Movie Nation

The sheer number of Holocaust dramas in the film canon means that the bar for the genre has been raised, perhaps unfairly high. If the movie isn’t great, considering the epic horror of the subject, it can and should be dismissed, or so the thinking seems to be.

But what if the tale’s a decent yarn with interesting characters, a mystery or two and the rich subtexts of classical music, an arrogant prodigy, World War II childhood, famously valuable violins, and Judaism? With those ingredients, “The Song of Names” would be at least watchable with or without the vast tragedy that hangs over it.

French Canadian director François Girard is at home in this milieu, with “The Red Violin” and “32 Short Films About Glenn Gould” on his resume. He and screenwriter Jeffrey Caine serve up a quiet, atmospheric period piece in adapting Norman Lebrecht novel.

It’s about two friends who grew up together in London “during The War,” who broke from each other suddenly. And in the narrative present, 35 years after that break, one of the two is still doggedly searching for the other, seeking closure and answers about whatever happened to the fellow with “music from the gods” talent.

In 1951, a London concert debut, that of a Warsaw-born prodigy raised and schooled in Britain, is canceled. The man promoting it, played by Stanley Townsend, is gutted by his discovery’s no-show. His son Martin (Gerran Howell) is a tad put out as well.

In 1986, Martin — now played by Tim Roth — is a music educator and concert promoter who, when judging a competition in Tyneside, sees a Newcastle boy conduct an odd ritual. He kisses the precious lump of resin he uses on his bow before playing.

Martin has seen that before, decades ago. Thus begins his latest hunt for his long lost “brother.” His wife (Catherine McCormick) will just have to understand.

“The Song of Names” tucks Martin’s 1986 search, updated in Tyneside, Warsaw and on to New York, with long flashbacks telling the story of how the two boys met and much of what led up to that infamous no-show Big Show in 1951.

Luke Doyle plays little Dovidl Rapaport, son of lower middle class Jews from Warsaw, a “genius” in his father’s eyes. That’s made him arrogant beyond measure, even as he seeks mentorship in pre-war London.

“He’s not (Fritz) Kreisler,” his would-be teacher tells Martin’s father.

“Kreisler is NOT Rapaport,” the precocious brat spits back.

But Mr. Morrison (Townsend) decides that the child must be taught and must stay in London. He will stay with his family, and room with his son Martin, which doesn’t sit well with the kid (Misha Handley).

Intimidating Dovidl speaks several languages, is more serious about music than Martin (who plays piano) and can even best him in a tussle. Might as well learn to put up with him. They grow up, thick as thieves.

Flashbacks quickly sum up the war years, Dovidl’s insistence on standing outside and watching The London Bliz because “It would have been like this” for his family in Warsaw, Dovidl acquiring a young musical rival and the two of them having a “Devil Went Down to Georgia” fiddle face-off in a crowded air raid shelter. Later, there’s the futile search for Dovidl’s family after the war.

Martin’s connection to the slightly younger boy is almost worshipful. Dovidl’s looming teenage crisis of faith can be tossed off in an aphorism.

“Ethnicity is the skin you were born with and will have until the day you die. Religion is a coat. When it gets too hot, you can take it off.”

The teaching, the piano-violin duets and the sibling-level friendship all end the night Dovidl stands up an audience, an orchestra and Martin’s father in 1951. Martin’s wife Helen was there. So she understands the renewed search, even as she dismisses it as futile.

“If he wanted to be found, don’t you think he would have found you?”

The cold trail leads from that Newcastle boy to the street performer who taught him, to Warsaw, a woman (Magdalena Cielecka), the Treblinka concentration camp, and onward.

Saul Rubinek has a warm on-screen moment, playing a luthier and violin broker, and Eddie Izzard a nice cameo as the radio announcer for that infamous concert-that-never-was broadcast.

“The Song of Names” has a gloomy pallor about it, overcast out-of-doors, the dimly-lit wooden interiors of the life of privilege the boys grew up in, concert halls and nightclubs — all shaded with the hazy glow of memory.

The violin playing fakery is top notch, from the boy “prodigy” to the late-arriving big name you’ll see listed on the credits below. And the acting has a lived-in reality, even if the emotional punch any story with “Holocaust” attached to it is mostly missing.

That only turns up in “the reveal,” the moment that gives the film its title.

But that payoff is as rich musically as it is dramatically. One problem with movies of the “Mister Holland’s Opus/Mo’Better Blues” bent, films building towards some signal moment in music that is what the film is based on, is what letdowns those “grand musical statements” always are. Not here. It’s musically poignant and moving.

Still, “The Song of Names” is a more interesting than fascinating mystery than it is a profound statement on memory, loss, tragedy and faith — which was plainly its aim. The conflict is more talked about than keenly felt, the climax something of an over-the-top anti-climax.

But its shortcomings shouldn’t deprive you of the pleasure of immersing yourself in this world, this time, these lives and this story. It’s as watchable as its opening credits promise it will be.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some strong language, brief sexual material, thematic elements, and smoking

Cast: Tim Roth, Clive Owen, Catherine McCormick, Jonah Hauer-King, Gerran Howell, Magdalena Cielecka, Stanley Townsend, Saul Rubinek and Eddie Izzard.

Credits: Directed by François Girard, script by Jeffrey Caine, based on the Norman Lebrecht novel. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:53

A thriller from some of the folks behind “Us” and “Get Out.”

Jack London’s classic earns another adaptation.

Sometimes, you can pinpoint with smart-bomb accuracy the moment a movie goes wrong. In the manhunt thriller “21 Bridges,” it concerns a mass murderer/”double tap” cop killer, an underworld “banker” he’s just held a gun on, and an Alcoholics Anonymous token.

Trigger happy Ray (Taylor Kitsch) has just been persuaded to drop the murderous threat, to work with Adi (Alexander Siddig), the quick-service money launderer, by Ray’s partner in crime, the guy (Stephan James) who helped him swipe “50 keys” of mob cocaine, starting the body count which is already nine, according to the news reports on the TV behind them.

Mercurial Ray whips out that AA token, lays in on the bar in Adi’s loft, and asks for whisky. All that slaughering (“double-tap,” remember) have given him a thirst that Red Bull won’t slake. With that token, screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan (“Lions for Lambs”) and Adam Mervis misguidedly try to not just humanize Ray, they soften him up so that we can sympathize with him. It comes out (in the police efforts to profile him) he was a vet, too.

Gosh, all that stress, the horrors he’s seen. It’s no WONDER he’s in AA. It’s no wonder that he latched onto a life as gun-for-hire. And it’s no wonder that he killed a bar full of cops as he and Michael (James) stumbled over a LOT more cocaine and a lot more complexity in what they’d thought would be a simple hold-up of a mob restaurant/drug storage waypoint.

“21 Bridges” goes steadily more wrong after that. And more’s the pity, because there was promise in what was supposed to be a taut tale of a detective (Chadwick Boseman) whose specialty is bringing cop killers to justice. He’s the one who orders the tunnels, ferries and “21 bridges” that connect Manhattan to the world closed down overnight to catch the guys who killed seven cops, left another mortally wounded, and murdered the restaurant manager in the bargain.

Det. Andre Davis is the son of a slain cop. We see the grim pageant of an NYPD funeral (sans bagpipes, this time) in the opening scene. And we hear Davis declare that “being a cop is not really a choice for me…it’s in my DNA,” and pontificate that “justice comes at a cost” at an Internal Affairs shooting review board hearing where his latest on-the-job killing is investigated.

“Justified shootings” have become a habit for this guy. And if Davis was played by anybody other than Black Panther, maybe his history would be more of a grey area, less righteous. So that when the F.B.I. shows up at the murder scene and refers to him as a “trigger” it would sting more. Davis has been called in by his chief (Keith David) and a precinct captain (J.K. Simmons) who have very specific requirements in mind for this manhunt.

Simmons’ Capt. McKenna lists, from memory, the officers slain. And “just so you know, they leave behind four wives, one fiancee. Six kids.”

Don’t put them through the ordeal of arrest and the public spectacle of a trial. Be the guy the F.B.I. just dismissed as an executioner, a “trigger.”

But Davis has questions about the first police on the scene. No alarm, no shots fired. No sign of forced entry. ”

“Why were they there?”

British TV director Brian Kirk (“Luther,” “Game of Thrones”) pumps up the pulse-rate in the early scenes, showing the two crooks arriving to find ten times as much cocaine as they were hired to steal, the heist going wrong, the hail of machine gun fire they use to shoot their way out.

We follow their pursuit through Det. Davis and his “all hands on deck…flood the island with Blue” strategy. Traffic control delivers the first clue, vehicle registration a second, a woman in “the life” looking at a red light camera photo and speculating on who these two might be a third.

The logistics of getting off Manhattan with millions in drugs, or payment for those drugs, and doing it while the clock is ticking, is fascinating too. You sell drugs to a mid-level dealer, he’s not paying you by check. Cash on hand? Bags and bags of $20 bills aren’t inconspicuous, thus the need for this banker. Adi? “He’s SWITZERLAND, man!”

Michael, the junior partner among the robbers, turns out to be the brains, reluctant to spill blood and thus more sympathetic.

Davis has a sidekick for the night, a narcotics cop Frankie Miller (Sienna Miller) who has no more qualms about shooting the bad guys than her captain. There are cops AWFULLY eager to “put those two down.” Davis? We reflexively expect higher mindedness, a nose for “justice” and a suspicion from him because of Boseman’s casting.

Look at the elegant, cool and super-heroish way he flashes his badge in scene after scene.

Chadwick Boseman stars in 21 Bridges

Chadwick Boseman stars in 21 Bridges

Giving Davis more of an edge would have made the pursuit more of a moral dilemma for him, that “Black and Blue” quandary of a cop who senses bad cops all around him even though he’s been avenging his father’s murder with every “righteous kill” he carries out.

But the manhunt, complete with shootouts, chases on foot through Manhattan’s meatpacking underbelly, could have gotten by without that little extra nuance of doubt had Kirk not repeatedly pumped the brakes — stopping the picture cold as Davis repeatedly confronts and negotiates with the killers.

The film’s flow is also interrupted by that second line of pursuit, the one we’re not privy to. For all the split second timing of tips, clues and sightings, the sprinting Davis and Burns are often the second police to arrive at this dark street, that salsa bar.

Too little is made of the actual closure of the bridges, of the tightening net closing in on the pursued.

Maybe “21 Bridges” could withstand sops to the stars (“Let’s make the murderous bad guy sympathetic.” “Let’s make the hero righteous, not sketchy.”). But as any fan of police procedurals knows, nothing kills a tense “ticking clock thriller” quicker than stopping that clock.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language throughout

Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Sienna Miller, J.K. Simmons, Stephan James, Taylor Kitsch, Alexandder Siddig and Keith David

Credits: Directed by Brian Kirk, script by Mattheww Michael Carnahan and Adam Mervis An STX release.

Running time: 1:39

This is one of two or three end of year films I have been looking forward to, police racial harassment, a traffic stop escalated, a “Dirty Larry Crazy Mary” escape-flee “spree” (NOT “Bonnie & Clyde”).

Looks gripping.

Let’s lower the bar here, straight off.

Say you’re snowed in, the kids are going stir crazy and you’ve still got power and Netflix. If those kids are “over” “Home Alone,” and not yet in their picky/discriminating taste years (say 7 and under), “Christmas Break-In” makes a perfectly passable time-killer. For them.

Adults? As you were, people. This isn’t for you. At all.

It’s about a Duluth area nine year-old, Izzy (Cameron Seely) with visions of shredding guitar solos dancing through her head. She’s so anxious to get that new Fender for Christmas that’s she’s Sparpied “Fender” and “Guitar” on her parents’ heads (Denise Richards, Sean O’Bryan). They’ve got to get to the “one day/half off sale” at the guitar store after work, on the last day before school Christmas break.

They just HAVE to! Izzy’s told everybody in school it’s happening. She’s told the janitor who gives her guitar lessons (Danny Glover) this, too.

But there’s a blizzard coming. Her workaholic parents forget to pick her up. And by the time they remember, driving is no easy thing.

Izzy’s all alone, waiting in an empty school. Well, empty, save for the three crooks (Katrina Begin, Douglas Spain, Jake von Wagoner) who just broke in to hide out.

They knocked over a Salvation Army Store and had planned to skip down. But numbskull Ned (von Wagoner) isn’t much of a getaway driver, when it comes to directions. And he chose an ice cream truck as their getaway car.

Testy Barbie (Begin), his sister, is their leader. She and the muscle, Rico (Spain) plan on spending the bags of change they scored from the bell ringer charity on umbrella drinks in Mexico this Christmas.

Maybe not.

And as Ray has come back to get Izzy after her parents tell him about their screwup, the getaway just got more complicated. Izzy is on the spot and on task, gathering gear and a war plan for foiling the bad guys and saving Christmas!

Glover gets the film’s few laughs, telling the robbers “haunted school” stories to scare them off (Izzy secretly provides sound effects).

The parents try various ways to reach the school — stealing a snowmobile, for instance. None of these are developed, as there was no budget for stunts. Apparently. The same goes for Izzy’s guitar mania. They always cut away lest we see how little girl fingers have a hard time with Fender fretboards.

The villains manage only a giggle, here and there. The biggest laugh might be Begin’s blown line making it past the script supervisor, the director and the editor.

Unless the line was written as “What does the time of year have ANYTHING to do with it?”

Anyhoo, this “Home Alone” knockoff has a ways to go to reach “middling.” But if the kids are stuck inside without appropriate fresh-made holiday fare to watch, it’ll do.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, pretty much a G.

Cast: Cameron Seely, Danny Glover, Katrina Begin, Douglas Spain, Jake von Wagoner, Sean O’Bryan and Denise Richards.

Credits: Directed b y Michael Kampa, script by Spanky Dustin Ward. A Koan/Netflix release

Running time: 1:26

It’s good to see Chadwick Boseman taking a shot at something that’s not a high minded biopic (“Marshall,'”Get on Up,” “42”) or a Black Panther turn.

But early reviews on this genre cop thriller have been weak. STX is still a relatively new studio, and while the genre and the star were worth a gamble, and the picture should sell itself (genre pictures usually do), I’d hate for Boseman to lose box office clout if this one tanks.

So fingers crossed, as usual. “21 Bridges” opens Thursday night at a multiplex near you.

Intimate, evocative and lurid, “Waves” captures the heat of youth and the fog one family navigates through as parents try to guide two teens to adulthood in Greater Miami.

Writer-director Trey Edward Shults, in a major departure from his best known work, the Aussie apocalypse horror tale “It Comes at Night,” tells this story in densely saturated colors, with a swirling camera, seamless stream-of-conscience editing and a soundtrack — music sung along to, voices muffled, then brought into focus — to match.

The melodramatic first two acts play out pro forma, predictably but with intense feeling as Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), an upper middle class high school senior who wrestles, plays a little piano and loves on his girlfriend Alexis (Alexa Demie), and endures the loving but judgmental glower of his “We are not AFFORDED to the luxury of being ‘average'” father (Sterling K. Brown).

But “predictable” goes out the window with a third act that feels more like an overlong epilogue, taking the story from its climax and beyond, meandering into grace notes that point to how people go on and grow after a life-shattering event.

Tyler’s training regimen at school is rigorous enough. It’s when he gets home that “that extra mile” is covered. His taskmaster dad puts him through more reps in their home gym, and a post-match debriefing and coaching on the mat he’s laid out in the garage.

Homework? That comes next. And yet he has time for Alexis and tomfoolery with his friends after all that. The illusion of it all, the thin margin the kid is working with, is hinted at in his careless driving, rambunctious sing-alongs with his boys or Alexis, a camera spinning between them capturing joy, harmless fun and a lot of unbelted seatbelts.

That margin of error evaporates in ways we can see coming, even if a car wreck isn’t one of them. And the “push through it” pressure Tyler is living under means there’s no communication with his family when the wheels start to come off — an injury here, a girfriend crisis there.

Sister Emily (Taylor Russell) is all but ignored until Taylor’s crisis comes to a head. We then get to watch her sort her own life out and face the same stark choices he did as she finds a beau (Lucas Hedges) and the life-altering temptations of teenagers all over America. Will she make better choices?

The young players shine, ably getting across the emotional confusion of youth, the impulsiveness, and the stubborn unwillingness to communite with their elders. These are buttoned-down performances with flashes of temper, regret and guilt.

But it is Brown, of TV’s “This is Us,” who pops off the screen, pop-eyed in intensity, full of life lessons, directions and heavyweight parenting. He revels in the weightlifting bonding (with mirrors to peacock in front of) with his boy, stares at him with an unnerving focus. This is “toxic masculinity” with a loving touch. Ronald runs the family construction company, and whatever he and wife Catherine (Renée Elise Goldsberry) agree on financial and childrearing matters, he is hellbent on raising a young MAN.

An opening credit — Damien Van Der Cruyssen is “colorist” on “Waves” — speaks volumes about Shults’ stylistic intentions here. He’s borrowed Harmony Korine’s production designer from “Spring Breakers” and put Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross in charge of the score. The screen size changes aspect ratios as hypersaturated blues tint interiors, with neon-colored parties and grey overcast afternoons evoking the grim discipline of training.

It’s all a bit much, as the picture’s two halves are in no way equal, and the post climax scenes, reaching for “healing,” tend to soften the film’s blows. The emotions stick, but feel rather flat after the tension and release of the opening scenes.

That robs “Waves” of the gut punch we feel coming, even after the anti-climax has slow-walked out of the gate.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, drug and alcohol use, some sexual content and brief violence-all involving teens

Cast: Kelvin Harrison Jr., Taylor Russell, Alexa Demie, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Lucas Hedges and Sterling K. Brown.

Credits: Written and directed by Trey Edward Shults.  An A24 release.

Running time: 2:15

Channeling one’s inner five year-old girl isn’t much help when considering the thin charms of “Frozen 2.”

It plays like an animated musical built around forgettable tunes and impressive animated effects that were cooked up before the script was decided on. And that script, by co-director Jennifer Lee? Undercooked, with heaping helpings of self-help speak shoved into tiny tots’ faces.

Odd moments of Josh Gad‘s giggly magic snowman Olaf — who breaks into pointless, random laughs, just like your stoner roomie in college — and a couple of funny tunes, including a proposal song rendered into a “Bohemian Rhapsody” with reindeer backing lovesick suitor Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), don’t break the visually and emotionally flat spell this Journey to Nowhere casts.

Magical Queen Elsa (Idina Menzel) and her mortal spitfire of a younger sister Anna (Kristen Bell) have the run of Arendelle. But a song their dead mother sang them about a river “which holds the answers” and a troubled land “as north as you can go,” a place hidden by a menacing, magical mist, sticks in their minds.

An ancient betrayal and wrongs never made right won’t touch Arendelle, right? Even if “nothing is permanent.”

The snowman doesn’t fret about such things. He’s too busy making age jokes, the “OK, Boomer” cracks of a fairytale jester — to the sisters.

“I can’t wait until I’m ancient and I can worry about important things.”

But there’s a voice only Elsa hears, a siren’s call of warning. When a cataclysm strikes the kingdom, she resolves to find closure, to visit the mist and venture, in song, “into the UNknoooooooown!”

Anna won’t be left behind. That leaves poor Kristoff with a ring and no right moment to pop the question. One of the few lightly amusing bits here is how he repeatedly says the wrong thing, and she blows up that wrong thing into self-criticism and a Federal case.

Just as in real life.

Their collective mission on this vague quest is to “Do the next right thing.” Olaf’s mission is to entertain one and all with his vast knowledge of trivia — “Did you know that wombats poop squares?”

Anything to get him off his endless collection of Tony Robbins “self-actualizing” quips.

The land of Northuldra (If any Northuldrans want to correct my spelling of their homeland, have at it.) is a place and a people of perpetual fall. So we’re really NOT in “Frozen” territory here at all, are we?

The songs, by by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez of “Frozen” and “Coco” fame, include a folk lullaby, a couple a classic rock-tinged tunes including that “Lost in the Woods” tribute to Queen. And one with a lyric unique to the entire history of animated films for children.

“Hello darkness, I’m ready to succumb.”

Welcoming the end of the movie, where the tunes place so few demands on the Great Menzel and plucky Ms. Bell is one thing, but welcoming death?

There are new “Earth Giants” (rock monsters) to fear. And there’s a new critter, a fire-gecko, for the plush toy crowd.

Yeah, it’ll earn a cool $billion. But seriously, if “Frozen” was lukewarm mush to anyone over the age of eight, “Frozen 2” is mush that’s melted.

MPAA Rating: PG for action/peril and some thematic elements

Cast: The voices of Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel, Josh Gad, Jonathan Groff, Evan Rachel Wood, Sterling K. Brown, Alfred Molina, Jeremy Sisto and Martha Plimpton

Credits: Directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, script by Jennifer Lee, A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 1:43

A South Florida father trying to guide his kids to a better life, young love. A trailer that gives you just enough.