The New York Times by A.O. Scott

This movie is rigorously and intensely lifelike, which is to say that it’s also a strange and moving work of art.

Village Voice by Calum Marsh

The film, a kind of hybrid between understated drama and essayistic tourism, approaches its subjects with uncommon patience and curiosity, lingering over objects and faces as if to savor their aesthetic qualities, eager to convey truths without authorial imposition.

Slant Magazine by Jesse Cataldo

Jem Cohen's film finds its most salient tension in the fraught relationship between known and unknown objects.

Washington Post by Ann Hornaday

Museum Hours is every bit as masterfully conceived and executed as the art works that serve as the film’s lively cast of supporting characters.

Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips

Some may find the film underpowered. Not me. With elegant understatement, Cohen creates a humane testament to reaching out, whatever our habits and routines.

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

With a keen eye for the capacity of fine art to address a complex range of attitudes and experiences, Museum Hours effectively applies Cohen's existing strengths to a familiar scenario and rejuvenates it by delivering a powerfully contemplative look at the transformative ability of all art.

The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

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.

Time Out by David Fear

The real strength of Cohen’s occasionally didactic drama, though, is in the way the film redirects your focus to the periphery and reminds you of the richness that resides there. It was an achievement Bruegel mastered early on. And it’s what makes Museum Hours its own work of art.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

It's a film whose pleasures are much more visual than dramatic, but that doesn't mean there aren't serious things on its mind.

Total Film by Tom Dawson

Blurring documentary/fiction boundaries, writer/director Jem Cohen’s film is deceptively simple.

Boston Globe by Mark Feeney

Museum Hours is an unusual film. It lacks a score yet feels like a sonata, intimate and musical. Secret harmonies are being heard.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Liam Lacey

It’s a hybrid drama/art-history essay about how looking at art recasts our experience of looking at the world.

New York Post by Farran Smith Nehme

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?

NPR by Mark Jenkins

Those who don't savor Cohen's leisurely rhythms will probably not respond to Museum Hours, and even the movie's admirers will admit that it could be a little tighter. One scene that might be trimmed is the one where museum-goers pose, naked as the people on the canvases around them. The interlude certainly isn't dull, but it is a little brazen for a film that encourages its viewers to find the beauty in more commonplace sights.