The Hours

Ridiculously star studded adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which takes place over the course of one day and profiles three women whose lives share parallels, despite the fact that they live in different eras. In 1920's England, there's Virginia Woolf (Kidman sporting the most celebrated piece of prosthetics in modern cinema), who is engaged in an unwinnable battle with depression as she starts writing her celebrated novel, Mrs. Dalloway. In Los Angeles of the 1950s, pregnant mother of one, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is struggling with her feelings of inadequacy, exacerbated (albeit unwittingly) by her dim-witted, insensitive husband (John C. Reilly). An avid reader, Brown has connected deeply with the central character in Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, and uses her as a template for her own 'liberation'. The final part of the puzzle lies in modern day New York City with lesbian books editor Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) who is caught up with the preparations for a party she is throwing for her former lover, a gay poet (Harris) dying of Aids.

Confused? To the credit of the director and his screenwriter David Hare, The Hours etches out the dilemmas facing the women with the minimum of fuss and the universal feeling of female constraint and being underpinned by social convention is successfully conveyed throughout. The Hours is undoubtedly a handsome, subtly shot, austere and supremely acted piece of filmmaking, with the three central actresses supplying evocative performances, especially Moore. Some will find the tone overly earnest, and The Hours is bereft of any light-hearted relief over its two hour running time, which makes its Oscar baiting feel a little too urgent. Nonetheless that's a question of taste as this is a hefty, mature movie.