“When I read Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours, I admired it as a thoughtful, delicately considered engagement with the literary past and a sensitive articulation of various kinds of loss. Curiously, though, when I sat in a dark theater and watched the movie version, I sobbed and moaned as though I were being viciously beaten. And although my cinematic reaction was physically extreme whereas my literary response was emotionally mild, I would say it is Cunningham’s novel, and not the film it spawned, that is of greater value. I have had any number of interesting conversations about the book, and phrases from it stay with me (‘without her there is no world at all’), but of the movie I can now remember precious little beyond its having left me sobbing.”

(Wyatt Mason, review of Colin McGinn’s The Power of Movies: how screen and mind interact. Why don’t they give him more space?)