One Day
Focus Features | Release Date: August 19, 2011 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
48
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 41 Critic Reviews
Positive:
13
Mixed:
24
Negative:
4
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleAug 18, 2011
One Day is a beautiful movie, but beautiful in a way that life often is, not movies. Nothing is sudden or easy, either for the characters or for the audience, and there are no thunderbolts from the blue. Read full review
88
USA TodayClaudia PuigAug 18, 2011
One Day is an aching lovely romance, but it's also an insightful look at human potential and the search for a purposeful existence. Read full review
75
Miami HeraldConnie OgleAug 18, 2011
Director Lone Scherfig (An Education) doesn't have such luxury, but she infuses her snapshots of their relationship with humor and poignancy. Read full review
75
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanAug 18, 2011
The two actors are at their best when Emma and Dexter get emotionally naked. It's mildly enjoyable to listen to the self-deprecating banter people use to conceal anxieties, but we connect to them most deeply when they bare their souls. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertAug 17, 2011
In a season of movies dumb and dumber, One Day has style, freshness, and witty bantering dialogue. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterKirk HoneycuttAug 17, 2011
Danish director Lone Scherfig skillfully adapts David Nicholls' best-selling romantic novel to the screen. Read full review
67
Portland OregonianShawn LevyAug 20, 2011
One Day, despite its attractiveness, never manages to find a way to bring the conceit fully to life. Read full review
67
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesAug 18, 2011
Sturgess, saddled with a caddish character, is less compelling, but he does provide the film's only spot of unloosed, raw emotion. Everything else feels too precisely and too compactly assembled for much impact. Read full review
67
IndieWireEric KohnAug 17, 2011
Anne Hathaway's faux British accent might be the first obvious conceit in One Day, but not its most cumbersome. That distinction belongs to the eponymous structure, a claustrophobic device that follows a pair of best friends over the course of a 22-year period, but only on many versions of July 15th. Read full review
63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick GroenAug 20, 2011
The effort is admirable, the movie not so much, and yet, contrary to most pictures, it does improve towards the end. At least a little. Read full review
63
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottAug 19, 2011
A movie that wants to be a crowd-pleasing romantic comedy at times and a weighty drama at others. It ends up being an imperfect blend of both. Read full review
63
Washington PostAnn HornadayAug 18, 2011
One Day often seems too tame for its own good, as if its spirited protagonists were censoring themselves in deference to a PG-13 rating. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineAndrew SchenkerAug 14, 2011
One Day conveys a real sense of the poignancy of individual lives unfolding over time, but the film's ultimate embrace of conventionality ultimately undercuts the not inconsiderable accomplishments the project had worked so hard to achieve. Read full review
60
EmpireIan FreerAug 22, 2011
It may not truly capture the complexities of its source material but One Day is funny, winning and entertaining - if little else. Read full review
60
NPRElla TaylorAug 18, 2011
One Day ends up fatally compromised by its glib recourse to death and cancer as moral wake-up calls. Read full review
60
VarietyJustin ChangAug 17, 2011
On a moment-by-moment basis, Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess make this long-arc love story viable, sometimes even vital. But the structural conceit proves more reductive than expansive, the big picture too overdetermined to really sweep the viewer away. Read full review
55
MovielineStephanie ZacharekAug 19, 2011
We need to wait nearly 20 years for the romance in Lone Scherfig's One Day to get cooking, and for long stretches it seems as if we're watching this particular pair of nonstarters hem and haw in real time. Read full review
50
St. Louis Post-DispatchCalvin WilsonAug 19, 2011
One Day fails to make us care about the young couple at its center. Read full review
50
New York PostLou LumenickAug 19, 2011
I might be able to get past that if Hathaway and Sturgess had any chemistry. There are no sparks whatsoever, and that's always a deal-breaker for me in romantic films. Read full review
50
The New York TimesA.O. ScottAug 18, 2011
Her (Ms. Scherfig) eccentric eye and offbeat rhythm sustain One Day through its stretches of banality and mitigate some of its flaws. Read full review
50
TimeMary PolsAug 18, 2011
Even in the skillful hands of director Lone Scherfig, the effect is disjointed. The characters that Nicholls brought so cunningly to life in the book feel rushed through a timeline, tied to an agenda. Read full review
50
Philadelphia InquirerCarrie RickeyAug 18, 2011
As in "An Education," Scherfig's settings are unshowy, imparting period flavor without overwhelming what is, ultimately, an underwhelming film. Read full review
50
Chicago ReaderJ.R. JonesAug 18, 2011
Watchable but not very gripping. Patricia Clarkson does her best with an underwritten part as the young man's terminally ill mother, and British actor Ken Stott is excellent as the grieving husband she leaves behind. Read full review
50
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsAug 18, 2011
What proved tasty in book form comes across a little more like work in the movie. Read full review
50
The A.V. ClubTasha RobinsonAug 17, 2011
The ultimate end of the story reveals that it's all about Sturgess' suffering, which just isn't that compelling a topic. Given its lack of center and balance, the film might more appropriately be called "One Dude." Read full review
50
Orlando SentinelRoger MooreAug 17, 2011
This episodic romance works in fits and starts, and captures a bittersweet faux British turn by Anne Hathaway, plainly mismatched in being paired with real-life Brit Jim Sturgess. Read full review
50
ObserverUna LaMarcheAug 17, 2011
It's a sweet, harmless, meandering tale with an engaging gimmick, but a great love story - or a great movie - it's not. Read full review
50
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallAug 17, 2011
Some ideas simply work better on book pages, rather than on film where illogic is exposed. Read full review
50
Village VoiceKarina LongworthAug 16, 2011
For an entry in a genre of films that frequently work as guilty pleasures even at their most formulaic, One Day doesn't offer much pleasure. Read full review
42
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerAug 19, 2011
The problem with this year-by-year structure is that the slow crawl to the end can seem agonizing if the film isn't engaging. And One Day, despite strenuous attempts by all involved to make us laugh, cry, and laugh-cry, is more likely to induce winces. We've seen it all before – and better. Read full review
42
Entertainment WeeklyLisa SchwarzbaumAug 17, 2011
A drippy, uninvolving movie adaptation. Read full review
40
The New YorkerAnthony LaneAug 22, 2011
In short, this popular love story isn't much of a story, and falls badly short on love. Read full review
40
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierAug 19, 2011
Now CDL aficionados have One Day, though it is a tedious addition to this subspecies of rom-com, despite Anne Hathaway's efforts to make us fall for her regardless of the setting. Read full review
40
Los Angeles TimesBetsy SharkeyAug 18, 2011
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. Read full review
40
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternAug 18, 2011
In this frustrating fizzle, the friendship does keep struggling to change into a love affair. But year after year, July 15 after July 15, it's the same old same old - two increasingly tedious people talking self-conscious talk. Read full review
40
Time OutKeith UhlichAug 17, 2011
That all sours by the time of the film's "shocking" climax, which is so hilariously telegraphed, it plays like a Benny Hill gag rather than a tear-duct stoker. Read full review
40
Arizona RepublicRandy CordovaAug 17, 2011
The idea of dropping in on characters at different points in their lives can work - see "Same Time, Next Year" for how it should be done. Here, it simply puts a distance between the audience and two characters that aren't that interesting to start with. Read full review
30
SalonAndrew O'HehirAug 18, 2011
You could definitely call it awful, and I'm about to do so, repeatedly and effusively. In fact, One Day is an appallingly bad movie made by talented people who could and should have done much better, but somehow all drove off the cliff together. Read full review
30
Boxoffice MagazinePam GradyAug 17, 2011
The dismal reality is that this romantic drama is a disaster, a dour "When Harry Meets Sally" that tries to jerk tears out of the story of a man and a woman who go from friends to lovers. Read full review
25
Boston GlobeTy BurrAug 18, 2011
A miscast, underwritten, drably directed adaptation of a very popular novel, it's the feel-bad film of the summer and an almost perfect example of how not to turn a book into a movie. Read full review
12
Rolling StonePeter TraversAug 18, 2011
This tear-jerking twaddle, adapted by David Nicholls from his 2009 bestseller, is nearly as bad as Anne Hathaway's British accent, which is heading for infamy. Read full review
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