One Hour Photo: Critic Reviews

Former video director Mark Romanek has written and directed a very entertaining, if overdesigned movie.

Sy's scary ordinariness is a species of acting stunt. There's no there there.

This immaculately made first feature from noted musicvid and commercials director Mark Romanek provides Robin Williams with one of his creepiest, atypical roles, and the comic star responds with an unusually restrained performance...

Intensely scary thriller; not for every teen.

this film shows that Williams can slither into the blacks and grays of the psyche

Call it an exercise in threat management, free with the purchase of a photo album--or a movie ticket.

This is a brilliant, incredibly directed film with excellent performances all around from Nielsen, and Williams who deserves an Oscar nod.

In a story so reliant on detail as the engine for character action, it's frustrating and annoying to see the film spiral down the gurgler because of a few (but crucial) lapses of attention to detail.

Robin Williams creates a character who earns our revulsion--and somehow also our sympathy.

Sy is a complete character with a physicality, inner monologue and motivation that we haven't seen from Mr. Williams in a long time. And it's a pleasure to watch.

Robin Williams' good work in contained in an uneven film, whose first half is an intriguing chronicle of urban alienation, but second part deteriorates into a presposterous thriller with a subplot of stalking and revenge--not unlike Fatal Attraction

It has arresting things to say about how the family photo is used less to record than to project, and how far that projection can be from the truth.

This story begs for a harder focus, the kind of thing Stanley Kubrick was always good at, at least until he got a little too focused. What saves the film is Robin Williams in a very atypical role.

This is not the Robin Williams you are used to seeing.

What brings the film to a level beyond is Williams's superb performance and, in turn, Romanek's carefully calibrated direction.

A music video is like espresso: a lot of visual power compressed into five minutes. A movie needs to know something of the rhythms of everyday life, or else the audience get dizzy and exhausted.

This isn't the Williams of Mrs. Doubtfire or, thank heavens, Jack or What Dreams May Come.

Robin Williams has mastered the essence of the overlooked man. Quite simply, it is a fantastic move for his career.

Williams is at his very best ...

This is the best and boldest performance of Williams' career.

It's the mark of a good thriller when we never know quite when to relax. This movie has several witty and visually adept sequences which caught me completely off guard, and has me still thinking about them.

Mark Romanek's film is both intriguing and unsettling, inviting the viewer to become a voyeur, like Sy, inspecting the minutae of the lives of others.

Those people that call One Hour Photo the most disturbing work Robin Williams has ever produced don't know what they're talking about - I saw Patch Adams.

Williams gives quite a performance. It's as if he's turned himself into a negative of his usual chipper self.

Creepy movie, nice DVD.