Strong and Moving!

Redundant and unnecessary.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Nothing like "Cidade da Deus" (City of God), Era uma vez... is a good movie, very realistic but with some problems of screenplay at the final. I don't know why they -the director and the writer- choose that final, is not necessary. Love story, big drama in a wonderful city with many faces like Rio de Janeiro. In this movie you can see the cruelty of the reality in a country where the injustice are so common to poor people. People live and die in Rio but if you put the attention in their faces you can't understand why they look so happy every day of their life's. I being there, in a funk party at night, and when I saw this movie I realize how unconscious was I to went there. May be because many of the people who live in the "morros" are workers and honest. If you are interest to know a little more than the wonderful beaches, women, men and the happy faces that you can see in the beach, this is a good movie to experiment how they live and how many injustice happened in our world.

Great plot, story and topic. Following the current trend, the "favela" environment is portrayed with great fidelity, and the same goes for the lifestyle of Rio's young riches. Action scenes are also great and certainly scrape your back from the seats. All the ingredients are there for a great movie. And it could definitely have been one. There are two main reasons it was not:1. The spectator is not convinced of the true love that must have existed between the main characters for the film to be trustworthy. Most probable cause of this is the lack of key elements to evidence this connection (e.g. scenes where their fundamental values are shown to be similar). This cripples the actors' in their attempt to share screen chemistry.2. The Romeo and Juliet inspiration is clear throughout the movie. This inspiration was definitely key in creating such a compelling story, but it seems that there was a failure to notice that, at a certain point, the film was already good enough to stand on its own. Because of this, we can almost feel the chains of the original Shakespeare story holding back the development of the movie. Of course there is a very interesting similarity between the two worlds, but allowing the modern story to creatively deviate from the original one would have definitely been a good idea.All in all, it's one of those movies that - instead of making you mad for having watched such a bad film - it makes you terribly disappointed for not being able to enjoy a piece of art that could have been so much greater. Which, for many movie fans, is even worse.

Here we have a classical story of a simple hard-working poor boy, falling in love with a rich spoiled girl. There aren't many things you can do with this plot. That's because most of it have already been done. That is the classical "date movie", when two people struggle to be together in the end. People feel good about it, and even with the feeling "I think I have seen that before", people still enjoy it. Just like 10 in 10 Brazilian soap operas. Despite the dreadful edition, the movie director does a really nice job using almost all the clichés that he could remember. But what really bothered me is that you CAN make this kind of movie without getting into the Romeo and Juliet set up, when really bad choices by the characters (like "playing along" with the police) leads them to certain death. Overall it is a nice movie, but nothing beyond that. In terms of Brazilian cinema, where creativity and excellent ideas are used to surpass difficulties such as low budgets and horrible actors, this movie disappoints. Ps. Thiago Martins does a really good acting here, and Victoria Frate does the exactly same face 90% of the movie.

Im Brazilian and I usually like the Brazilians titles like Tropa De Elite or Cidade De Deus that are grade 10 movies ...But Era Uma Vez... is for sure the worst title I have seen in the last 5 years! the story is really bad and the end is ridiculous! Seriusly, if I tried to do a worst end I wouldn't be capable of ... The thing that really upset me is that during the film there are many smartest thing to the characters to do but they always choose the stupid options ! If I had seen from minute 1 to 80 I would give a grade 6 ... but after those last 10 minutes I just didn't gave 0 because the minimum is 1 ...Well this is mine opinion ... fell free to comment