70
The New York Times by Ben Kenigsberg
If Happy Hour doesn’t quite deliver all it promises, that may only be because it promises quite a lot.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
88
Hamaguchi arranges most sequences around a handful of static, roomy medium shots that subtly suggest emotional dynamics through camera and actor positioning.
90
Village Voice by Melissa Anderson
Funny (sometimes caustically so), rueful, and bracingly honest, Happy Hour is also a movie defined by an unshakeable belief that any encounter holds the promise of magic.
100
The New Yorker by Richard Brody
Happy Hour, a work of distinctly modern cinema, reaches deep into the classic traditions of melodrama—along with its coincidences and its violent contrasts—to revive a latent power for grand-scale observation through painfully close contact with the agonizing intimacies of contemporary life.