Stephen Holden of "The New York Times" called the film "deeply moving" and "an amazingly faithful screen adaptation" and added, "Although suicide eventually tempts three of the film's characters, "The Hours" is not an unduly morbid film. Clear eyed and austerely balanced would be a more accurate description, along with magnificently written and acted. 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." 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. The result is something rare, especially considering how fine the novel is, a film that's fuller and deeper than the book ... It's marvelous to watch the ways in which Hare consistently dramatizes the original material without compromising its integrity or distorting its intent ... Cunningham's touched on notes of longing, middle-aged angst and the sense of being a small consciousness in the midst of a grand mystery. But Daldry and Hare's [film sounds those notes and sends audiences out reverberating with them, exalted."