Elegy (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 112 minutes, R) - Penelope Cruz may have received her Oscar this year for her scene stealing work in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but her resonant, soul piercing performance in Elegy is equally captivating. Based on Philip Roth’s novel THE DYING ANIMAL, ELEGY features Ben Kingsley as critic/professor David Kepesh, a commitment phobe who has spent most of his life treating women as sexual playthings. “When you make love to a woman you get revenge for all the things that defeated you in life,” muses Kepesh, who also has a long standing, no strings attached affair with a sexy, career driven, middle aged woman (Patrica Clarkson). Enter Consuela (Cruz), an open hearted, romantic Cuban-American student who sees right through Kepesh’s self-absorbed longings. Although his best friend, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet (Dennis Hopper) advises Kepesh to keep the relationship strictly sexual, the besotted professor is transfixed by Consuela’s beauty. Peter Sarsgaard (JARHEAD) is Kapesh’s neglected son, a respected doctor who partly blames his father for his recent infidelity. Crisply adapted by writer Nicholas Meyer and confidently directed by Isabel Coixet, Elegy is that rare film that truly delves into the sexual and emotional longing of two people. On a more superficial (and for that matter, carnal) level, Cruz has several nude scenes in the flick, but under Coixet’s sure hand, the sequences actually make thematic sense and do not exist to satisfy one’s prurient interests. Kingsley mesmerizes in the film as the highly unlikable Kapesh, a man whose appetite for self-destruction has reached its tipping point. Man cannot live on flesh alone, and it’s a lesson that Kapesh gradually discovers with Consuela (the chemistry between Kingsley and Cruz is definitely palpable). Painfully ignored upon its 2008 release, Elegy deserves a look on DVD. Featureson the DVD including a featurette on the film and commentary from screenwriter Nicholas Meyer.