what one would expect from a good Hollywood movie

Rating: 8/10 (18 September 2004)

'Cold Mountain' is a big studio epic, and a good one for a change. All elements of a successful creation of this kind are in place - a good historic theme, super-stars casting, good cinema (much was filmed in location in Romania) , and a message that is beyond the plot, and makes the film worth watching. The message is about the vanity of war, the conflict between love and man's brutality, the will of the human beings to love and survive despite the wish of their leaders to push them to war one against the other. It's an actual theme today as well, unfortunately.
What the viewer gets is a good cinema treatment, a superb war scene at the beginning of the film setting the background and providing Law's character motivation for the rest of the movie, and very good acting from Renée Zellweger. I was slightly disappointed by Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. Each of them was good, but not at their best, and they never showed up the radiant chemistry of a true great love story as they should have. A full world of good supporting characters and solid cinematography re-create the world of the American civil war in a fresh way, despite the many other memorable film stories inspired by those times.
It's what you expect. Nothing less, maybe a bit more. 8 our of 10 on my personal scale.