Rating: 
Summary: A truthful film.
Review: Reading the reviews here on Amazon, it seems there are many people who feel The Hours was hypnotic, moving, and intelligent. There are also numerous reviewers who felt that the film was overwhelmingly depressing, self-important, and ultimately dull. Both of the above statements are true! First, let me say there is rarely a masterpiece created that isn't self-important. A visionary knows when he creates a masterpiece, knows going into the project that he is creating something that speaks of truth. It doesn't use irony or any kind of sideline, but hits the audience with truth head-on. The first time I saw The Hours in theaters, I was dreadfully disappointed! I thought it was pompous and pointless! It was only as I began to remember subtle details, scenes, and emotions from the film that I came to respect its greatness--the greatness of Kidman's wistful gazes and forceful intensity.. The pain and humility and wisdom conveyed in her voice and every gesture. There is a line in the film, when Woolf (Kidman) is asked by her husband, who must die (in her novel). Woolf replies, "the visionary must die." I think that is the message of The Hours, but it took me a long time to discover it. All three women in the film could represent visionaries, but there are forces suppressing them. Moore is trapped in a marriage to a man she does not love (and does not fulfill her needs), Kidman seems to be the intelligent and romantic dreamer surrounded by people who can only see the superficial qualities of life (only the young girl can see the depth inherent in her, and the significance that Kidman finds in the dead bird). The film is flawed. The segment with Meryl Streep seems to drag, uninspired and depressing. Her performance is a weak link in a film that has two fully realized characters played by two of our best actresses today (Moore and Kidman). It is the compelling combination of brilliant performances, a haunting score, and masterful writing that gives the film its unique and lasting impact. And to address those who feel Kidman only won the Academy Award for her deglamorized appearance, perhaps they should see the film again and look at the meaning Kidman conveys in every gesture, word, and soulful gaze.
Rating: 
Summary: My favorite film
Review: I would like to start off by saying that The Hours is not for everyone; I would say maybe 2% of people fully "get" this film. I find this movie amazing in every way...the adaptation from the novel was excellent, the acting untouchable, the editing, brilliant. If you like Virginia Woolf's works then you're in good shape for the film....it is very subtle, yet deep. Obviously, you can find a synopsis of the plot in other reviews, so I will not lash into this here... If you enjoyed the film in the theatres, I highly recommmend the DVD...the commentaries are amazing. I especially treasure the one by Streep, Moore, and Kidman. I feel it should have won the Best Picture oscar. PS: No, not all the women were "lesbians"...a comment such as this reveals certain reviewers were not paying attention and/or were not...ready for the film.
Rating: 
Summary: Overrated and frustratiing
Review: After hearing all the prasie for this movie, I decided to finally rent the DVD. I might be in the minority here, but as I watched it I could not help but feel that I had somehow tuned into a bad, boring Lifetime made for TV movie. I kept expecting Judith Light or Shanon Doherty to appear. The performances were not compelling, and I can't for the life of me understand how Kidman received such priase for this yawner. I guess if you stick a big piece of bubblegum in the tip of your nose, ugly yourself up a bit, that becomes award winning acting. I know I should have felt something for the three women in this story... If not completely understand their pain and struggles, at least acknowledge it. But, I felt nothing. Actually, that is not entirely true. I did feel something...frustrated. For 2 hours I felt the frustration at these 3 actresses on the screen. In the end, I was only too happy that it was over. It is a film that really leaves you feeling empty. This is not because the performances were so engrossing that you feel the emptiness and pain in these women's lives. No, you feel empty because you sat dopwn to watch a great movie, and instead witnessed some mediocre movie of the week hogwash. It is the type of movie that "serious" revieweres will feel compelled to label a masterpiece, even though inside they really wanted it to end as badly as the rest of us.
Rating:
Summary: Addressing some of Crbpe's points.
Review: "The characters of Kidman and Streep have near-perfect lives full of people who love them, plenty of money, nice place to live, etc. Yet both somehow find a way to spend most of their time totally unhappy, miserable, depressed, and suicical. Kidman sits around all day in a huge house with servants, next to a huge garden, has a husband who adores her and will do anything she wants, and she can basically do whatever she wants and write whatever she wants at her own pace. Yet all she does is mope around, act weird when a bird dies, come on to her sister, and obsess over nothing and ends up killing herself. "--- A reviewer on Amazon of "The Hours". SOMEONE didn't do their homework. Does this reviewer realize that Virginia Woolf suffered from an acute mental illness that drove her to suicide? This person needs to research these subjects a bit before ranting about them. " I was sort of glad at the end of the movie that Kidman ends it all, she was so unredeeming and irritating at the end of the movie."- Ibid You mean, unredeemable aside from being one of the great novelists of the twentieth century? I found Kidman did an amazing job of portraying Virginia Woolf's more disturbed side... it's clear from the onset that she is NOT a fully functional woman (as anyone who has ever heard about Virginia Woolf would know that she was not), and that she has serious imbalance issues throughout the film. While she was at her most stable during the writing of "Mrs. Dalloway", it's quite clear that it just means that she wasn't suicidal-- her malady was such that it seemed to be almost permanently hanging over her head, her behaviour becoming so erratic at times that she was branded an "eccentric". In fact, in the novel "Mrs. Dalloway" the character of Septimus is diagnosed and treated pretty much like Virginia Woolf was herself treated. Chronic depresison or schizophrenia, whatever Mrs. Woolf suffered from, was something british society was not in condition or knowledge to treat back then. If you read Mrs. Dalloway, you'll find an echo of Mrs. Woolf's condition in the paragraphs where she enters Septimus' mind. In the movie, the pathos of Mrs. Woolf is very well portrayed by Mrs. Kidman.
Rating: 
Summary: A really great movie--Kinda
Review: [Warning: Spoilers included] This movie had much going for it: good dialogue, good acting, good direction, and extremely good editing. So why did it leave me flat? Because it was just so damn self-indulgent. There seems to have been one theme to the picture: All women are lesbians, (some incestuously so), and men, no matter how good or devoted, just screw things up and make life miserable. The acting was extremely fine (Julianne Moore should have gotten an Oscar for her amazingly subtle performance), but the characters were so self-centered and shallow you couldn't really feel for any of them. The scene with the poet defenestrating himself was dreadful. Talk about telegraphing your intentions! Anyway, he was so self-absorbed and callous that you almost wanted to push him. Everything about this movie was great but the story. Oh wait--I forgot about the music by Philip Glass. It started off good enough, but then degenerated into that "minimalist" nonsense of repetition substituting for composition and quickly became tiresome. This is a movie that wanted to be deep and had all of the tools to be so, but just came off as perverse and self-centered.
Rating:
Summary: The Most Overserious, Self-Important Lifetime Movie -- Ever
Review: Okay, after watching the Golden Globes award show and seeing 'The Hours' crowned with the highest prize, Best Picture, and hearing incessantly about Nicole Kidman's fake prosthetic nose in the movie, it was time to venture into that darkened theater and see how good the awards-friendly 'The Hours' was. Little did I fully realize what I was getting myself into. Nicole Kidman plays Virginia Woolf, who is in the midst of writing her novel Mrs. Dalloway, where she proposes to display a woman's entire life through the events of a single day. Julianne Moore plays Laura Brown, a housewife in 1951 having difficulty adjusting to a domestic life that she feels ill equipped for. Meryl Streep plays Clarissa Vaughan, a gay editor in 2001 planning a party for a poet and former lover (an emaciated Ed Harris), who is suffering from the late stages of AIDS. These three storylines will be juggled as the film progresses, with each woman's life deeply changing before the end of the day. 'The Hours' is a meandering mess where the jigsaw pieces can be easily identified. The attempt at a resolution for an ending, tying the three storylines together, is handled very clumsily. The film spins on and on that you start to believe the title may be more appropriate than intended. What this movie needed was a rappin' kangaroo, post haste! The film is wrought with female victimization, and screams "Give me an award already!" Before you know it you're being bludgeoned to death with what is profoundly the most over serious Lifetime network movie ever assembled. And there's nothing fundamentally wrong with Lifetime movies (their corny sensibilities can be cheery) but 'The Hours' does not share the sensibilities of its "Must-Sit-To-Pee TV" brethren. Kidman, nose and all, gives a strong performance displaying the torture and frailty of a writer trapped within her own mind, but too often relies on wistful staring or icy glares. Moore is effectively demoralized but cannot resonate with such a shallow character. Streep is the least effective of the three and fizzles amongst an over-stuffed assembly of characters. And for those of you that have been waiting for some hot Meryl Streep girl-on-girl action, your thirst has finally been quenched. The supporting cast is unjustly left for dead. The characters are seen as parody (Toni Collette as Moore's unliberated homemaker neighbor), extraneous (Claire Danes as Streep's daughter, Allison Janney as Streep's lover, Jeff Daniels as Harris' ex-lover, you know what, almost anyone in the Streep storyline), one-note (the workmanlike John C. Reilly who plays yet another doting and demystified husband) or merely obnoxious (Moore's brat child that refuses to separate from her). It appears 'The Hours' is the three lead actress' game, and everyone else is not invited to play along. Stephen Daldry's direction shows surprising stability and instinct after his art-house pandering 'Billy Elliot' showed none. The technical aspects of 'The Hours' are quite competent, especially the sharp editing and musical score, which just points out further how slickly hollow and manufactured the film is. 'The Hours' is an over-glossed, morose, agenda-driven film that is too self-important for its own good. It sucks the life out of everything. And for all its doom and gloom and tsunami of tears, the only insightful thing 'The Hours' is trying to pass off onto the public is that women are more depressed than you think and like to play kissy-face with each other.
Rating:
Summary: DELICATE AND INNOVATIVE
Review: "The Hours" is a study (a brilliant one, let me add) of three women's lives (The writer Virginia Woolf, the urbane Vaughn, and the suburban wife Laura Brown)- their daily frustrations, their wants and needs that can't be earned no matter how one tries so hard. (Melo-dramatic, is it not? quite soap-operatic?) Ed Harris's Richard is the ultimate modern-day tragic hero. Here he portrayed a character that is a source of pain, only pain, a Virginia Woolf re-incarnation of some sort. But Richard's pain, as the movie reminds us, is not one brought by his ... illness but by the past, brought by rejection and how this rejection shattered the life of a supposedly brilliant man. The actor's portrayal of a highly important character is sensitive enough to earn him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Kidman's portrayal of the writer Virginia Woolf really is inspiring and realistic. Her projection of the character's (Woolf) sense of loss and emotional emptiness is there, and, rejecting the comments of harsh critics, her adaptation of a brilliant but demented person truly is magnificent. Streep also carried the film and has once again proven that she is one actress of versatility. Julianne Moore is brilliant as (1) a bored but determined young wife, and (2) as the estranged mother. But it was Toni Collette who almost stole the film with her incredible but brief powerful appearance. This is one actress that, given the right opportunity, will truly amaze the audience. In a way, THE HOURS, is a meditation of the past, a rememory, a re-living. This is a movie of superior craftmanship, one that is delicate and innovative
Rating:
Summary: Sadness!
Review: These three women were looking for something that none of them found. They needed unconditional love, and in that their three lives came together. There is such a ubiquitous sadness, and it makes one wonder if it is possible to find some sense of happiness or fullfillment in one's life, or if it is just a chimera. Running away or dissolving your identity into somone else's or just walking into a stream is not an end, and, unfortunately is not much of a beginning either. Are we all destined for unhappy desperation . . great talent doesn't do it, neither does a conventional housewife's existence give answers, nor, apparently does caring for someone else. Maybe life is a haphazard set of experiences leading downward, and ultimately to nothingness.
Rating:
Summary: It Felt Like Hours Until the Movie Ended,
Review: Stay away, I warn you. This is probably the most depressing movie I've ever seen. I'd be curious to know just how many people committed suicide after watching this film. I wanted to like it, because it had some great actors in it, and it even had a complex and challenging plot that made you think, but alas it was the plot that was just so gloomy. They should have just kept this dreary story in the book where only the people who enjoy being bummed-out could read the tale. Why bring it to the bring screen? I have been told I am over-optimistic about movies, giving good ratings to even the movies that my friends didn't enjoy. Well, here ya go: a movie that I wished I had never seen.
Rating:
Summary: Different..too cerebral?
Review: This is one heavy movie. It's a real downer, addressing issues of life happiness, fulfillment, and stressing that few have anything but momentary glimpes of being happy. Either you end up in despair and suicidal, or, as Kidman's character puts it, you're ignoring life and you're really not living. Nice stuff... Anyway, it is a very literate screenplay with an all-star cast. Everyone is amazing, particularly Kidman, though for some reason I felt Streep was fake for some reason. I'm not sure what the main thing is here we're supposed to get, but all I got is, when you realize you're really happy, it's over, and you may never be happy again. Don't watch this if you're depressed. Upon watching it a second time on cable, I saw the above, but really, except for Julianne Moore's character, I really hated the movie and the characters the second time. The characters of Kidman and Streep have near-perfect lives full of people who love them, plenty of money, nice place to live, etc. Yet both somehow find a way to spend most of their time totally unhappy, miserable, depressed, and suicical. Kidman sits around all day in a huge house with servants, next to a huge garden, has a husband who adores her and will do anything she wants, and she can basically do whatever she wants and write whatever she wants at her own pace. Yet all she does is mope around, act weird when a bird dies, come on to her sister, and obsess over nothing and ends up killing herself (it's the first scene, I'm not revealing any plot twist). I was sort of glad at the end of the movie that Kidman ends it all, she was so unredeeming and irritating at the end of the movie. Then we have Streep, a modern-day lesbian with a great life-girlfriend, a great NYC apartment, an adult daughter who is perfect, and the perfect job. Yet, all she does is make herself miserable obsessing over some man she slept with once when she was 18 who is dying of AIDS. Apparently, once he told her he loved her (even though they both are gay, like, what?) and it was a happy time. No one explains if she's had similarly happy times with the woman she's been with for like 10 years. You just want Alison Janney (who plays her girlfriend) and her daughter to walk out on her at the end. Janney deserves better than Streep in this. Then there's Julianne Moore, a 1950's housewife, who once again, is surrounded by love, people, and doesn't have to work. She ends up suicidal because apparently, she's not only a loner, but a lesbian also. She married her husband after the war because she thought he deserved it. She ends up abandoning her family completely at the end because, as she says later, it was that "or death." Ok, I see her point, totally trapped, but when a woman who abandons two small children is the "heroine" and most likeable person in a movie, you know it's a strange flick. There's a lot here, but the second time I saw it, I really was just more irritated at the pathetic characters than anything else.
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