Avis Metacritic

John Carney, who wrote and directed "Once," has made another great film that focuses on songwriters and the way their lives influence their work.

The film’s quiet pleasures creep up on you.

A film that lays emotions on the line and then drives them home with music.

Begin Again is a joyous movie about the good things in life: love, family, relationships, New York, creativity and music. And Knightley and Ruffalo make for one of the most unusual engaging couples of the year.

It's a film that lives in the high and not in the comedown, even though its characters are often stalled and wallowing.

As a whole, Begin Again is a fairly mannered treatment of an expressive medium.

Since the music doesn't connect like it should, everything else that is underpinned in the story by these songs also doesn't come together with the weight or power Carney surely intended.

All that prickly inner conflict Ruffalo is so adept at suggesting? Cheery Begin Again wants none of it, offering instead lots of scenes of two characters we don't believe could ever exist arguing about authenticity in pop music.

The film's sole saving grace is, of course, Ruffalo.

A film that inserts banal plot devices and endless cutesiness in place of where the “good parts” should be.