The Hours

This is pretty much exactly the kind of movie you’d expect if you asked three men to make a film about the inner lives of lesbians, and then told them it couldn’t be a porno. Overestimating their own intelligence, director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter David Hare take Michael Cunningham’s novel and produce a comically reverential ode to the pain of being a gay woman in a man’s world. Good performances by Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf and Julianne Moore as a 1950s housewife can’t save this stinker, which is further stinked up by the incredibly stinky music of Phillip Glass. Glass is sort of a perfect microcosm for this piece of crap: He makes fake experimental music that plays to the lowest common denominator while still pretending to have integrity. If you’re dying to see slow, painfully emotive cinema that has no actual depth, then by all means go to The Hours. If you want to see something a bit more meaningful, I’d suggest staring at a piece of toast for three hours. You know what I mean: lesbian toast.