The Hours Critic Reviews

Richly layered, deliberately paced, dealing with difficult emotions and life decisions, it feels like a moody wintry afternoon.Read the full review

I found the film -- excruciatingly flat-footed, with one of the most exasperating scores (by Philip Glass) ever written. The most fascinating thing in the movie is a nose.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

I'm sure mainstream audiences will be baffled, but, for those with at least a minimal appreciation of Woolf and Clarissa Dalloway, The Hours represents two of those well spent.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

That makes it hard to watch "Billy Elliot" director Stephen Daldry's adaptation without thinking of the one Almodóvar might have made -- which surely would have been warmer, less self-consciously tony, and less relentlessly arid than the one that did get made.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

While we can admire their attractive exteriors, we don't know anything about the interior lives of the three women so vibrantly miserable in their unhappiness.Read the full review

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