There Was Once...
Metascore
64 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 5 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3 out of 5
  2. Mixed: 2 out of 5
  3. Negative: 0 out of 5
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  1. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kevin Thomas
    Sep 22, 2011
    70
    Much in this wholly absorbing and poignant documentary is familiar from numerous previous Holocaust accounts, but Mago and her quiet sense of moral obligation provides a fresh perspective.
  2. Variety
    Reviewed by: Ronnie Scheib
    Sep 24, 2011
    80
    Hungarian schoolteacher Gyongi Mago's campaign to raise awareness of her hometown's once-vibrant, now conspicuously absent Jewish population is captured in the superior docu There Was Once ...
  3. Slant Magazine
    Reviewed by: Andrew Schenker
    Sep 19, 2011
    63
    A not insignificant act of oral history, Gabor Kalman's There Was Once… makes for considerably less compelling cinema whenever it turns its focus away from the talking-head testimony of the Holocaust survivors of Kalosca, Hungary.
  4. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: David DeWitt
    Sep 22, 2011
    60
    Ah, well. "There Was Once ...may feel like sober, do-gooder public television, but it has integrity, recording one specific town's slice of living history. Simple as that, it's a worthy document.
  5. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Michelle Orange
    Sep 20, 2011
    60
    The neo-Nazi sentiment in Hungary today is touched on most acutely when it mars the memorial that finally brings the survivors home.

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