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

| Feb 22, 2019

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

| Jun 15, 2016

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

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

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

It's as if Cohen had lived for centuries among these places, and sometimes with art that encapsulates these centuries, and is pleasantly imprisoned within its strength.

| Oct 9, 2013

It has its tedium, but it's not bad. At times, it's actually quite good.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 19, 2013

Cohen's spare but spectacularly visualized film follows a pair of middle-aged strangers who meet in a Viennese art museum and proceed to walk and talk.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 12, 2013

Museum Hours is melancholy yet full of humour; educational and entertaining.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 6, 2013

It sits uncomfortably as a weird in-between facsimile, as though we're being asked to study postcard reproductions of great artworks.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 6, 2013

This is one of those rare films that may change the way you view the world.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 5, 2013

A look around Vienna's legendary gallery provides some unexpectedly enlightening moments.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 5, 2013

Museum Hours is that rare thing: a movie about high art that's not only nice if you can afford it.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 5, 2013

Cohen's vivid eye for forlorn urban spaces makes this as geographically evocative as his other work, but it's a film of clearly etched themes, too, about the solace of growing old as well as the slight sadness of unlived lives.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 5, 2013

Its encouragement to let ourselves be captivated by everyday humanity as well as the old masters is both richly illuminating and quirkily endearing.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 4, 2013

An enthralling and sometimes droll meditation on life, art and mortality, not to mention Internet porn and its influence on modern art.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 29, 2013

"Museum Hours" is every bit as masterfully conceived and executed as the art works that serve as the film's lively cast of supporting characters.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 15, 2013