David Hare's screen adaptation reduces Woolf and her art to a set of feminist stances and a few plot points, without reference to style or form.
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02/11/08
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The Hours (2002)
78
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Reviews Counted:36
Fresh:28
Rotten:8
Average Rating:7.1/10
Consensus: The movie may be a downer, but it packs an emotional wallop. Some fine acting on display here.
Theatrical Release:Jan 10, 2003 Wide
Box Office: $41,465,765
Synopsis: Based on the Pulitzer-prize winning novel by Michael Cunningham, THE HOURS employs Virginia Woolf's classic novel and central character, MRS. DALLOWAY, as its foundation and inspiration. Spanning... [More]
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Toni Collette
Director: Stephen Daldry
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Reviews for The Hours
Top CriticA puzzling and forbidding strangeness.
08/07/04
Top CriticClick to read the article
05/19/04
Top CriticA compelling, moving film that respects its audience and its source material.
01/17/03
Top CriticAs stunning an acting showcase as you'll find.
01/17/03
Top CriticThe acting, for the most part, is terrific, although the actors must struggle with the fact that they're playing characters who sometimes feel more like literary conceits than flesh-and-blood humans.
01/17/03
Top CriticThe performances are so beautifully synchronized -- for which Hare, Daldry and editor Peter Boyle also deserve credit -- that it is impossible to choose one as being better than another.
01/17/03
Top CriticVirtually humorless and extremely talky, the movie takes place during one day in each woman's life, although it moves so slowly it often feels like a week.
01/17/03
Top CriticFragmented and stinking vaguely of literary pretentiousness, The Hours is a stretch -- it's missing the spinal fusion that might have held it together with the kind of cinematic coherence I found sadly lacking.
01/16/03
Top CriticThough Daldry elicits brilliant performances, particularly from Meryl Streep and Claire Danes, on balance The Hours is more pretentious than penetrating about existential despair.
01/16/03
Top CriticSome moviegoers may interpret The Hours as waving a banner for gay life. Actually, it waves a banner for individuality in a world that does not always sanction such a stance.
01/16/03
Top CriticThis movie is in love with female victimization.
01/13/03
Top CriticYou don't just love the movie for its structure but for the haunted people in it, making each other miserable, but forcing each other to face who they are.
01/10/03
Top CriticIt would be all too precious to watch except for the brilliant performances, which make it too wonderful not to watch.
01/10/03
Top CriticFar from a bad film, and at least two of its central trio of performances provide moments of disarming grace, but don't be surprised if a whiff of self-congratulation emanates from the screen.
01/10/03
Top CriticIt never fails to engage us.
01/09/03
Top CriticKidman's acting is superlative, full of passion and feeling.
01/09/03
Top CriticA viewer can forget about Woolf, not care a fig about Cunningham, and just bathe -- soak, more like -- in the voluptuous sadnesses of Mss. Woolf, Brown, and Vaughan, delineated with such refinement by Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep.
01/09/03
Top CriticThere's been so much talk about the fact that [Kidman] wears this prosthetic device you know so that you can't even recognize her. But beyond that it's just a really good performance.
12/30/02
Top CriticIt takes extraordinary actors to make a movie like this work, and The Hours is blessed with an abundance of them.
12/27/02
Top CriticLatest News for The Hours
May 05, 2008:
Kidman tipped to play Dusty 
Nicole Kidman has been tapped to play the bee-hived chanteuse, Dusty Springfield, in a biopic to be written by Michael Cunningham, who she worked with for The Hours. More...
June 21, 2006:
Natalie Portman Aboard "Boleyn" and "Kavalier"
The universally-adored and very cute Natalie Portman seems to have a pretty high profile pair of freshly-inked contracts. On one hand, she'll be starring in a historical drama... More...
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