Movie Nation

A couple of things make the lovely and entertaining “Dolphin Reef” stand out among the deep-sea documentaries DisneyNature has served up on previous Earth Days.

We see dolphins engaged in an underwater brawl, something Disney, BBC and other docs on dolphins have missed.

And we witness that rarest of underwater tussles, two green sea turtles feuding over a spot on an underwater outcropping where they need to wait their turn to have their shells and unreachable bits “cleaned” by helpful turtle-waxing fish.

Add to that Oscar winner Natalie Portman‘s enthusiastic narration, and you’ve got the kid-friendliest of the salt water films DisneyNature has served up, anthropomorphized and light — with just enough peril to keep it “real.”

Director Keith Scholey’s team did a “Diving With Dolphins” film concurrently with this one, and served up “Blue” a few years back.

This one takes us to a gorgeous, still-unruined reef in Polynesia to tell the story of Echo, a three year-old still learning dolphin-lore, and his mother, Kuma, who tries to teach him to herd fish via mud circles (stirring up a corral of muddy water on the bottom), or echo-locate tiny, “tasty” razor fish, who burrow into the bottom sand to hide.

Echo is a bit of a slow-learner, giving up on the razorfish to go gulp a little air. In a flash, the prey comes out, en masse, as if to taunt him.

“When no one’s around,” Portman narrates, “it’s a PARTY down there!”

We meet a peacock mantis shrimp, humpback whales trying to avoid the predations of orcas, clown fish and rock-chewing parrotfish, whose “sand poop” has a lot to do why some places have sandier beaches than others.

I did not know that.

And then there’s the mesmerizing, bio-luminescent cuttlefish, the most feared predator among the crabs, shrimp and smaller fish on the reef.

“You don’t MESS with cuttlefish!”

The over-arching theme of David Fowler’s script is the “balance” of the reef community that keeps it healthy — fish and turtles that prune it, reef sharks that keep the pruners at bay, tiger sharks that dine on reef sharks, at times, and so on.

Humanity’s impact on that balance — pollution, rising sea temperatures, over-fishing and reef-destroying dynamite fishing in that part of the world — is never so much as brought up. There’s a giant bleaching event going on along the Great Barrier Reef as I type this.

“Dolphin Reef” is content to demonstrate how reefs work, and how they should be allowed to work.

Even without those harsh realities, “Dolphin Reef” is DisneyNature’s best undersea doc ever, and a great reason to sign up for Disney+ all by itself. Leave it on as the credits roll to see how the team got these amazing images and you’ll be even more impressed.

MPAA Rating: G

Cast: Narrated by Natalie Portman

Credits: Directed by Keith Scholey, script by David Fowler. A DisneyNature release on Disney+.

Running time: 1:17

What a delightfully light confection “Abe” is, a family dramedy about food, clashing cultures breaking bread together and the celebrated cosmopolis that might be the only place in the world this story could happen — New York.

Where else could a boy (Noah Schnapp), son of a Palestinian-atheist father and a Jewish mother, whose grandparents re-fight “The Six Day War” at every family get-together, learn to cook at the feet of a Brazilian chef, a master of street cuisine?

Brooklyn, baby.

“Abe” narrates that one side of his family calls him Avraham, or Abraham, the other Ibrahim. He goes by “Abe” just to keep the peace.

But as he turns 12, the quarrels at his birthday dinner start to come to a head. Jewish Mom’s (Dagmara Dominczyk) peace-keeping efforts are failing, the grandfathers (Tom Mardirosian, Mark Margolis) are violating the peace treaty and yes, SOMEbody is going to need a Bar Mitzvah next year. Or celebrate Ramadan instead.

Dad (Arian Moayed) wants everything secular. Mom isn’t commited to that. And Islamic granny (Salem Murphy) insists to the boy “You can TRY both, but you cannot BE both!”

To the boy, an always-online 12-year-old foodie who knows a lot more about cooking than his parents, “fusion” is the natural way of things. Try his “Ramen (noodles) tacos.”

Abe’s food-wanderings take him to a food booth at a weekend street food fair where he seeks out Chico (Seu Jorge, of “City of God,” “The Life Aquatic” and “Marighella”), a darling of the foodie underground.

Abe is a pushy little pissant. And clumsy, not “up to code” in terms of knowing his way around a kitchen, ingredients and disinfectant. He may know the chemistry of cooking, and a lot more than his parents. But Chico is unimpressed.

“Does this look like a summer camp for rich kids?” Abe doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, “mixing up fusion with CONfusion.” But we know that the old master will take him under his wing — AFTER making the kid clean the co-op kitchen where he does his prep.

Abe is supposed to be at a tiny tykes summer cooking camp, but his “Give him space” parents are none the wiser.

The conflicts in “Abe” are cute and funny, but also pointed and real. The grandparents bicker over permissive Jewish parents vs. strict Islamic supervision. The parents, in turn, are sucked into this fight as it’s about them.

And Abe? He wants to learn how to peel and prepare yucca, figure out the right blend of sweet and savory for a fusion taco and whip up the perfect lemonade (with thyme) ice pop.

Like comfort food, it’s not surprises that “Abe” — a Brazilian-American production — is aiming for. We see the conflicts and their resolutions two dinner courses in advance.

There are throw-away moments and lines that work, and a few that sing.

And young Mr. Schnapp, of TV’s “Strangers Things,” is an agreeable tour guide, while Jorge, one of Brazil’s finest dramatic actors, wears this exotic, Afro-Brazilian mentor mantle with a beguiling effortlessness.

Brazilian director Fernando Grostein Andrade, making his North American debut, revels in the foods and the online life of American tweens even as he’s immersing us in a story with a lot of heated conflict built into it.

This moment in time feels as if it could use a little New York state of mind dramedy like “Abe.” It’s not a whole meal, but “Abe” sits easy on the palette and leaves you wanting more.

MPAA Rating: unrated, quite PG

Cast: Noah Schnapp, Seu Jorg,  Dagmara Dominczyk, Arian Moayed, Salem Murphy, Tom Mardirosian and Mark Margolis.

Credits: Directed by Fernando Grostein Andrade, script by Lameece Issaq  and Jacob Kader. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:25

Leslie Bibb has lost her husband, but taken on a farm. North Dakota native Josh Duhamel is just the guy to show her the ropes. And goats. April 10 this family friendly one starts streaming.

As we’re all feeling the need, to varying degrees, to stick a thumb in the eye of the Chinese Communist Party and its autocracy, this seems like a good time to release another doc about the Dalai Lama.

Nothing irritates The Party more than having the world reminded that oh yeah, they’re still occupying Tibet.

The doc is about the Buddhist leader changing his teaching and his focus thanks to his many interactions with famous scientists over the decades. “The Dalai Lama — Scientist”  comes out May 17.

Here’s a clever and righteous pitch from indie distributor Kino Lorber.

They have the rights to the touching and acclaimed 2014 documentary, “The American Nurse.” And as nurses are now on the front lines of America’s and the world’s struggle against COVID19, the studio is making the film available — streaming for free on their website.

Here’s the link. https://kinonow.com/american-nurse.

Photographer Carolyn Jones is a cancer survivor who took on “The American Nurses Project” for a book, and then as a followup, took a film crew to visit five of the nurses she profiled for that book for this film.

“Who are the people who can do this incredibly intimate work?” the film wonders.

There’s Naomi Cross, labor and delivery nurse at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, a job with “so much bodily fluids and screaming” that never everybody is cut out for it, she jokes.

Her job? “Calm people (patient and spouse) and push through it!”

Jason Short is a home health RN in Paintsville, Kentucky, a mechanics’ son who got tired of disagreeing in the garage and took up another way of helping people. He looked at the human body as a car engine — “radiator hoses? That’s your bloodstream. Heart? That’s a water pump.”

Like Tanya, Jason has a touching and personal back-story about why he took up this calling.

Tanya Faust is a prison guard’s daughter who followed mom to Angola Prison in Louisiana. Mom served in the guard tower, but Tanya does nursing and supervises trusty’s who serve as nurse’s aids. A prison filled with lifers means she has to be, in essence, a hospice nurse. “I’m not here to judge them,” she says. “It’s just taking care of another human being.”

Brian McMillion got sold on the idea of becoming an Army medic watching a recruiting video in an Army Recruiting Center. He’s been in the bush, in combat zones, tending soldiers, bonding over their “shared suffering” and brings that home, doing outreach for homeless veterans.

And then there’s Sister Stephen, the Wisconsin nun who supervises a nursing home and helps run a therapy farm attached to it, where troubled youth in her corner of the state.

Her lifelong “soft spot for older people” and passion to “always live on a farm” brought her to her best destiny, where she helps care for alpacas, sheep, goats, pigs and cows, supervises teenager who bring lambs and other critters into the home where the elderly get to interact with them, and even strums on the autoharp at nursing home singalongs.

That’s the tone of the film, folksy people doing righteous work. We see Jason’s frank warnings to relatives about this dying house-bound patient or that one, see Naomi comforting and congratulating parents, witness Michael’s dedication to wounded warriors, hear Sister Stephen tell an aging lady who has become her friend, “If Jesus is calling you, to you.”

That’s the message of the movie, never clearer than when Tanya Faust is showing tenderness to convicted murderers — compassion is contagious.

Kudos to Kino Lorber for letting people see it for free at a time when not everyone is in a position to sing to or applaud the health care professionals risking their own health to save us from a pandemic.

Credits: Directed by Carolyn Jones. A Kino Lober release.

Running time: 1:18

An eerily beautiful long, foggy drive on an Icelandic spring morning opens “A White, White Day,” Iceland’s contender for this past year’s Best International (foreign language) Oscar. That drive ends with a Volvo wagon going through a guard rail — an emotionally-detached depiction of a tragedy that hangs over this Hlynur Palmason film.

That’s followed by a time-lapse sequence showing the passing of days, months and seasons as a remote barn is transformed into a house, with shaggy Icelandic ponies frequenting the yard.

With that, the tone for the picture is set — dreamy, sad and slow.

The owner (Ingvar Sigurdsson) walks a little girl (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir) through the still-unfinished renovation. “Your mom’s room, lot of work to be done,” he says gruffly (in Icelandic, with English subtitles), before they gently nudge a pony that has wondered into the doorless/windowless and open-to-the-elements living room.

We can see she’s his granddaughter, but with no other information we have to wonder — “If she’s staying here, and we don’t know who was driving the Volvo, might that have been her mother?”

Hint: it isn’t. Palmason is one parsimonious poseur when it comes to parceling out basic information in this meditative, melodramatic thriller.

We only learn the old man’s name — Ingimundur — when we sit in on his therapy session with George the shrink (Þór Tulinius). Wait, what? From some very basic (and insulting) questions that gauge his mental state, we learn that Ingimundur is a cop, that he’s coping with a loss, that this might be department-ordained psychotherapy.

“Do you feel like people understand you? Do you want them to understand you?”

Eventually we figure out — not directly, mind you — that it was his wife who was in that car. Don’t get hung up on the question, “He lost a spouse in a car accident, he’s retired and he’s ordered to take therapy?” That’s a logical rabbit hole you probably have to be Scandinavian to accept.

But it’s pretty obvious that Ingimundur needs the therapy, if not in him stealing evidence and files about his wife’s accident from the office, then from the hilariously scary story he tells his eight year-old granddaughter when she asks for one at bedtime.

He suspects his wife was having an affair. He’s looking for clues. He’s got a notion of who it was. And he’s not above stalking the guy, sneaking around when he should be fetching the kid, to who knows what end?

It’s a lovely looking film, chilly (not snowy) and atmospheric. And there’s an opening title that explains what a “white white day” is good for — communing with the dead. But Palmason, who did “Winter Brothers,” has let us know right at the start that he’s an indulgent filmmaker.

That long opening car drive in the fog is topped by a rockslide that Ingimundur runs over in his Range Rover. He takes a few moments to consider the rock, and then slide it off the pavement and over a cliff. The director follows this rock as it tumbles, like a famous effect from a Buster Keaton movie, all the way down a hillside, tumbling into the sea until it settles on the bottom.

It’s a minute long sequence, with a dozen or so cuts — denoting changing camera set-ups, angles, and editing. Was there no one on set, or in all of Iceland, who could say, “Dude, symbolism is fine, but seriously?” You know, a producer?

The “mystery” isn’t what we’re plunging into here. It’s a man’s spiral from grief to suspicion to rage. And let’s give our star, Sigurdsson, and director credit. The third act climax where that plays out is pretty good.

And it’s not that everything that came before it is a waste. We meet the daughter (Elma Stefania Agustsdottir) and her beau (Haraldur Stefansson), whom Ingimundur has no regard or patience for. We see that she has a toddler — thus her happiness at having her dad take care of her oldest.

Sampling a dark, morbid and no-budget Icelandic kids’ TV show where astronauts (U.S. flags on their space suits) note how they’re doomed, and that we ALL die, is kind of an off-topic treat.

And the second session with the shrink is where the picture finally gets down to business, adding drama and incidents, if not much in the line of tension.

But I didn’t fall for the surfeit of mood manipulation that opens “A White, White Day.” All that time-lapse stuff and its ilk is a nice contrast to the shock and action that takes over the third act. They’re just a very dull way of managing that.

Was “White, White Day” nominated for an Academy Award? Savvier viewers will figure that out half an hour in.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast:Ingvar Sigurdsson, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir, Elma Stefania Agustsdottir, Haraldur Stefansson and Þór Tulinius

Credits: Written and directed by Hlynur Palmason. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:49

An introspective tale of a loner, a kid looking for his dad, with Jeffrey Dean Morgan and David Straithairn.

Screenwriter Michael Milillo all but calls his work an “American classic” on IMDB.

Gosh. Tempting karma, critical ridicule, etc.

“In the tradition of American classics, WALKAWAY JOE is the story of an unlikely friendship between a young boy searching for his father, and a wandering loner hiding from his past. In each other they experience the power of a second chance, and a shot at redemption.”

“El Silencio es bienvenido” is an inscrutable parable about the trials of a family vacation punctuated with a mystery perhaps meant to deliver a “moral to the story.”

The debut feature of Gabriela García Rivas doesn’t give us much. It makes us work, bring our own “meaning” to the film. And there are hints that this is because she hadn’t quite made up her own mind in that regard. Inscrutable. And kind of dull.

“Silencio” shows us a couple strained by the dull routine of their marriage, the road-trip ordeal that accompanies every cross-country drive to “grandma’s house” and a sullen teen who lives for her cell phone.

And then, at long last, “something” happens.

The title of this Mexican film (in Spanish with English subtitles) is “The Silence is Welcome,” but that’s something we can’t really gather from its opening acts. Moni, short for Monica (Eileen Yañez) and Joel (Jorge Luis Moreno) are resigned to making this increasingly silent trip several times a year.

Or rather, he is. When 13-year-old daughter Amanda (Daniela Newton) pops off that “luckily (grandma) doesn’t have much more time,” Joel figures “She must have heard that from you.”

This is a marriage fraying at the edges. And the longer they drive through a Mexico where the news is about “terrorist” attacks, where soldiers keep order and run checkpoints, where accounts of shootouts with terrorists dominate radio news, and lurid headlines and violent photos catch Amanda’s attention (she photographs them with her phone), the more the stresses show.

Younger sister Andrea (Andrea Newton) is still Daddy’s little girl, showing off a volcanic rock she’s found at the lake where they stop to rest and skip stones across the water.

But when Dad asks Amanda to summon her sister to lunch, she calls out “Joel says so,” as a reason. She’s acting out against the boring trip and the father who complains about her cell obsession by calling him by his first name.

Monica laments that “We used to talk until sunrise,” when they stop at a resort with a spa, pool and fine dining. He gripes at how “boring” it all is.

Those are what pass for “incidents” in this script. But the drive itself — “slow cinema” defined — has a hint of tension about it, suspense for some big blow up or something more sinister to come.

It’s just that “El Silencio” has so little going on that it starts to feel indulgent. Dragging out what little action there is over 95 minutes seems like a waste of an hour.

Is García Rivas making a commentary on Mexican politics, this quiet “normality” glossing over a country roiled by stresses which no one is watching, dealing with or listening to?

Probably.

But nothing is overt. And the complacency of this family, the “don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” noise of life that’s too irritating to deal with, has “Silencio es Bienvenido” sacrificing what might have become an engaging story at the altar of subtlety.

That’s the trouble with “silencio.” Whatever it is hiding, most often it just signifies nothing much is happening.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex

Cast: Eileen Yañez , Jorge Luis Moreno,  Daniela Newton , Andrea Newton

Credits: Written and directed by Gabriela García Rivas. A Cinemex/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

April 24 on Netflix.

Is abortion like a hot new horror theme?“The Perished,”which is out this week, and now “The Unborn” — “coming soon.”