Gently weaving real life and chance encounters of these two people with numerous paintings in the museum, the film is a sublime beauty.

| Feb 24, 2021

Cohen's film is quietly, carefully and honestly made. At times perhaps, one would like to see a few more fireworks in the drama, but an elegant, sensitive film in defense of life and art ... how many of those do we have at present?

| Feb 12, 2021

Subtle in its emotional grounding and profound in its ability to harness art history to question the world's current relationship with it, Museum Hours is nothing less than a brilliant film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 12, 2020

The film's effect is much like a an actual visit to a museum, a stiff whiff of cultural pretense that becomes a sense of quiet awe and wonder.

| Aug 22, 2019

[A] sublime and quietly engrossing exploration of the power of art to bind people together across the ages.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 7, 2019

Cohen examines the skill of looking-looking at art, looking at film, looking at the world around you. He observes the art, and we observe his art, watching intently as he films intently.

| Original Score: 8.2/10 | Apr 15, 2019

Museum Hours offers neither a city symphony nor a love story but a serenely eccentric way of looking.

| Feb 22, 2019

Cohen has balanced both the head and heart, producing a serene quality that feels like a lazy Sunday afternoon strolling off the streets into an art gallery.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 23, 2018

"Kunsthistorisches. It's the big old one."... neatly sums up the film's warm, casual attitude toward weighty cultural institutions while serving as a way of reframing formerly perceived paragons of elitism in a more democratic manner.

| Oct 2, 2017

Emotion is often considered the enemy by experimental filmmakers, but Cohen's films depend on it.

| Jun 15, 2016

When Cohen's film is over and the lights go out, the world is not the same anymore.

| Original Score: A | Mar 13, 2014

Sommer is perfect. So is O'Hara. This is the "Before Sunrise" for a very different (and platonic) pair of individuals.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 6, 2014

A Chris Marker kind of exceptional experimental film that sets its sights on observing art, the landscape, people, Vienna and our sense of being.

| Original Score: A+ | Jan 20, 2014

Amid all the looking and dissection, Cohen demonstrates an understanding of the individual need for increasingly elusive privacy that feels urgent, wistful, and quaint.

| Jan 6, 2014

Cohen's simple, masterful film considers how we anoint value.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 19, 2013

...encourages you to see the aesthetic potential of everything around you, including each frame that appears on the screen.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 18, 2013

This goes on for more than two hours and will bore some viewers to death. Others, though, will find this quiet, complex film a fascinating piece of art in itself.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 2, 2013

The quiet time that Johann and Anne spend during museum hours -- and after his shifts on trips around the city -- offer solace in their mutual solitude. Museum Hours is an introverted companion for its viewers.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 15, 2013

The two leads contribute fresh, genuine performances, and what might have been a musty academic exercise gains in tension from Cohen's deft juxtaposing of vocal narration, character detail, and majestic artwork.

| Nov 14, 2013

Great art has the power to comment on life's issues - sex, death, parenthood, religion, etc. - and Cohen uses the power of the still image to construct a film of moving ones with power of its own.

| Original Score: 4.0/5.0 | Nov 14, 2013