Overwiew :Insightful, moving performances make ONCE AROUND, Lasse Hallstrom's family comedy-drama, a unique and memorable film. The Bella family is a close as any--maybe too close. Sisters Jan (Laura San Giacomo) and Renata (Holly Hunter) are together on the day of Jan's wedding. Jan is marrying her dream man (Tim Guinee), yet still carrying on an affair with another man (Jim Redstone), while Renata has just faced the reality that her live-in boyfriend (Griffin Dunne) will never marry her. Renata soon finds herself living at home again, and regressing easily into the role of the failed but beloved daughter to smart, beautiful Marilyn (Gena Rowlands) and fair-minded Joe (Danny Aiello). Vowing to pull her life together, she takes a new job selling condo timeshares on the island of St. Thomas. There, she meets arrogant, gregarious, and overconfident Sam Sharpe (Richard Dreyfuss), a super salesman from a Lithuanian family, who is as madly in love with her as she is with him. It is this dedicated, loving, and eccentric relationship that, ironically, begins to pull the close-knit Bellas apart. What lies ahead for all is a complex patchwork of familial disharmony, undying loyalty, cultural tradition, tragedy, and triumph. The interplay between family members, their closeness and resentments, permeate an unusual story with characters that are each unique and unforgettable.
www.boxoffice.com - : Ever since he segued from the Swedish ''Life as a Dog'' to American fare, director Lasse Hallstrom has been known for over-saccharine schmaltz. Even ''The Cider House Rules,'' arguably his least schmaltzy American film, is fairly thick with calculated sentiment. But in hindsight, after having wrought the likes of ''Chocolat'' and ''The Shipping News,'' a reevaluation of ''Once Around'' may be in order. This unfairly maligned 1990 melodrama in which Holly Hunter breaks is swept off her feet by Richard Dreyfuss' charming but obnoxious Sam, much to the chagrin of her lovable and loving but overbearing Italian-American family (Danny Aiello and Gena Rowlands as mom and dad, Laura San Giacomo as her sister). Think of it as ''Meet the Parents'' with less slapstick and more earnest sentiment. Sometimes it's too earnest, but on the whole its chords are more harmonious today than they probably were at the time. more...
www.washingtonpost.com - : The danger in making a movie about a family, rather than, say, a secret agent or a Martian colony, is that while few of us have spied for our country or gone into space, most of us do have experience with mothers, fathers, in-laws and siblings of some description. And that means we can spot the unbelievable or insincere a mile away. more...
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