Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

IslandGuru Who payed the critics

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Seraherrera The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

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 :)

kkaustubhv The Best movie i have seen til now..Nothing more to say ..just watch it alone in a quite place and you will know what i am talking about

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.

straue Two singer-song writers get to know each other in Dublin. Once you get used to their accents, there is absolutely nothing interesting about either one of them. They seem to write the same song over and over again with the same four-note motif played and sung over and over again. All the fuss and all the awards given this film are prime examples of people bending over backwards to valorize all foreign, indie films over "slick Hollywood" movies. This is my considered opinion as I've watched the film twice now . . . actually one and a half times as I got so bored with the low-key acting and the gratingly repetitious sound track the first time that I only made it about half- way through before giving up. Their tedious songs are touted as brilliant within the film, but I just can't buy into it; the songs are meh and then meh and then more meh. Garsh! They don't even end up together so there isn't even the pallid solace of a true romance.