Once.

"A tentative love story between two musicians framed through the lens of an erstwhile folk musical, Once is a tiny movie in the best sense: full of minuscule gestures and glances laden with meaning, and carrying the sense of something intricately labored over so as to provide the impression of simplicity and ease," writes Jeff Reichert at indieWIRE.

"[T]he magic of the movie is how utterly wrenching it renders [its] songs, which thrive alongside the film's simple, eloquent, dusky narrative," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice. "Hence, Once's burgeoning legend among those who saw it at this year's Sundance Film Festival as one of the greatest musicals of the modern age - a movie in which people sing to each other, only without the genre's distancing artifice."

Updated through 5/21.

Jeff GP at the Six-Reel Shuffle: "Once opts strongly against any character flaw whatsoever with the leads or peripheral characters, though I find one. They're too nice."

For the New York Times, David Browne talks with [director John] Carney, who tells him, "I kept thinking, 'How do you make a modern musical?' Then it became clear that I could do it just like a small indie art-house movie, very naturalistically. I could create a world where it's OK to break into song, without an orchestra coming up out of nowhere."

Online listening tip. NPR talks with Carney, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova; and that page features a Frames concert as well.

Earlier: "Sundance. Once."

Update: "The film's most baffling qualities are also its most soothing and reassuring," writes ST VanAirsdale at the Reeler. "Like its American contemporaries The Talent Given Us or In Between Days, both astonishing admixtures of intellect, imagination and a busload of accidents, Once is very literally phenomenal." And he talks with Carney.

Updates, 5/16: "It seems silly and grandiose to lavish praise on a movie whose dramatic crux is the recording of a demo tape, and there is some danger that the critical love showered on Once will come to seem a bit disproportionate," warns AO Scott. "It celebrates doggedness, good-humored discipline and desire... The special poignancy of the movie, the happy-sad feeling it leaves in its wake, comes from its acknowledgment that the satisfaction of these aspirations is usually transient, even as it can sometimes be transcendent."

"Are you looking for a little film you can make your own, an enchanting, unpretentious blend of music and romance you can watch forever?" asks Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "If you do, Once is about to come into your life and make it whole." Also, Jay A Fernandez talks with Carney.

"Although there's plenty of music, and plenty of joy, in Once, it's ultimately a quiet, wistful picture: In its tone and mood, in the way it shows us young lovers wandering through a city and making it part of their story, it reminds me very much of Richard Linklater's quiet masterpiece Before Sunrise," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek.

Online browsing tip. Photos by Ray Pride.

Updates, 5/17: "Once is one of those urban fairy tales you come out of not wanting to switch on your car radio, make small talk or do anything but shelter in its beguiling ambiance for as long as you can to avoid re-entering the real world," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly. "Like the memories we have - if we're lucky - of formative interludes in which a love affair never fully jelled but expanded our vision of what we might do with our lives, Once feels handmade in the best sense, an impressionistic feast for the senses cobbled together from lovely grace notes and a warm palette of reds and yellows."

Time's Rebecca Winters Keegan offers a primer on making musicals work for contemporary audiences.

Updates, 5/21: "There is absolutely nothing new in Once, but the way it combines old elements in new ways makes it feel like an accidental film, as though no one involved quite knew what they were doing and were as surprised to find what they had as the audience who eventually saw it," writes Todd VanDerWerff at the House Next Door.

"Once is the genuine article: a winning love story told with simple grace and humanity," writes Jürgen Fauth.

Posted by dwhudson at May 15, 2007 11:51 AM