MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

Aubrey Hackett While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

minnu-forums Unless you want to dive into 'feminist' angst .. There is nothing there that's worth watching ..

alexdeleonfilm image1.jpeg"THE HOURS" ~ The story of how the novel "Mrs. Dalloway" affects three generations of women, all of whom, in one way or another, have had to deal with suicide in their lives. Misdirected and spewed forth for Paramount by a director named Stephen Daldry this extremely overrated motionless motion picture was viewed at the 2003 Berlin film festival. The morning press screening of "The Hours" (with Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf) in the Big Hall helped me catch up on some sleep lost the night before. Crashingly expensive BORE and the Kidman role could have been pulled off by any halfway decent high-school actress. Not that Nicole was bad, just that the role is zilch – Anybody can play a zombie with a false nose. But the other parts of the film (it's a three part movie) were even worse. The Ed Harris/Meryl Streep segment could have been excised totally without missing a beat. Who wants to watch Ed Harris dying of leprosy on screen as they claim it's really AIDS, and who cares if he left Streep years before for a gay boyfriend? – and now she's living in a lezzy affaire with another woman whom she kisses repeatedly on the mouth.The only one of the three parallel stories that held my interest at all was the LA segment with Julianne Moore, but only because of her – because for my money Moore is the best actress in Hollywood –the new Bette Davis! But the overall story line with three extremely dull people building their private lives around the depressing suicide centered Woolf novel "Mrs. Dalloway" was one long embarrassing bore straining painfully for meaning while falling flat on its face. For me the film was over when Kidman (as Virginia Woolf) went under without so much as a blug-blug in the first three minutes of the pre-titles sequence where she commits suicide by calmly walking into a local lake. This picture should have jumped into the lake before it was released. The fact that it swept up multiple Oscars including a Best Actress for Ms.. Kidman he following February is proof positive of the meaningless of the annual Let's all pat ourselves on the back Ritual known as The Academy Awards. I cannot help but agree with the assessment of another IMDb reviewer who called it the Usual Feminist Garbage and said: "This was so awful it's a shoo-in for Best Picture". Amen.Bottom Line: Crashingly Expensive Bore with a bashingly bad nose-job

Kirpianuscus It is not exactly a good film. or a masterpiece. or the perfect choice for Oscar. it is not only a remarkable adaptation. because the acting transforms all. the novel, the expectations, the respiration of Michael Cunningham lines, the rhythm, the details. three great actresses are masters of a subtle, impressive, complex transformation of a story who becomes almost magic. axis - a character who guides the life of each movement, who propose new manners to understand the life, who becomes a kind of spirit who has as guest each of the women looking her form of happiness. The Hours remains a revelation at each new view. and that fact is not surprising because it is more than an extraordinary film but a sort of mirror for his public. a film of delicate nuances. and one of refuges for rediscover the meanings of life.

gsygsy A bravura piece of screen writing by David Hare is the foundation on which this remarkable cinematic edifice is built. It is peopled by actors of the highest quality. Several of its images are truly haunting. Many of its scenes are tremendously powerful.The story concerns lives in different decades linked by Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway. It's essentially a literary idea, based as it is on a book by Michael Cunningham. But Hare, director Stephen Daldry and their colleagues turn it into a poetic study of life and death. It is given urgency and unity by Philip Glass's score.The Hours aims high and mostly achieves what it sets out to do, but there are, perhaps inevitably, a couple of fumbles. A climactic scene between two of its leading actors is presented in a series of ever tighter close-ups, which ends up giving the impression that the characters might not be in the same room. If that was the idea, it was a mistake - we really need to feel them communicating, sharing the space. Also, one of the story strands feels much more contrived than the others, shoe-horned in to make it all work: this is, I'm pretty sure, a problem in the source material which the movie couldn't avoid inheriting.In the final analysis, these are quibbles. To embark on a project as ambitiously multi-layered as this in a commercial movie, and then to realise it as fully as The Hours does, is quite an achievement. Everyone connected with it should be very proud.