Rating: 
Summary: Haunting To The Core
Review: A film that has haunted me since I first saw it, The Hours is a chilling depiction of depression over the ages. Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, & Julianne Moore deliver impeccable performances as three women whose lives mirror each others in sometimes eerie ways. The film follows a day in the life of each woman as they try to accomplish what may seem simple tasks to some people. To these women however, these tasks are the world and what will make or break them. What makes "The Hours" such a briliant movie is it's ability to convey the women's depression and inner torture to the movie going audience without ever actually uttering the word depression. This is not only a tribute to the film's actors but also to its stunning direction and cinematography. A movie that should strike a chord with everyone (given how many people suffer from depression or other such diseases), "The Hours" is a must see at least once in your life.
Rating: 
Summary: Contrieved and faithful to the book; well-casted, dazzling
Review: I find the movie very delightful in remaining faithful to Michael Cunningham's novel except for some minor details. The scene in which Clarissa Vaughan bumps into Walter Hardy and invites him to the poet's party is omitted in the film. The scene in which Louis (ex-partner of the AIDS-stricken poet to whom Clarissa provides care for) confesses to Clarissa his affair with his student is truncated. Another minor inconsistency is time. The novel describes Clarissa pauses at the threshold of the vestibule door on a June morning; while Meryl Streep, with light-blue stained spectacles and lemon-colored dangling earrings, walks down West 10th Avenue strewn with snow. No big deal.The Hours is a difficult one to film. It's not the straightforward narrative type of movie. It begins with Virginia Woolf wading in a river committing suicide. The crosscutting between three women at different times and space (Virginia Woolf recuperating from her mental illness in Richmond in 1923; Clarissa Vaughan kicking off a busy day preparing for a party to celebrate merits of a poet in New York City in 2001; and Laura Brown frustrating herself making a birthday cake that looks too amateurish in 1950s, Los Angeles suburb) proves to be challenging for both the crew and audience. In the first 30 minutes or so, the screen jumps from one woman to another, back and forth in time, to establish the common thread of these three women. Viewers who are not familiar with the book might not be able to spell out what this crosscutting makes of. Two thirds of the film focuses on Clarissa's day that serves as the artery of the film. Meryl Streep delivers a solid performance playing Clarissa who is unhappy and melancholy though living a full life. The scene in which she breaks down while telling Louis about Richard's illness is striking. Julianne Moore is Laura Brown, a Los Angeles housewife from the 1950s. She too, is not happy with her life though she has a perfectly happy marriage and a cute 3-year-old boy. Laura wants freedom from motherhood and duties of a wife. She will go so far as to leave her own son with a neighbor for a few hours, check into a hotel room and read undisturbed. Then we have Nicole Kidman as the writer Virginia Woolf who suffers from mental illness and hallucinations. I really enjoy seeing her getting on the wrong foot with her servant Nelly, whom she sends off to London for ginger biscuit and China tea impromptu. Kidman adroitly captures Woolf's brooding and grudging intensity. No less impressive is the tenderness she shows when her niece Angelica buries a dead bird in the Hogarth House garden. Viewers might question the whole purpose of chronicling a woman's day. I think the film is well done in the sense that unity of the novel is preserved. A notable flaw is that the film gives away the end too soon, at least sooner than it should. You'll know what I mean if you read the book prior to viewing the film. Philip Glass has done the background scores in piano that is a little too loud at times and withstands the acting (Is that intended?) I'm not in the least turned off by the shortcomings. I recommend everyone to see the film and treat oneself to a dazzling performance by a brilliant cast. 4.5 stars.
Rating:
Summary: Thr Hours of Feelings
Review: "The Hours" is easily the best movie of 2002/2003. Based on a Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Hours", it recounts a single day in the life of three women from different times: Virginia Woolf (1923), Laura Brown (1951) and Clarissa Vaughn (2001).
We get three different stories of true emotions, each heartfelt in its own way, combined into over 100 mintues of complex feelings that will have you in tears a couple of times before the end credits start to roll.
The central point of cohesion is Viginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway". Virginia Woolf, an author troubled by by own insanity in Richmond (1923) is in the midst of writing her bookMrs Dalloway. Choosing between living in Richmond and death, Virginia Woolf will finally succumb to the voices in her head by killing herself.
Almost 30 years later, a lonely housewife, Laura Brown in Los Angeles (1951) picks up the book for a read and questions her own life and feelings. She decides to leave while the impact on her son, Richard, is so devastating in years to come. The movie hits a high in a scene when Julianne Moore's character becomes engulfed in a sea of water while in bed.
In 2001, a New York City gay woman being nicknamed "Mrs. Dalloway" by her dying AIDS friend, Richard, questions her own existence and priorities when Richard re-ascertains his love for her before leaping to his death, another emotional high in the movie. In this well-executed movie, the cast has given stellar performances and props go to all three lead actresses. Nicole Kidman delivers a performance of a lifetime delivering a convinving portrayal of one of the leading authors of all time. Her performance shines through in the scene when she argues with her husband for her own existence at the train station. Perfect! Julianne Moore is the most outstanding here in her portrayal of a lonely housewife who makes a daring choice to break free and later confronts her son's suicide leap with much bitterness. If there were two Oscars to give, she sure deserves one too. Look for her Oscar-nominated performance in Far From Heaven! Meryl Streep, as usual, doesn not disappoint in her lesbian role played to great emotions opposite Ed Harris's dying character whom she has stood by all these years. "No two people would have been happier the way we have been." Simply breathtaking, a masterpiece!
Rating:
Summary: poweful but always deep enough
Review: The film is quite fabulous but I got feeling that sometimes it concentrates on the visual surface not the deep feelings; only Nicole Kidman was extraordinary. She moved me and she was very much on the Oscar level and I was happy that she got it...never mind the nose. This is is a movie about the woman an man relationships ; their chalenges and their tragedies. I was not trilled when I left the movie theater but I liked it.
Rating: 
Summary: Didn't believe a word of it
Review: I admired the sets and costumes while waiting for some story to develop. It's meant to be a serious movie, romanticizing suicide, in the great literary tradition, but we get no stories. Just characters, in three separate and barely related tales: the Tortured Artist, Repressed Woman and Terminally Ill Man. Maybe it's because the story is spread so thin, but we don't get to know any of these people, so when Nicole delivers her Academy Award winning, impassioned speech at the train station, we don't know what she's talking about. Or understand the fey housewife who's always staring off into the distance. And definitely don't buy the supposedly turbulent relationship between Meryl Streep and Ed Harris, neither of whom is heterosexual. A movie like this is supposed to stand on the strength of its words. If that was the case with the book, it didn't translate.
Rating:
Summary: Might be better with consistent supernatural theme.
Review: I approached this movie as an opportunity to learn more about Virginia Woolf, of whom I knew a little. It was not without substantial eagerness that I sought to learn more about her from this film. But this movie is to no substantial degree the learning experience I had hoped for, scarcely more so than if I'd watched WILD WILD WEST with the hope of learning more about Ulysses S. Grant. So what is there to get out of THE HOURS? Nothing very tangible that meets one's eye. A discussion early on alludes to suicide and reasons for not taking one's life. We stay here on Earth for the sake of those we matter to, so one character asserts. That's a reason not to commit suicide, we're told, and we might suspect that would define a consistent theme of the movie. But not all its characters live out that sense of purpose. Virginia Woolf didn't, either in real life or in THE HOURS (that point being the one unambiguous element of non-fiction I could find in the film). At least one other character also declines to stay around for those to whom he matters. But if one is looking for evidence either for or against staying around for loved ones as the theme of the movie, the most compelling evidence comes from Laura Brown, played by Julianne Moore. This gloomy and depressed character, forever on the verge of "losing it" decides not to commit suicide. Yet, she abandons her family anyway. So the movie's theme would seem more to be that choosing or not choosing suicide is beside the point relative to that claim that we should stay around for those to whom we matter. Even staying in this world doesn't mean that we'll be there for them. While Laura Brown's suicidal tendencies are rather unexplained, there is a hint as to why Virginia Woolf (at least the one in this movie, whether the real one or not) is having a crisis about going on. Part of the therapy for the conditions she suffers has her living in Richmond, a suburb of London. She longs to be back in the big city instead. I'll assume she has her reasons for wishing she were in London, however poorly explained they are in this movie. In fact the subject is poorly introduced. Apparently what is supposed to first hint at her bitterness over separation from London is a scene where her servants are preparing a meal. She tells them to use ginger. They respond that they are out of ginger and would have to go all the way to London to get any. She responds that she doesn't see a problem there. Her harsh words as she elaborates must be meant as the first sign of her torture over being condemned to this suburban life that she detests (however attractive the setting might look to a lot of us viewers). But a first time viewer of the movie is hard-put to discern such a message in this scene as it is playing. It is more likely to look like she is being haughty, even bordering on verbally abusive, toward her servants. You'd think the movie makers overlooked that obvious appearance in their zeal to portray sympathetically these supposedly parallel lives of three women . Yes, parallel lives -- at least that is what so many are saying about this movie. The paralles are implied between the real life of Virginia Woolf and two fictional women who lived later, one of them being the aforementioned Laura Brown. But how deep is the parallel? Laura reads Woolf's novel, "Mrs. Dalloway". That's about it as far as a tangible parallel really goes. Are we supposed to think the parallel is grounded in ordinary reality, in some general aspects of "the human condition"? Or is the parallel forged by some deeper, essentially supernatural influence? Little room for the latter possibility would seem to be allowed by the movie's tone, which does not at all generally seem to draw on supernatural effects. Yet, brief suggestions that Laura is somehow living out the life of Mrs. Dalloway are thrown into the mix. It is as if Laura is constrained to live out that life, according to how Woolf writes of her heroine (as if the two time lines were simultaneous, even though the novel was written a few decades earlier than the stage of Laura's life interspersed in the movie's flashbacks and flash-forwards). That particular plot element is indeed as if some curse or something doomed Laura to live out a literary character's life. There could be the potential for a supernatural thriller there, if the movie consistently pursued it. But the movie does not go for that option that could have made for entertaining, if somewhat escapist, fare. Instead the direction the movie does take is an incongrous, muddled mess that very weakly at best lives up to its billing as a profound exposition on parallel lives. Where so many would have us believe it delivers with a bang, its impact is really more of a whimper.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best movies of 2002
Review: The Hours is a very nice movie that earned 9 nominations and only won one oscar award(Best Actress-Nicole Kidman)This book even won an award.The adapted screenplay of the movie is one of the best adapted screenplays of 2002.This is a movie you must watch and a dvd you must have.
Rating: 
Summary: Movie Goers Beware
Review: I should have learned my lesson by now. When a film is touted as a "must see film" by movie critics, I'll remember this film and make sure I don't waste my time or money to see it. I wouldn't recommend renting this film for home viewing either. This film starts out depressing and I kept waiting for it to get better. This was just another vehicle for Hollywood to push homosexuality and lesbianism as a normal way of life. There was nothing in the previews or reviews to alert the public as to content and what they could expect if they went to see this film. I tried to find something in the film to keep me watching but gave up after 50 minutes and left along with several others. Walking out was refreshing after the doom and gloom I had just endured.
Rating:
Summary: Pass the toilet paper
Review: This is one of the worst films I've seen this year. More than anything, it works as a piece of propaganda. Painful to watch & listen to (with the melodramatic dour score) it is cliched to the max. Loaded with lame dialogue that people simply wouldn't say, the overbearing lesbianism, or "Sapphic Love" & the overall pretense is enough to last for the next 50 yrs. I'm not at all surprised this tripe was nominated for an Oscar, simply because it doesn't require an intellect to understand. There are horribly trite scenes where the film is trying to evoke "depth" yet only manages to come across as lame melodrama. If you are a zombie or like Oprah novels (is there a difference?) then you'll probably love this film. But if you're tired of films about the "suffering & depressed artiste" & same old cliches, then don't bother- you'll have more fun cleaning out your cat's litterbox.
Rating:
Summary: Intrinsically Beautiful
Review: This movie is so beautifully acted and made. It has a poetic resonance as it unfolds, sort of like how American Beauty portrayed. The film is stark in its ability to illustrate the truth and some people may react to the film in negativity. It is about pain, grief, choices on how to live your life or end it if you must. I think the overall emotion the film can reflect is compassion. Compassion for people who are living The Hours as they chose, not judging them, realizing they are we all struggle with pain, that life is not all pain and can be joyful. I was floored at how much this movie tugged at me. I am still reverbrating from it. Kidman, Streep and Moore were all outstanding! They made this movie an inspiration to watch. Notice how well Kidman achieves her accent and voice change. Her mannerisms are impeccable, they are not overdone, she channels her creativity it is so wonderful to watch. Streep is so honest in her acting, she becomes an emotion. Moore is subtle, very subtle and yet so effective! I was amazed at how much Ed Harris does for his roles. He is amazing! This movie is very emotional and can trigger depression. I felt a heaviness after watching it but there was also so much beauty layered within. So keep this in your mind if you chose to watch this film. Lisa Nary
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