Critics reviews

Even if the film could be said to start with a meet cute, the relationship that subtly and tenderly grows from this eschews the illusory end-point of certainty of conventional screen romance. It exquisitely underscores instead the fleeting fragility of connections within eternal change and loneliness, and the fact that all we really have are moments – the startling beauty of which might just be enough.

The considerable time he gives each shot forces the viewer to contemplate the images as if they were all artwork. This process never becomes tiresome or didactic; instead, the message is delivered so subtly and gently that one cannot help but be carried away by the ebb and flow of the film's lulling pace.

While it is possible to say what the movie is about, it is much more difficult to encapsulate what the movie is. In its modest and unassuming way it is a total experience, composed of people, sights, sounds, history, travel, argument, speculation, fantastic beauty and ordinary life, woven together and maintained in aerodynamic tension. It is no more reducible than a day in spring.

Museum Hours is a romance not between people, but ideas. The delightful way Johann and Anne and share stories calls to mind the best sort of artistic expression. [...It] argues that to truly live is to see past the obviousness of bias and rhetoric. Viewing the world with fresh eyes is a radical and priceless act of bravery.

This is a far more hopeful film [than Cohen's Chain], revealing the joy and solace that can be found from hours spent looking at art. It is also many things besides: a tale about the brief but tender friendship between two strangers – Johann and Canadian tourist Anne, adrift in the city while visiting her cousin who lies in coma; a tour of Vienna's grey streets, neglected architecture and statues; a homage to museums; a plea for imaginative interpretations of art.

Museum Hours is a film that's not afraid to take on Big Themes, namely the intersection between life and art and the transience of existence, but it wears its ambitions lightly, unfolding in a quiet, contemplative mode that mirrors the hushed atmosphere of a museum. Rather than simply repeat bromides about the ways in which a half-century old canvas can speak to the present moment, Cohen shows us, drawing visual parallels between the paintings and 21st century Vienna.

The movie has a slightness that at 107 minutes begins to feel slack... But its delicacy is absorbing. And its commitment to the inexorable allure of watchfulness and observation is resolute. Yet the film's two most striking moments feature a character with her back to the camera. Amid all the looking and dissection, Cohen demonstrates an understanding of the individual need for increasingly elusive privacy that feels urgent, wistful, and quaint.

Like much of Cohen's work, Museum Hours fluidly mixes fiction and non-fiction, scripted and improvisational scenes into a narrative collage that feels organic. A colleague likened Cohen's strategy in Museum Hours to the fiction of W.G. Sebald, and the comparison elucidates the ways in which the filmmaker gently allows meaning to accrete through the mingling of open-ended meditations on history, art, urbanism, and personal biography.

All great art communicates something, intentionally or unintentionally, allegorical or humanistic. But art also lives separately from its context, free to be reconsidered and made evergreen by those can find applications for it today. Museum Hours teaches one how to treat art, and also the world, which is elegantly broken down in critical terms in the coda. If art reflects the world... then so too can art criticism reflect an ability to find beauty and truth in reality.

The talk of time evaporating as one roams a museum and a detour about how many of the artists whose work sells for millions died penniless and miserable aren't exactly philosophical bombshells. They come from the characters themselves, not Cohen, who uses them to encourage us to take a stance, or think about something else. The deeper thinking is left up to the viewer, and this incomparably gentle film... provides the space for minds to wander.

Essentially an essay film, Museum Hours is less interested in plot than in using its characters as a way to give ideas shape and voice; however, because their performances are natural and improvisatory, the movie never seems didactic. Though Sommer and O'Hara are both playing characters, very little of what happens onscreen could credibly be called "fiction"; rather, Cohen is using his protagonists as lenses through which he can view the "real" Vienna.

The film shows how quiet exteriors can mask deep interior lives, and how art feeds those lives. The view of art is richly intellectual, sometimes enthralling. But I confess, I liked "Museum Hours" best for answering a question I've always had: What is that guard thinking?