jessy zaki I am writing this review now while listening to the award winning song "Falling Slowly". ONCE is the best musical-in my opinion. It is the simplest story I've ever seen on screen. Its simplicity is shown through everything surrounds it from the camera to the budget to the 17 days in which it was wholly made. Sometimes you needn't a high budget to be captured your audience.About the performances. you will never feel the actors are acting. They are very real. Actually everything is very real, I think due to the camera work. I doubt it is a home camera or something ;) I don't have much words to describe it. Simply, it is a feel-good movie with a straightforward story about immigrants in Ireland, and sweet melodies that after watching it you'll feel loving everyone and want to hug everyone. You know, am so sensitive towards music :)

Martin Gil When I started to watch this movie, frankly I did not know what I was going to find myself with. The film is developed in a very special way, you will be catching little by little and when you want to realize, you are immersed in a beautiful work where not only the story of the characters, but also in the way they express their Emotions and dreams through music. When I finished watching the movie I asked myself: What wonderful thing just happened? Why did this movie come to me so deep? Simply because of its simplicity and beauty and the way it manages to connect with it.

SquigglyCrunch Once follows two people: a busker/songwriter and a young woman with a broken vacuum cleaner. As expected of John Carney, the music is great. And similar to his latest film, Sing Street, he is very aware of that and spends at least a solid 1/3 of this movie in song. Most of the music is heard all the way through, and thankfully the music is good so it makes it just that much easier to sit through. While I didn't like the music as much as Sing Street and I think that it did get redundant after a while, thus reducing its rewatchability, it was still good and it's a soundtrack that I plan on revisiting. As for the writing and directing, both were kind of off and on. While the hand-held camera use was suited to making the movie somewhat more lifelike (like a documentary), it could be somewhat nauseating and difficult to keep up with. The directing also seemed like a cop-out for the often faulty writing that proved to be rather unconvincing and awkward at times. But at the same time the music is well-written and some of the dialogue is really good too. My biggest problem with the movie, however, was Markéta Irglová. Her acting ranged from fine to just plain stale. There were so many points where I audibly remarked on how bad her acting was, despite being completely alone on my couch. The rest of the acting is mostly fine, but she was just so wooden. Her lines were delivered with no emotion or tone or anything whatsoever most of the time. It was as if she was just reading her lines off a nearby sheet of paper. Her best acting seemed to come from when she forgot her lines and stumbled over them, which at the least added some naturalism to them. Overall Once is good, but it's ultimately weighed down by inconsistent writing and directing and some poor acting. Sure the music is great, but as a movie it's okay. It's like John Carney didn't know how to get his music out into the world without performing it, so he made a movie about it and didn't hold back. In the end I would really only recommend the movie to select people, specifically ones who would like the musical aspect.

frenchjuice If you are the type of a person to watch movie to judge beautiful cinematography or look for masterful direction, don't look here. Thats not the only problem with the movie, editing is choppy, the camera setup is boring, blocking is very simple, and it is clear that the stars of the movie Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova are not professional actors. So why does this film work so well? Perhaps it's because of the soundtrack recorded by the two stars. Their voices compliment each other perfectly in their tunes and it fits the story. The rough edginess of Hansard's voice blends with the soothing nature of Irglova's. However; if only the songs are what makes "Once" what it is, it would've not have gotten the accolades, awards, and nominations from variety of sources which made me be interested in the movie. So once again, why does this film work? Because of it's mistakes. Once is a romance, and usually movie industry does a poor job in conveying what romance really is. In movies love is too perfect, and beauty is above the truth. In here love is not beautiful, it's awkward, choppy, and unprofessional, that's why it works. The movie does not lose anything because of it's lacklustre qualities, in fact it gains something which many Hollywood movie can't even create, rawness. I heard that the director's next movie "Begin Again" with a similar premise but a bigger budget did not fare as well. While I haven't seen the movie yet (and would love to compare those movies) I assume that the bigger budget got rid of the rawness prominent in "Once." As a film, it lacks a lot. If you show this to your film professor, they will undoubtedly discredit the movie. However; we should not focus on it's lack of cinema techniques and look at what the movie revealed to us. Truth.