25th Hour Critic Reviews

It's deeply stylized, but there's an accompanying patience and gravity that are hard to shake. They're the architecture of a lingering, unsentimental sadness.Read the full review

The film is unusual for not having a plot or a payoff.Read the full review

Lee, as he did in ''Malcolm X'' and ''Clockers,'' makes his hero's dread palpable, and though 25th Hour lacks the glittering brilliance of those films, I was held by the toughness and pity of Lee's gaze.Read the full review

There are two films at war in director Spike Lee's newest feature 25th Hour, one uninteresting, the other an epic of near-tragic miscalculation.Read the full review

Moves slowly -- it's an unhurried, talky affair that consists primarily of members of the small group of characters interacting.Read the full review

In a multiplex filled with empty New Year vessels (take that, Kangaroo Jack), this holdover grabs you hard.Read the full review

The result is a film of sadness and power, the first great 21st century movie about a 21st century subject.Read the full review

At its best, 25th Hour is a melancholy tone poem -- But the movie is also muddled by its own ambitions. There is simply no connection between the themes of Benioff's screenplay and 9/11, and every time Lee over-inflates the story, he loses its real pulse.Read the full review

If 25th Hour does not quite work as a plausible and coherent story, it produces a wrenching, dazzling succession of moods.Read the full review