One Day Reviews
Top CriticThe film might make the book look less astute and interesting than it is, but it still has an undeniable emotional wallop by its close.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
One Day is just a gimmicky "new" way of doing an old-fashioned love story. But we'll hear much more of Sturgess, Hathaway, and Lone Scherfig.
It's what a Nicholas Sparks movie would be if it were aimed at grown women rather than teenage girls.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
The result is a rom-com with ambition, keen to actually develop the characters and to mix a few tears with the laughs. Well, the effort is admirable, the movie not so much.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Miscasting aside, there's simply very little excitement to the film since you can see where it's going -- chances are even just by reading this review -- right from the start.
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
Director Lone Scherfig, working from Nicholls's screenplay, takes a big step back here from An Education, her last film
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
Few films "get" the strange, intertwining bonds of affection quite so effortlessly, although the episodic structure keeps the drama from flowing nicely.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Nicholls has proven a faithful shepherd to his fictional creations, who banter and rant at each other with the practiced elan of the aging couple they're clearly meant to be.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
As 1992 rolls around, a sense of dread sets in: Are they really going to do every single year?
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Long before the credits roll, you may find yourself wishing your life could flash before your eyes, to end the monotony of this relentless turning of calendar pages.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Amid sharp banter, the film poignantly captures how lives meander and take unexpected turns.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
There are no sparks whatsoever, and that's always a deal-breaker for me in romantic films.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
As so often happens with love, what you hope for is not even close to what you get, and in this case we are left with a heartbreaking disappointment of a film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
"One Day" is a beautiful movie, but beautiful in a way that life often is, not movies.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
For much of its running time it somehow fails to capture what makes the book work so well.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
No popular storyteller ever went broke stoking the undying female fantasy that if a good woman puts her mind to it, a heel can always be brought to heel.
The movie's content and style generate all the synergy of fingernails and blackboard.
The performances are overeager. Particularly distracting is Hathaway's accent, which is less Yorkshire than New York.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
You could definitely call it awful, and I'm about to do so, repeatedly and effusively.
This tear-jerking twaddle, adapted by David Nicholls from his 2009 bestseller, is nearly as bad as Anne Hathaway's British accent, which is heading for infamy.
Full Review
| Original Score: .5/4
"One Day" won't set the world on fire but it radiates pleasing warmth.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A miscast, underwritten, drably directed adaptation of a very popular novel, it's the feel-bad film of the summer and an almost perfect example of how not to turn a book into a movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
The characters that Nicholls brought so cunningly to life in the book feel rushed through a timeline, tied to an agenda.
One Day turns out to be less about enjoying a traditional happy ending than an admonishment to stop wasting time, get on with the business of living and enjoy every single moment with the ones you love.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
When a movie inflates the importance of a love story that is predominantly comic in tone, even with a fair share of grief and loss built into the plot, that love story takes on more than it can handle.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
"One Day" turns an episodic story into an anthology of feelings and associations, many familiar, a few surprising, some embarrassing and one or two worth holding onto.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
In a season of movies dumb and dumber, "One Day" has style, freshness, and witty bantering dialogue.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
We simply zoom in and zoom out of the characters' lives rather than develop any kind of emotional attachment to them.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
The leads are so lightweight and barely-there that a stiff breeze in the projection booth could make them disappear entirely.
Hathaway and Sturgess lack the chemistry to make us yearn to see them together. They're all wrong for each other physically, tonally, logically, which only makes "One Day" feel a whole lot longer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
It's a frustrating film, never light enough on its feet to be cute, never heartfelt enough to achieve "You had me at 'Hello.'"
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
An unusual but ultimately successful piecemeal approach to romantic drama that follows a couple on the same day for each of 20 years.
On a moment-by-moment basis, Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess make this long-arc love story viable, sometimes even vital. But the structural conceit proves more reductive than expansive.
Scherfig demonstrated her ability to infuse a talky script with plenty of wordless mood in An Education. But in One Day, the words - many of them taken directly from the book - are never convincing.
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
It's a sweet, harmless, meandering tale with an engaging gimmick, but a great love story -- or a great movie -- it's not.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
"Sense of humor is overrated," Emma says at one point, and while she means it ironically, the true irony is that One Day's sense of humor is sorely lacking.
