Critic Reviews

One Day is a beautiful movie, but beautiful in a way that life often is, not movies. Nothing is sudden or easy, either for the characters or for the audience, and there are no thunderbolts from the blue.

One Day is an aching lovely romance, but it's also an insightful look at human potential and the search for a purposeful existence.

In a season of movies dumb and dumber, One Day has style, freshness, and witty bantering dialogue.

The two actors are at their best when Emma and Dexter get emotionally naked. It's mildly enjoyable to listen to the self-deprecating banter people use to conceal anxieties, but we connect to them most deeply when they bare their souls.

Director Lone Scherfig (An Education) doesn't have such luxury, but she infuses her snapshots of their relationship with humor and poignancy.

Danish director Lone Scherfig skillfully adapts David Nicholls' best-selling romantic novel to the screen.

Anne Hathaway's faux British accent might be the first obvious conceit in One Day, but not its most cumbersome. That distinction belongs to the eponymous structure, a claustrophobic device that follows a pair of best friends over the course of a 22-year period, but only on many versions of July 15th.

Sturgess, saddled with a caddish character, is less compelling, but he does provide the film's only spot of unloosed, raw emotion. Everything else feels too precisely and too compactly assembled for much impact.

One Day, despite its attractiveness, never manages to find a way to bring the conceit fully to life.

One Day conveys a real sense of the poignancy of individual lives unfolding over time, but the film's ultimate embrace of conventionality ultimately undercuts the not inconsiderable accomplishments the project had worked so hard to achieve.