The Hours Critic Reviews

The result is something rare, especially considering how fine the novel is, a film that's fuller and deeper than the book.Read the full review

A splendid film. It uses all the resources of cinema -- masterful writing, superb acting, directorial intelligence, an enveloping score, top-of-the-line production design, costumes, cinematography and editing -- to make a film whose cumulative emotional power takes viewers by surprise, capturing us unawares in its ability to move us as deeply as it does.Read the full review

With its deft intercutting of place and time, the film creates a powerful sense of mysticism and fate.Read the full review

Ms. Kidman, in a performance of astounding bravery, evokes the savage inner war waged by a brilliant mind against a system of faulty wiring that transmits a searing, crazy static into her brain.Read the full review

It never disconnects from two values: its honesty and its intensity.Read the full review

Considerable intelligence and strategic finesse have been brought to bear on this handsomely mounted adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which was hardly a natural for the bigscreen.Read the full review

The links and resonances remain largely abstract -- to understand them isn't necessarily to be moved by them -- while the individual dramas of those three lives are often stirring, and the three starring performances are unforgettable.Read the full review

For a movie audience, The Hours doesn't connect in a neat way, but introduces characters who illuminate mysteries of sex, duty and love.Read the full review

Still: The Hours is a book about people writing, reading, and living another book, and that literariness makes the movie resist itself.Read the full review