Metacritic reviews

Danish director Lone Scherfig skillfully adapts David Nicholls' best-selling romantic novel to the screen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's a sweet, harmless, meandering tale with an engaging gimmick, but a great love story - or a great movie - it's not.

Some ideas simply work better on book pages, rather than on film where illogic is exposed.

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.

A drippy, uninvolving movie adaptation.

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.