Once

If recent Hollywood attempts to rejuvenate the film musical have seemed mired in nostalgia and bombast, then Once will feel like a tonic. Director John Carney refers to his film – which charts the developing relationship between a busking songwriter and an immigrant Czech cleaner on the streets of Dublin – as a ‘visual album’, aptly describing its small, intimate scale and the organic means by which songs teem over the story. But by any name it is a musical – albeit one with more heart and invention, and a more playful, progressive grasp of the form, than we have grown accustomed to. (Samuel Wigley)