| 100 |
San Francisco Chronicle
The result is a film of sadness and power, the first great 21st century movie about a 21st century subject.
|
| 100 |
Chicago Tribune
25th 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.
|
| 100 |
Film Threat
G. Allen Johnson
One 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."
|
| 100 |
Christian Science Monitor
The 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.
|
| 90 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
The 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.
|
| 90 |
The New Yorker
It 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]
|
| 90 |
Chicago Reader
The 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.
|
| 90 |
Dallas Observer
The 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.
|
| 88 |
Boston Globe
It'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.
|
| 88 |
New York Post
Norton, 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.
|
| 88 |
Chicago Sun-Times
The film is unusual for not having a plot or a payoff.
|
| 83 |
Entertainment Weekly
Lee, 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.
|
| 80 |
Washington Post
Lee has created that rarity in filmmaking: a movie we need, right now.
|
| 78 |
Austin Chronicle
Isn't Lee's most personal piece, but it may very well be his most mature.
|
| 75 |
Miami Herald
Lee delivers a beautiful evocation of the American Dream in its simplest, purest form.
|
| 75 |
ReelViews
Moves slowly -- it's an unhurried, talky affair that consists primarily of members of the small group of characters interacting.
|
| 75 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
It could have been more taut, could have been harder, but 25th Hour still resonates with power and poetry.
|
| 75 |
Rolling Stone
In a multiplex filled with empty New Year vessels (take that, Kangaroo Jack), this holdover grabs you hard.
|
| 75 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Too bad there's also a final 15 minutes that surely ranks among the worst endings an otherwise good movie has ever received.
|
| 70 |
The New York Times
If 25th Hour does not quite work as a plausible and coherent story, it produces a wrenching, dazzling succession of moods.
|
| 70 |
Wall Street Journal
Edward 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.
|
| 67 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Lee doesn't seem to have the slightest sympathy for his hero, no particular point is made, and the whole exercise seems cold and empty.
|
| 67 |
Portland Oregonian
An 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.
|
| 63 |
Baltimore Sun
Norton is brilliant in Lee's so-so 'Hour.'
|
| 60 |
TV Guide
While 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.
|
| 60 |
Salon.com
Jeff Stark
Of course Spike Lee has the right to transcend movies about race. He also has the talent to do better than this plodding moral fable.
|
| 60 |
Variety
Lapses 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.
|
| 50 |
USA Today
Scott Bowles
Hour 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.
|
| 50 |
Washington Post
It's the usual undisciplined, overextended Spike symphony: more fun than it is any good.
|
| 50 |
New York Daily News
To say Spike Lee is repeating himself is itself repetitious -- he is getting B-O-R-I-N-G!
|
| 50 |
New York Magazine
This is romanticism of a rather low order.
|
| 50 |
Slate
At 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.
|
| 50 |
Village Voice
Often feels like a mediocre time-waster, and yet it sticks in the mind.
|
| 40 |
Time
Pretty lethargic stuff. Monty, a convicted drug dealer on his last day before he is to report to prison, does more moping than moving.
|
| 30 |
LA Weekly
Just 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.
|
| 30 |
Los Angeles Times
There are two films at war in director Spike Lee's newest feature 25th Hour, one uninteresting, the other an epic of near-tragic miscalculation.
|
| 25 |
Charlotte Observer
Spike 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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