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78Isn't Lee's most personal piece, but it may very well be his most mature.
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63Norton is brilliant in Lee's so-so 'Hour.'
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88It's deeply stylized, but there's an accompanying patience and gravity that are hard to shake. They're the architecture of a lingering, unsentimental sadness.
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25Spike Lee's films have been provocative, blunt, thoughtful, misguided, daring, sentimental, funny, honest and silly. But 25th Hour earns the director two new adjectives: irrelevant and tedious.
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90The film persuades us to think long and hard about what prison means, and Lee has shaped it like a poem that builds into an epic lament, especially in a beautiful and tragic closing that risks absurdity to achieve the sublime.
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88The film is unusual for not having a plot or a payoff.
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10025th Hour struck me as one of the best movies of 2002, but it's also a film that will strike some of its audience as ethically dubious or threatening.
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100The movie is flawed by implausible psychology and moments of weak acting. But it's more than redeemed by Lee's passionate ideas about America today.
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90The movie resonates precisely because it serves as documentary only pretending to be fiction: It's set in a real place recovering from real pain, which Lee makes tangible.
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83Lee, as he did in ''Malcolm X'' and ''Clockers,'' makes his hero's dread palpable, and though 25th Hour lacks the glittering brilliance of those films, I was held by the toughness and pity of Lee's gaze.
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100One of Spike Lee's greatest films -- seamlessly merging personal drama against a canvas of larger social significance on a level worthy of "Do the Right Thing."
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30Just about the only good thing you can say about Spike Lee's pointless, didactic The 25th Hour is that it's filled with strong performances, albeit of stock characters.
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30There are two films at war in director Spike Lee's newest feature 25th Hour, one uninteresting, the other an epic of near-tragic miscalculation.
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75Lee delivers a beautiful evocation of the American Dream in its simplest, purest form.
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50To say Spike Lee is repeating himself is itself repetitious -- he is getting B-O-R-I-N-G!
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50This is romanticism of a rather low order.
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88Norton, returning to cracking form, doesn't try to make the selfish and smug Monty sympathetic -- but he lights up the screen, especially in two fantasy sequences.
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75It could have been more taut, could have been harder, but 25th Hour still resonates with power and poetry.
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67An engaging if not riveting film based on David Benioff's adaptation of his own novel. It's not nearly Lee's best picture, and it's guilty of a few wrong turns that only a confident filmmaker could make, but it's assured and, perhaps more importantly, reassuring.
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75Moves slowly -- it's an unhurried, talky affair that consists primarily of members of the small group of characters interacting.
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75In a multiplex filled with empty New Year vessels (take that, Kangaroo Jack), this holdover grabs you hard.
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60Of course Spike Lee has the right to transcend movies about race. He also has the talent to do better than this plodding moral fable.
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100The result is a film of sadness and power, the first great 21st century movie about a 21st century subject.
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67Lee doesn't seem to have the slightest sympathy for his hero, no particular point is made, and the whole exercise seems cold and empty.
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50At its best, 25th Hour is a melancholy tone poem -- But the movie is also muddled by its own ambitions. There is simply no connection between the themes of Benioff's screenplay and 9/11, and every time Lee over-inflates the story, he loses its real pulse.
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90The film at its simplest serves as a cautionary tale, but it also functions as a meditation on how little it takes to redirect a life by choice or by chance.
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75Too bad there's also a final 15 minutes that surely ranks among the worst endings an otherwise good movie has ever received.
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70If 25th Hour does not quite work as a plausible and coherent story, it produces a wrenching, dazzling succession of moods.
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90It captures the city's bitter, wire-taut mood after September 11th, and I hope that Disney -- finds some way to bring this acrid and brilliant little picture to the large audience it deserves. [13 January 2003, p. 90]
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40Pretty lethargic stuff. Monty, a convicted drug dealer on his last day before he is to report to prison, does more moping than moving.
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60While Edward Norton convincingly portrays both the good and bad side of his conflicted man, a great deal of the insight into his character comes from the strong supporting cast.
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50Hour not only acknowledges the attacks -- they're a running theme. Lee opens his movie with a shot of the beaming blue spotlights that mark where the twin towers once stood.
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60Lapses into melodramatic self-importance and gratuitous stylistic flourishes that take the audience out of the action -- are outweighed by the steadily amplified emotional power of this ultimately moving drama.
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50Often feels like a mediocre time-waster, and yet it sticks in the mind.
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70Edward Norton makes an art of self-containment. No contemporary actor gives less away to more effect, and he's at his closely held best in 25th Hour, a drama of redemption, directed by Spike Lee, that seldom rises to the level of his performance.
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80Lee has created that rarity in filmmaking: a movie we need, right now.
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50It's the usual undisciplined, overextended Spike symphony: more fun than it is any good.