It stars Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep as three women whose lives are connected by Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway.

Supporting roles are played by Ed Harris, John C. Reilly, Stephen Dillane, Jeff Daniels, Miranda Richardson, Allison Janney, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, and Eileen Atkins.

With the exception of the opening and final scenes, which depict the 1941 suicide by drowning of Virginia Woolf in the River Ouse, the action takes place within the span of a single day in three different years, and alternates among them throughout the film.

In 2001, New Yorker Clarissa Vaughan spends the day preparing for a party she is hosting in honour of her former lover and friend Richard, a poet and author living with AIDS who is to receive an award for career achievement.

It is clear that Richard's abandonment was a profound trauma for him but Laura reveals it was a better decision for her to leave the family after the birth of her daughter, rather than commit suicide.

[3] With an estimated budget of $25 million, the film eventually earned $41,675,994 in the US and Canada and $67,170,078 in foreign markets for a total worldwide box office of $108,846,072.

[6] Richard Schickel of Time criticized the film's simplistic characterization, saying, "Watching The Hours, one finds oneself focusing excessively on the unfortunate prosthetic nose Kidman affects in order to look more like the novelist.

And wondering why the screenwriter, David Hare, and the director, Stephen Daldry, turn Woolf, a woman of incisive mind, into a hapless ditherer."

This ultimately proves insufficient to lend meaning to their lives or profundity to a grim and uninvolving film, for which Philip Glass unwittingly provides the perfect score—tuneless, oppressive, droning, painfully self-important.

Mr. Glass's surging minimalist score, with its air of cosmic abstraction, serves as ideal connective tissue for a film that breaks down temporal barriers.

"[8] Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle observed, "Director Stephen Daldry employs the wonderful things cinema can do in order to realize aspects of The Hours that Cunningham could only hint at or approximate on the page.

It's marvelous to watch the ways in which [David Hare] consistently dramatizes the original material without compromising its integrity or distorting its intent ... Cunningham's [novel] touched on notes of longing, middle-aged angst and the sense of being a small consciousness in the midst of a grand mystery.

He praised the performances, commenting, "Kidman's acting is superlative, full of passion and feeling ... Moore is wrenching in her scenes with Laura's son (Jack Rovello, an exceptional child actor).

"[12] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian rated the film three out of five stars and commented, "It is a daring act of extrapolation, and a real departure from most movie-making, which can handle only one universe at a time ...

The performances that Daldry elicits ... are all strong: tightly managed, smoothly and dashingly juxtaposed under a plangent score ... Part of the bracing experimental impact of the film was the absence of narrative connection between the three women.