Rating: 
Summary: Astonishing Movie!
Review: I normally hate movies where women stand around and stare miserably into space, having little patience for self-absorption. And so it is astounding that I could be so enthusiastic about this movie, but I am. It all works. This really is a tour de force for everyone involved: the director, the actors, Philip Glass, the cinematographers, everyone. You could watch this movie a hundred times and always see something you missed before. I think it might be good to watch the interviews on the DVD first as that is enlightening, but even without them, this movie shines on every level. And to Ed Harris: I'm still waiting for you to do something wrong. Is this the most underutilized actor ever? God, what a talent! I'd give it six stars if I could.
Rating:
Summary: One Day. 3 Interesting Characters. 3 Great Performances.
Review: In 1921 England, author Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) has been banished to the country to recover following a suicide attempt. While she wants desperately to return to a more stimulating environment in London, the ideas for her next novel "Mrs. Dalloway" begin to form in her mind. In 1951 Los Angeles, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is a housewife with a loving husband and engaging little boy. But that life is unsuited to her and, finding it unbearable, she seeks refuge in Woolf's novel "Mrs. Dalloway". In New York City 2001, Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) is planning a party for an old friend. Her friend, a poet named Richard (Ed Harris), nicknamed her "Mrs. Dalloway" when they were young. Now he is dying, and Clarissa is left to reflect on their relationship and the life she has made for herself. "The Hours" is a character study of these three women, based on the novel by Michael Cunningham. The three women are very different in character and circumstance, but are linked, not only by "Mrs. Dalloway", but by their emotional isolation and the thoughts of death that engulf them. "The Hours" shows us only one day in the lives of each of these characters. We learn enough about them to make them interesting, but not so much as to make them tedious. The performances by Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep, as well as the supporting cast, are excellent. Much has been made of the prosthetic nose which Nicole Kidman donned for her role as Virginia Woolf, and she truly is unrecognizable in the film. But it is her voice, which is changed as radically as her face, which transforms her into Woolf. Her performance really is impressive and may be her best work to date. Kidman easily holds her own next to the more experienced and acclaimed thespians, Streep and Moore. Meryl Streep's performance here is better than her Oscar-nominated turn in "Adaptation", so this is a must for Streep fans. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Boy, did Kidman deserve that award!!!
Review: When it was announced that Nicole Kidman had won the best actress award, I thought "Well, she did not deserve that." I knew this movie was great, but wasn't sure about Nicole's performance. Now after seeing her heartbreaking and amazing performance as the troubled Virginia Woolf, she is at the top of my great actress list. Not to negelct Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep, they are always amazing in their roles. For some reason men have trouble watching this movie.
Rating:
Summary: A darkly beautiful film
Review: "The Hours" is a sad, yet great story, of the lives of three women, who are living in different times. One is Virginia Woolf(Nicole Kidman) who is living in 1931, and is writing her book, Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia also has some problems though, in that she hears voices, and is also suicidal. The next is Laura Brown(Julianne Moore) who is living in 1949. She is a pregnant houswife, who has a loving husband(John C. Reily) and a young son. However, she is unhappy with her life for various reasons, and is contemplating suicide. She is planning to make a cake for her husband, and seems to be broken up about many different things. Then, there is Clarissa Vaughn(Meryl Streep), a lesbian who is planning a dinner party that night for Richard(Ed Harris)her ex-lover, who has just won the top prize for poetry writing, and is also dieing from AIDS. What makes the film work so well is the acting. A film like this requires that we care about the characters. The dialouge is well written and the acting is off the charts. Without brilliant performances, this film would not be nearly as good as it is. The reason acting is the key factor in this film is because 99% of the film is dialouge. There's no action, no sex, or anything other than the characters talking. That's just fine with me. I found everyone in the film so intriguing and intresting. The film is two hours, but I felt as though it could've gone on for another two hours and I still wouldn't have been board. Another highlight of the film is the beautiful score from composer Philip Glass, whose music makes the scenes complete. It fits the film too, because most of the music is like someone gradually gaining anger or frustration, and then exploding or wanting to explode. Nicole Kidman won Best Actress for this film at the oscars, and rightfully so. She is great as Virginia...but everyone else is equally great. This is such a complete cast. "The Hours" was my second favorite film of 2002, only behind Steven Spielberg's brilliant masterpiece "Minority Report". This film is one that you see, and cannot forget.
Rating: 
Summary: celebration of moral bankruptcy
Review: I checked out "The Hours" because the movie was so highly touted by the critics. Although I concur with the critics that the acting by Nicole Kidman, et al. was superb, I found the movie to be morally sterile and bankrupt, its main characters selfish, despairing of life (although for unexplained reasons), and extremely self-absorbed. In the movie, the Nicole Kidman character (feminist-lesbian author Virginia Wolf)found life so unworthwhile that she committed suicide, although she had insisted in her suicide note that she and her husband had a great love and were happy together. She must have known that her suicide would be immensely hurtful to her husband. But never once was she concerned about him; instead, it's all about her. Similarly, the character played by Moore abandoned a devoted husband, a precocious young boy who adored her, and a newborn girl--because she found suburban life as a housewife "stifling." Not only did her abandonment wreak a permanent emotional injury in her son, the movie did not inform us whether her "liberated" life was any better or meaningful or fulfilling. Frankly, I am surprised that no review I read had noted this about "The Hours." Instead, the reviews celebrated the movie--and in so doing, I can only assume that the reviewers also endorsed the movie's implicit narcissistic message that "If you're unhappy with your life, the solution is simply to end it, whether by suicide or physical abandonment of your family--regardless of the impact on those who love you."
Rating:
Summary: One of the best !
Review: Wonderful movie. One of the best I've ever seen.
Amazing soundtrack.
Rating:
Summary: What a wonderful chick flick
Review: I really enjoyed this rather dark and sad movie. It really made me go into my inner self and look at what is really important in life and what makes me happy. So if you want to laugh and watch a light type of movie, this is not for you! Julianne Moore gave such a brilliant performance as a depressed housewife in the 50's - she really should have won the Oscar! The other actors were brilliant as well. My husband and teenage son absolutely hated this movie - so I must say that it definitely goes into the chick flick group. It deals so much with feminine issues that most men will not be able to understand it. But I found it haunting and thought provoking.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely luminous
Review: This was one of the best movies I ever saw. I knew almost nothing about it going in except that Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for her role. To have the story of three women trying to hold their lives together unfold in three time periods and be tied together so expertly and unexpectedly - it was a truly wonderful film experience. The acting was superb and Kidman was genuinely brilliant as Virginia Woolf. If you write, you can relate to how wonderfully she behaved like a writer who's working even when she's away from pen and paper (complete with her bored teenage nephews snickering at her distant and distracted expression during tea). The film makes you think and relate and learn and cry. The scenes stay with you long after the movie is over - and they made me want to read Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" (which plays an integral part in the story). I can only hope that another movie as lovely and sensitive as this come along again in the next decade.
Rating:
Summary: simply amazing!
Review: the first time i saw this movie was the first time i played the DVD! at first it was so mysterious! 3 women in bed, just waking up each in her time period!! what's going on I wondered! and that was it! i could NOT look away from the screen till the end of the movie. at times i almost stopped breathing in anticipation. this wasn't one of these movies that you would know what would happen next! this one kept you guessing and would seriously surprise you! a wonderful film! i wish i could find a better word to describe it! you just HAVE to see it. and if you decide to get the DVD i assure you it's worth it. It's packed with special features, no not the kind you have to read yourself, these are interview, commentaries and even a special feature about Virginia Woolf herself!
Rating:
Summary: Three women discover that they have lost their lives
Review: I went into the Oscars this year only having strong feelings about Conrad Hall and Thomas Newman for "Road to Perdition" in the categories of Cinematography and Original Score respectively and ended up one for two (Hall won his final Oscar posthumously but Newman lost out to Elliot Goldenthal for "Frieda"). However, I know want to be retroactively be outraged that David Hare did not pick up the little golden dude for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published for the seamless way in which he weaved together the three stories of three women in three different times and places that make up "The Hours." By the point in the opening credits when Nicole Kidman's Virginia Woolf and Meryl Streep's Clarissa Vaughan both put up their hair for the day sixty years apart while in a time in between Julianne Moore's Laura Brown picks up the copy of "Mrs. Dalloway" that she is reading, the conceit is firmly established in our mind. Granted, I may well find this particularly effective because I have consumed more than my fair share of twisted time travel tales, so unconventional narrative form violating rules of time and space (American montage from start to finish) does not inherently confuse me. Instead, I found "The Hours" (the working title of Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway") to be intellectually engaging. Hare is presenting the stories in Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize winning novel as parts of a puzzle. Laura Brown feels that Woolf's novel is speaking to her on a deep and personal level, reading in it an impulse towards suicide; after all, Woolf ended her life by loading stones into her coat and drowning herself in the river outside her Sussex home. But Hare's screenplay has Woolf reconsidering the ending to her novel and the question of which character should be fated to die, and that shift in thinking resonates through the years to Brown's situation. The parallels with Clarissa Vaughan are decidedly different as she ministers to her ex-husband Richard (Ed Harris), a poet of intense bitterness dying of AIDS, and who insists on calling her "Mrs. Dalloway." Not only does she share the same first name as Woolf's character, this Clarissa is also preparing to host a party, as is Brown. The parties are quite different, but each character examines their life in light of preparing for the event. Of course one party will happen and the other will not, but these divergent paths will ultimately unite as the narratives finally come together. The performances in "The Hours" are as stellar as the cast, which is certainly not surprising. I found myself thinking that they should not have listed the cast in the opening credits because as the list of names goes by after the big three (Ed Harris, Stephen Dillane, Miranda Richardson, Toni Collette, Allison Janney, Jeff Daniels, Claire Danes and John C. Reilly, who only managed to be in three of the five Oscar nominated films for Best Picture) is sort of distracts you from the way the film is setting the stage for the drama (compare with the way "Playing by Heart" introduces us to an equally stellar cast). The DVD offers two superb commentary tracks, the first featuring actresses Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep doing tag team commentaries on their scenes, while the second offers screenwriter Hare and director Stephen Daldry ("Billy Elliot"). They offer insights into how this finely crafted jewel of a film came into being. You should make a point of sitting through both of those before you even bother going to the bonus disc. In the final analysis, perhaps the greatest ironic truth of this film that is adapted from one novel which was inspired a classic novel is that it is such a literate film.
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