Rating: 
Summary: One Of The Worst Movies Of 2002
Review: I have seen plenty of movies that had good drama and made since. But "The Hours" is probably the worst movie I have seen in the year 2002. It does have drama; but it does not really have a good plot (storyline) to it. So therefore this movie was quite nonunderstandable and pointless. Not only is "The Hours" one of the worst movies of 2002; but it's the most boring one at that. It is also the shortest Oscar nominated movie of 2002, being only a little over an hour or so. "The Hours" should have been called "The Hour" because it is just too short for a good movie. This dull, boring, uninteresting, pointless, and short movie should have never been nominated for any Oscars. Oh! I forgot to say: The fake nose on Nicole Kidman looked ridiculous. "The Hours" was not the only bad movie of 2002. I mean movies like: "Chicago", "Far From Heaven", and "Gangs of New York" were some pretty bad movies in that year if you ask me. "The Lord of the Rings", "About Schmidt", "Adaptation", and "Frida" were the best movies of 2002. Recommendation: SKIP THIS MOVIE!
Rating:
Summary: SHOULD HAVE BEEN CALLED "THE DAYS"!
Review: This dreary, boring movie seemed to go on for days! Sorry, but I could not find a shred of empathy for these characters and can't believe it received so many oscar nominations and an oscar for best actress. This is not entertainment.
Rating: 
Summary: The year's best film
Review: A wonderful film and an extraordinary performance by Nicole Kidman. Coming on the heels of her work in The Others and Moulin Rouge, this cements her position as the most gifted actress of her generation. Who would have guessed?
Rating:
Summary: Psychologically strong!
Review: This film is great.
It captured my whole attention during the 2 or more hours is lasts. The back and forth story is tricky, but so well edited that really one has to focus, otherwise one loses the thread.
The suicide ingredient is strong for someone who's not accostume to hear or deal with it. Depression, HIV, suicide, homosexual and bisexual relationships, psycosis, etc.., are some of the elements depicted in this wonderful story.
Excellent. Great!
Rating:
Summary: Provocative and hopeful
Review: Boasting an exemplary cast, purposeful direction, authentic production values, and a haunting musical score, The Hours is a sincere praiseworthy attempt to adapt Michael Cunningham's prize-winning novel to the screen. It is provocative, introspective, hopeful, and at times downright desolate. As evidenced by the opening sequence, the value of life itself is called into question and it sets the tone for the rest of the film.The complex storyline focuses on one day in the lives of three women from three different generations. Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) is living outside of London with her husband in 1923, recovering from mental illness and beginning work on her now famous novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is a 1950's suburban housewife, married to a World War II veteran (John C. Reilly), raising a small boy while expecting another child. And then there is Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep), a present-day version of Mrs. Dalloway, so named by her one-time lover and now AIDS-stricken writer Richard (Ed Harris), living in New York and planning one of her renowned parties for him following his reception of a prestigious poetry award. Yet there is a common thread among them that effaces any 'real' normalcy in their lives and ultimately forces each of them to make life-altering decisions. Themes revolving around feminism and sexual preference stir just below the surface. But it is the prevailing sadness of these women brought on by the confinements of a restrictive and often stifling society that is at the core of this film. Their yearning for something more or for that 'one perfect moment' in time places each of them in the painful position to question their own existence. The sequences in each of their lives are carefully interwoven throughout the movie, enhancing their parallel struggles. The Hours is skillfully directed by Stephen Daldry and contains some of the finest performances of the year. Julianne Moore's depiction of Laura Brown is filled with subtlety and nuance. She epitomizes a 1950's housewife with a constant shiny exterior who can barely contain the internal struggle of her life's claustrophobic confinements. Meryl Streep's Clarissa Vaughn, though bound by memories of her past, is somewhat less restricted in her character as a modern New York editor living with her female lover and therefore has more opportunity to display her considerable emotional range. However it is Nicole Kidman's portrayal of Virginia Woolf that is the most mesmerizing and transforming performance in the film. She is completely submerged as the famous novelist of the early twentieth century. The hype concerning Kidman's prosthetic proboscis and its alleged distraction is much ado about nothing. To the contrary, it enhances her performance and allows her characterization of Virginia Woolf to fully emerge. Audiences will not recognize her, nor should they. But if it is familiar players and plotlines you are seeking then The Hours is not for you. It is neither fantasy nor escapism, yet what it lacks in pure entertainment it makes up for with introspection and a somewhat hopeful ending.
Rating: 
Summary: An emotional cauldron of great performances and filmmaking
Review: More intense and focused than the book that inspires it, "The Hours" has the presence of a gathering, angry storm, manifested in three women whose convictions, desires and wills do not entirely match, yet all find themselves wondering if their lives could have or should have more to them than they do. Nicole Kidman is the standout as Virginia Woolf, the early 20th Century British novelist both ahead of and trapped by her era, embarking upon writing her book, "Mrs. Dalloway," which she believes will fully distinguish her genius. Julianne Moore is Laura Brown, a 1950s Florida housewife reading the book and attempting to prepare a proper birthday cake for her husband. Meryl Streep is Clarissa Vaughn, who intends to throw a party for a friend dying of AIDS (Ed Harris) as he's about to receive the Carrothers Prize for poetry. Director Stephen Daldry plays up the parallels of the three women, much as Michael Cunningham did in the book. In the compressed universe of a movie, these parallels are more obvious, and at times intrusive on the story, as Daldry seems to need to point and nod at his stylistic flourishes (See the flowers? Notice the dialogue?) to a point reaching irritation. But the performances carry the movie past the indulgences. Kidman, as Woolf, stalks her brooding scenes as if she's in her final role -- Daldry likes how Kidman smokes a cigarette so much, he shows it several times. Kidman, with a prosthetic nose plastered on to complete the character's transformation, holds her cards close -- Woolf is brilliant, and slightly mad, and good at concealing her moods -- until a late, angry scene at a train station, as she attempts to flee her rural England home for London, a main source of her madness. Kidman controls this performance; it doesn't get away from her like Alice Harford did in "Eyes Wide Shut." She's outstanding. Moore and Streep, obviously, inhabit smaller roles. Between the two, Moore has to work harder to make us believe her housewife is teetering so much on the edge of things that she's prone to crack. I'm not sure she gets there; she doesn't have enough time to develop Laura Brown's quirks, and what time she does have she underplays. Streep has her own troubles, playing Clarissa, a fiftyish lesbian -- methinks Streep doesn't exude "lesbian," hence, this aspect of Clarissa is downplayed -- who very well could have lived an entire life with her friend Richard (Harris), a brooding, mercurial genius not unlike Woolf, who once kissed Clarissa on a sand dune near the ocean and defined her one moment of pure happiness. What I love about Streep is her willingness to let others chew the scenery -- she's a cheery team player for a superstar, ain't she? -- and boy, does Ed Harris gnaw away. What the hell's gotten into this man? Five years ago, he was slogging around in "Milk Money" and hamming it up in "Stepmom." Now, with this performance and his tour de force work in "Pollock," he's redefining anger mismanagement. Harris has two extended scenes, and it's all he needs to put a sad, cruel stamp on the whole movie, like Woolf, his mind is a caged animal, bound up in ways by AIDS in he can never shake loose. You might remember him more than any of the women. Inevitably, you compare the movie to the book. Daldry's version --- my guess is this kind of movie can and will be remade a different way -- holds up. Cunningham, in the novel, allows himself the ability to rustle through the minds of his characters -- all of them -- whenever he sees fit; one of the great triumphs of the book is that he keeps the reader on a clear and straight path through all the shifting perspectives. Although it contains suicides, the novel's pervading emotion is of fleeting sadness, or, in some cases regret. Daldry cranks up those emotions into a stiffer drink; an early scene with Clarissa in the flower shop, which passes without much incidence in the book, is an opportunity for Daldry in the movie to convey heavy tension. To his credit, Daldry isn't fearful to become less-than-elegant and press his camera into these women's faces. And what few special effects there are work nicely. In the end, Daldry respected the pedigree of his actresses and the novelist but worked them over a little, too, and the end result is unsettling and dramatic. It was a mature, intelligent picture. It brought me to read the book, which I think might supplement the movie better than the movie would supplement the book. The book fills in the remaining blanks, but the meat of the book's power is right there on the screen. "The Hours" won't let you down.
Rating:
Summary: Brings the book perfectly to life
Review: This movie blends three stories that appear, at least at first, to be unrelated except by emotions and themes: Meryl Streep as a modern New York book editor, Nicole Kidman as the author Virginia Woolf, and Julianne Moore as a disaffected 1950s housewife. As always, these actresses are wonderful (I much preferred Moore in this to her very similar part in 'Far from Heaven;' and Meryl Streep is always a wonder). Edward Harris as Streep's dying friend is also remarkable. When I read the book on which this movie is based, I saw it as being as much like a piece of music as like a 'traditional' novel: themes rising, submerging, and reappearing just as in music (purchasing flowers; a kiss shared between two women; a life-threatening illness, etc.). The movie seems to build on this musical analogy, the camera sometimes cutting directly from one story to an identical moment in the next. The pervasive Philip Glass score adds to this sense of theme, variation, repetition. It's a beautiful score but I found it a bit distracting. Despite the distraction, if anything I preferred the movie to the book; the outstanding performances brought everything very much to life. If you prefer start-at-the-beginning-end-at-the-end storytelling, however, it may not be for you.
Rating:
Summary: Waiting for Death in Life
Review: This film is extremely disquieting. It is centered on Virginia Wolf and her character Mrs Dolloway. This character, this book is transmitted then through two generations of people with very catastrophic consequences. The book, like Virginia Wolf, is haunted by suicide, by death, by those hours during which a person lives death in life waiting for death, expecting death, preparing death, the hours after death that can only be imagined and that are seen as a liberation from life, from a life haunted by death. The fate of Mrs Dolloway is transmitted to a female reader a few decades later, but this woman who tries the road to death steps back and chooses life. So she abandons her family, her son and daughter, her husband and goes to Toronto. But the seed of suicide is transmitted to her son, who will become a poet, and he will court death to the end like the poet in Mrs Dolloway. He will meet love in a woman and apparently have a daughter from her, or is it really from her ? But he will be a poet, the poet of Mrs Dolloway, to the end of his life. He will look for dangerous situations and dangerous experiments. He will get AIDS and he will eventually commit suicide on the very day when he is recognized as a great poet, as the great poet he is, because he cannot go on living with his disease, with his pills, with his fate, waiting for death to come when it wants, leaving him abandoned and stranded in the hours before death, hours that can last years because of the treatment he gets. So Virginia Wolf will drown away in a river and the poet, Richard, will jump from the sill of the window of his sick man's nook. And yet the film goes farther by concentrating on the suffering of Virginia Wolf's husband and of Richard's paramour. The suffering of those who are accompanying these people doomed to die by their own hands and decisions. A suffering that has no limits because it is like an accusation standing in the way, the accusation that their love has been a prison, that their love has been the prison from which those doomed people want to escape. The more they love, the more they try to protect, the more they try to motivate the other into living, the more they fail and the more the other wants to disappear, to cut short the hours of waiting for death and enter the hours of after death. Poignant. And the actors, especially the actresses are outstanding in their rendering of this suffering, of this exploration of death in life, of this witnessing of life in death. The composition of these actresses is so fine, so delicate, so sensitive that we hardly recognize them in their parts. Nicole Kidman is probably the most perfect rendition of this escape from any image of her we may have in our mind's eye. They reach archetypal acting that makes the characters more important than the actresses. They disappear as concrete human beings in the fictional people they render on the screen. This leads to a feeling of absolute enslavement in our own lives and a desire to get out of these waiting hours in which we live with death behind the wings, a death we had never seen but that becomes omnipresent at this moment. Are we going to go down the way Mrs Dolloway is pointing at ? Are we going to be the woman who invented and created this Mrs Dolloway ? Are we going to be the poet of the book who says goodbye and disappears in the hours after the passing threshold of the end of life ? We could watch and watch again this film a hundred times and yet not come to any real answer though our desire to get free from these hours of waiting, into these hours of undescribable liberation beyond grows with each viewing. Is suicide the way to liberation for individuals who can see beyond the surface of things ? Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Perpignan
Rating:
Summary: the film of three lifes'
Review: i have to say this film had me stunned.
this film is about the life of three women each with there own problem. 1921{richmond,england}
virginia woolf (nicole kidman + fake chin& nose) is working on her novel mrs dalloway while also battling for her sanity. later on she comes to the conclusion that she is losing grip and needs to reaquated with london life before she goes compleatly insane.
1951{los angeles,usa}
pregnant houswife laura brown (julianna moore) is planing a party for her husband with her 8 year old son while reading mrs dalloway. but she is consantly feeling out of place and not deserving of her perfect life,she feels she needs to make somthing happen.
2001{new york,usa}
clarissa vaughn(meryl streep)is hosting a party for her friend and dying AIDS author richard. unawere to herself but she is keeping richard alive for herself.she loves him so much that she doesnt want him to die,for herself. this movie is cleverly constructed so that you feel that the womens lifes are not so far apart. the movie shows that these womens problems are bined by the singular thing of life and how you live it.
the musical score is perfect ,not a fault to it.(you wouldnt expect anything less from philip glass)
the only problem i had with this film was how it gave its meanings. i have to say i had to watch the film again to understand better it but once i got it,i loved it! but this film in my opinion did not reflect the actresss' potential.
you have to realy be a deep person or understand people very well to get this film
over all a defenate 4 star film.
Rating: 
Summary: The most revolting movie of 2003
Review: It's been said that women love "The Hours" and men don't. That's a rather simplified analysis. I found this movie to be simply revolting. There wasn't one single woman in the entire movie who didn't annoy me. Meryl Streep's character is a pathetic creature in love with a man who can never love her back. Julianne Moore plays a selfish 1950s housewife who can't see the world beyond her own navel, and Nicole Kidman captured the Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Wolf, the depressive and ultimately suicidal author. Every one of these women is presented as some kind of victim. None of them is responsible for her own actions and all them spend their time whining. This was an extremely dreary and lightweight movie.
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