MOVIE REVIEWS: ONE DAY

Critics appear to have a love-hate relationship with One Day. Some love it, others hate it. It’s about an even split. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times admires the movie’s “style, freshness, and witty, bantering dialogue.” A.O. Scott in the New York Times writes that “One Day 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.” And Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle concludes that One Day “is no light romantic movie. It may wear its seriousness lightly, as it should, but this is really about two people discovering meaning in their lives — which is next door to saying that One Day is about the meaning of life, in general.” But many critics don’t buy that evaluation, or turn it on its head. “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,” comments Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. Indeed, Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal finds the movie downright “offputting.” It’s merely “a long succession of scenes, mostly chaste and insistently verbose, that represent whole years. Occasional coitus, constant interruptus.”