The Hours (2002)
Directed by Stephen Daldry
The story of three women searching for more potent, meaningful lives. Each is alive at a different time and place, all are linked by their yearnings and their fears. Their stories intertwine, and finally come together in a surprising, transcendent moment of shared recognition.
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What critics compared The Hours to
It almost feels like someone took Far From Heaven (2002) and The Hours (2002), flattened out all of the depth and nuance of their commentary, put it through a Stepford Wives filter, replaced all of the characters with uninteresting archetypes, and called it a day.
Imagine The Hours, but in this version Julianne Moore's character, instead of reading Mrs. Dalloway, reads an airport thriller, a Lee Childs or James Patterson.
Carol is very much a love story but not even remotely a conventional one, and it might owe as much to Steven Daldry’s The Hours as it does to Far from Heaven because it’s very much about the relationship between these women.
Add the clean lines of the widescreen images of Seamus McGarvey, cinematographer of “The Avengers,” “The Hours” and “High Fidelity,” and a magisterially sour theme by the compulsively productive composer Alexandre Desplat and you’re talking one slick package.
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Stephen Daldry directed "The Reader" from a script David Hare adapted from Bernhard Schlink's 1995 novel, and they've swapped moral purpose for the artsy tastefulness that made their collaboration on "The Hours" such an attractive wallow.
Screenwriter David Hare (Plenty, Wetherby) and director Stephen Daldry (The Hours, Billy Elliot) appear to be overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the themes and ideas being stroked here.
Stephen Daldry follows his Academy Award-winning 2002 film “ The Hours ” with “The Reader,” which is marked by superb performances by Kate Winslet and David Kross, a fine performance by Ralph Fiennes, and a cameo by Lena Olin that’s so searing in its sophistication and directness, just try looking away from her during her brief appearance onscreen.
Stephen Daldry ("Eight"/"The Hours"/"Billy Elliot") directs the morose and mostly lifeless drama with great craftsmanship, while photographers Chris Menges and Roger Deakins paint a stylish looking maroonish post-Holocaust look on a Germany that still hasn't settled matters for its second and third generation citizens on its foul deeds of the past by its first generation.
This reunion between Hare and Daldry has a similar tone to The Hours, as it jumps around the timeframes, offering key details and hinting at other things.
Director Stephen Daldry's first two films ("Billy Elliot," "The Hours") both received multiple Oscar nominations, and this one is attracting some lead-in awards attention, mostly for Winslet.
The best comparison, though, is to The Hours?the Julianne Moore segment in particular.
"Brokeback Mountain," on the other hand, is a monotonous and often inadvertently campy romance that rivals "The Hours" as the most overrated movie of the decade.
You wonder if novelist David Mitchell was aiming for a sci-fi “The Hours,” or to start his own L. Ron Hubbard religion.
There’s maybe a touch of “The Hours” in the juxtaposed stories, but it’s truly not like any movie you’ve ever seen.
If Nicole Kidman was brave for wearing a fake nose in “The Hours”, Ron Perlman is a great American hero.
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John C. Reilly, whom started out in heavy hearted dramas like The Hours, Gangs of New York, and The Good Girl but has regulated himself to slapstick comedy like Walk Hard and Step Brothers, gives the perfect dose of farce and performance.
It's an epic story, stunningly photographed by Mikhail Krichman ("The Return," "Silent Souls") in cool blues, Philip Glass's ("The Hours," "Elena") music swirling like a churning sea.