One Day One Big Letdown

One Day, which tells the story of two almost-lovers over 20 years, should have worked. But despite great actors and bestselling source material, it definitely doesn’t:

• The film “seemed so promising given its pedigree,” which includes Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, and director Lone Scherfig, writes Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. “But as so often happens with love, what you hope for is not even close to what you get, and in this case we are left with a heartbreaking disappointment of a film.”

• It’s “an appallingly bad movie made by talented people who could and should have done much better, but somehow all drove off the cliff together,” agrees Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.
• One Day is “tear-jerking twaddle” that’s “nearly as bad as Anne Hathaway's British accent, which is heading for infamy,” writes Peter Travers in Rolling Stone.
• But in the New York Times, AO Scott is more forgiving, noting that the film “turns an episodic story into an anthology of feelings and associations, many familiar, a few surprising, some embarrassing and one or two worth holding onto.”

(More movie review stories.)