Peter Marklund

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Sat Apr 19 2003 05:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

The Hours

I recently enjoyed the magnificent movie the Hours starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne More, Meryl Streep, and Ed Harris. In fact, I've already seen the movie twice in two different movie theatres... I think it's the best movie I've ever seen.

The Movie Review Query Database delivers an amazing number of quality reviews for the movie. Below are some review highlights.

Stephen Holden of the New York Times writes:

"Some of the movie's most wrenching moments show Leonard Woolf (Stephen Dillane) frantically reaching out to his troubled wife and being rebuffed. It's not that the Woolfs don't love each other, but the agony Virginia is enduring can't be touched by love or reason. These moments bring home the film's deepest and most intimidating insight about the essential aloneness of the individual and its feminist corollary: that appearances to the contrary, women in their deepest selves do not and should not define themselves in terms of men."

Andrew O'Hehir at Salon.com sums up the movie nicely in this paragraph:

"Comparing a movie to a musical composition is one of those commonplaces of upper-middle film criticism that's almost never true. "The Hours" is the exception that proves the rule. Director Stephen Daldry (of "Billy Elliot") and screenwriter David Hare (an esteemed English playwright) have done what seemed impossible, rendering Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a meditative exercise in which not much happens, into a meticulously constructed and richly rewarding film that dissolves the boundaries of time and narrative. Cunningham's book and Daldry's film are musical in the sense that each is essentially an exercise in counterpoint, a theme and variations based on Woolf's novel "Mrs. Dalloway," which attempts to distill a woman's entire life into the events of a single day."