world of passion and romance, and adds a little comedy and a lot of quail, garlic, honey, chiles, mole, cilantro, rose petals and corn meal. Read full review

The title may be a mouthful but Like Water for Chocolate is a feast for the soul. Hauntingly and exquisitely prepared, this Mexican adult fairy tale is garnished with mystery and wonder. Read full review

Though much of Like Water For Chocolate simmers with humor and the stumbling plight of human life, the movie takes its soul from deeper strains -- unfulfilled longing, the tyranny of social customs in a macho-dominated world, and the final outrage that love and death are inseparable, often indistinguishable companions. [26 Mar 1993, p.C1]

Overtly passionate, ebulliently funny and ideologically subtle, Like Water for Chocolate is strong drink - hot and sweet. It toasts life not as it is but as it should be. [09 Apr 1993]

Director Alphonso Arau directs this adaptation of the Laura Esquivel novel with a light touch, even in the film's most bizarre twists and passionate turns. [07 May 1993, p.8]

Food and passion create a sublime alchemy in Like Water for Chocolate, a Mexican film whose characters experience life so intensely that they sometimes literally smolder. Read full review

This delicious, mystical Mexican drama keeps you in an almost constant state of stimulation. [11 June 1993, p.28]

Like Water for Chocolate, a simmering cauldron of romance and revolution, passion and purity, mysticism and witticism, is a powerful and heady brew. Read full review

The simplicity of Like Water for Chocolate - a Mexican expression for the boiling point - is that of a sophisticated hand paring away all excess until what's left is primal, elemental. In Esquivel's and Arau's fabulist hands, it's the hand that tends the cookfire that rules the world. [19 Mar 1993, p.50]

A delightfully robust fable about two passions that matter (sex and food). [17 May 1993, p.4D]

An enchanting story played out by a great female cast, particularly Cavazos as the poor Tita, and unique visuals from Arau. With equal parts melodrama, comedy, tragedy and cookery, Like Water For Chocolate adapts well from script to screen, unlike most Hollywood attempts. Read full review

It's overlong, but that reflects the nature of Mexican cooking: like water for chocolate, which must be brought to the boil three times, the characters continually bubble and boil over. Read full review

Odd, playful, and sweet. It equates the boiling point of water for hot chocolate with the height of passion. With occasional surrealistic fantasy sequences interspersed between the commonplace goings-on of regular lives, the film weaves a subtle spell of enchantment -- until a disappointing conclusion. Read full review

Though one wonders if Arau couldn't have found more visual parallels for Esquivel's narrative, overall the film is a witty, charming diversion that struck a chord with audiences. Read full review

The story was adapted by Laura Esquivel from her novel, a bestseller in Mexico. Arau, the actor turned filmmaker, tells the story with the equivalent of a saucier's night out -- the film is physically lovely, and never so sumptuous as when it is concentrating on Tita's creations in and out of the kitchen. [02 Apr 1993, p.G4]

Arau gives the northern Mexican landscape a strange beauty, and the acting is sensual and effective, though there are periods when the dialogue becomes heavy-handed and the pace too slow. [07 May 1993, p.3G]

With its cowlike Cinderella heroine pining for forbidden love while she slaves over her bewitching recipes (and knits a shawl as long as a city block), Like Water for Chocolate offers old-fashioned romantic masochism-Harlequin pulp-dressed up in a magical-realist veneer. It makes being a happy homemaker seem wondrous again. Read full review

In the end, Like Water for Chocolate is an overwrought potboiler that punishes Tita for her sexual freedom. Read full review