To me, this movie is perfection.

That was an excellent one.

Thanks for the memories!

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

The movie is well balanced, nicely written and directed and Penélope and Javier Bardem give as always wonderful performance. The biggest downside is that it´s in English - it definitely should have been in Spanish. Listening to the heavy accents of the actors was very tiring and Javier mumbles all the time and you can hardly understand what he´s saying. It would have been a great movie if they all spoke Spanish. There were also two horrible violent scenes (involving a dog and a horse) that were too much. The subject of the movie is known to death and yet again, it was well measured and not boring to watch.

Excellent gradient, fantastic Javier, good surprice..

In the past decade there's been much coverage of Escobar's life in film and television. If it's "El Patron del Mal", "Narcos", "Paradise Lost" even "Blow" or the recent "American Made". There are plenty of good and interesting adaptations of the real life events which involved Escobar. So the question is if there even was anything else to tell? Well, "Loving Pablo" is based on the book by reporter Virginia Vallejo and it focuses on her relationship with Pablo. It's pretty much told from her perspective and what she had to deal with by knowing the man. Sure, that's another angle to go with. To be honest, I only got curious when I saw which people were involved in the making. Spanish director/writer Fernando León de Aranoa takes the helm. I highly enjoyed his film "Mondays in the Sun", so I know he's a competent filmmaker. And then of course we got Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz as the two main characters. I thought their chemistry and interactions in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" were fantastic. With this in mind there had to be some merit. After watching it I ultimately think that the film is a mixed bag. There things to enjoy, but after all the "Narcos"-shows it does fall in to the "Been there, done it all" realm.The biggest problem is that it's in the English language. I know that Bardem, who also produced, was actively trying to convince many studios for it to be in Spanish. But none of them were willing to give them the green-light unless it was more international so it could appeal to a wider audience. The film suffered greatly because of that. They could still have spoken English whenever there's interaction with characters from the United States, but a good deal of authenticity is lost. And frankly, it was distracting to me. It's not bad filmmaking wise. León de Aranoa utilizes many long takes where he finds creative camera angles. The build-up of tension is executed well. As soon as the intense man-hunt begins about half way through, then momentum is not lost. I liked that there's a way to understand the motives and human sides of Pablo. Yet in the next scene you are immediately frightened of him again. Bardem's resemblance to Escobar is uncanny. Like Charlize Theron so amazingly did in "Tully", Bardem's physical transformation makes him fade away. That added a great deal for the immersion. When he appears you forget you're watching the actor. But then again, when he starts conversing in English I'm left underwhelmed. Because if it was in it's authentic language, it could have been so, so, so much more affective. Cruz is also fantastic at what she does. Her character changes quite a bit throughout the story. Going from curious and happy to hardened and emotionally unstable. You get that she loved Pablo, but hated Escobar. That is presented clearly.If you've already seen the shows on Netflix and so on, then you're not missing much. That's sad when you have great talent at hand and a director who has a good flair of how to create unnerving scenes. I wanna highlight the camera work again. Many set-pieces have a good use of blocking, light and inventiveness to make everything look less lazy. It's a movie made by people who know what they're doing filmmaking and performance wise, but it was made under unfortunate circumstances. With one mistake that made the whole project suffer. It's the same story of Escobar again, yet you get to understand him and Vallejo's relation. And more importantly why she loved and hated him at the same time. If you wanna see Escobar's life from that perspective, then check it out for curiosity. I wanna give it merit where merit is due, but I was left disappointed.

What's worse? The drug dealer, or the drug dealer's whore? That's what this is. The story of his most ardent mistress. Are we meant to feel sorry for her? Is she meant to be sympathetic when she was nothing more than a prostitute for the world's biggest drug dealer? She was complicit in what Escobar did. She knew what was going on, yet, her choice was to act as if nothing was wrong. What's worse, the people who do the crime or the ones who willingly profit from it? There's so much wrong with this movie:* It needs subtitles, as someone else pointed out, why have Spanish actors try to speak English and then with accents so thick that you have to listen to the dialog 3-4 times to understand even a single sentence? * Penelope Cruz was not a good choice. She is past the age of doing hot and young. Motherly, sure, but not a hot young thing that she still thinks she is. She just didn't pull it off * If you're going to cast a great actor like Javier Bardem in the role, how about you not ask him to speak in unintelligible English? He's shown that he can speak English very well in other English-focused movies, but apparently the director thought frustrating the audience with really think accents was a good idea. It wasn't.The acting is just bad. The action is just bad. The movie is 2 hours too long.