The Hours · reception & legacy
2002 · Stephen Daldry
How The Hours has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A prestige juggernaut in 2002 — nine Oscar nominations and a Best Actress win — it was then filed away by some as peak middlebrow Miramax awards bait; two decades on it's been warmly reclaimed, especially by queer cinephiles, and Philip Glass's once-divisive score is now treated as one of the great modern film scores.
What's debated
The forever-fight: did Nicole Kidman win the Oscar for the performance or for the prosthetic nose — and should Julianne Moore have won that year instead?
Its footprint
Kidman's prosthetic nose became a cultural event in itself — an entire awards-season discourse and a running late-night punchline — while the pulsing Philip Glass score has been endlessly borrowed, parodied, and needle-dropped ever since.
Where it stands
The 'sad women in three timelines' prestige picture that Letterboxd loves to half-mock and fully cry over — a fixture of Streep/Kidman/Moore stan canon rather than a forgotten Oscar footnote.