Adapted from a novel by the English classical-music critic Norman Lebrecht, The Song Of Names opens in 1951, at what’s supposed to be the London debut of a young Polish-born violinist, David Eli Rapoport.The kid never shows up, however, to the dismay of the concert’s promoter and his teenage son, Martin (Gerran Howell). Dovidl and Martin quickly become best friends. Learn more about the program. There is no denying that a sequence roughly halfway through where characters walk through the standing stones that memorialize the dead at the Nazi death camp Treblinka packs a wallop, especially with the accompaniment of Shore's keening, soaring score, one of his best. October is packed with great movies and several new and returning TV series. In most cases, items shipped from Amazon.com may be returned for a full refund. Leslie Felperin Some of the writing I found to be very clunky and without grace, and then suddenly there were some lines that were so well written that I wondered if it was by the same author. Lebrecht has a poetic ability to describe music. All this is told in flashbacks, shuffled together with the '80s-set storyline in which Martin, now a musical examiner, notices a talented violinist (Max Macmillan) kiss his lump of rosin for good luck exactly the same way Dovidl used to. Skittishly moving back and forth between scenes set at various points between the late 1930s and the mid-'80s, in chronological terms the story starts on the eve of World War II. Good luck. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 14, 2016. Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? These shortcomings aside, this is a confidently written and engaging first novel by a talented writer. EMAIL ME. Stitching the movie's three timelines together was interesting, and in parts the dialog -- spartan -- was excellent. Good overall but not a masterpiece, no offense to the author. Producers: Robert Lantos, Lyse Lafontaine, Nick Hirschkorn Was this review helpful to you? Music: Howard Shore Martin is an old man, looking toward retirement. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. Several years after his childhood friend, a violin prodigy, disappears on the eve of his first solo concert, an Englishman travels throughout Europe to find him. But any way you slice it, this is still a somewhat claggy, uneven work with stiff performances from the leads, both of whom seem to be sleep-talking lines as if they learned them in Yiddish first. Some of these items ship sooner than the others. Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free. Martin already loves Dovidl Rapoport, an eerily gifted Polish violin prodigy whose parents left him in the Simmonds’s care before they perished in the Holocaust. Despite the discouragement of his wife Helen (Catherine McCormack), who also knew Dovidl back in the day but thinks he should let his quest go, Martin plows on in search of his old friend, schlepping from Poland to New York and back to London until he meets Clive Owen playing a key character and all is revealed. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Only 40 years later does Martin get his first clue about what happened to him. The viewer is willing to hold onto it, in the expectation that the funds will suddenly appear when Dovidl does. One is a violin prodigy, Jewish, who was brought to London from Poland just in time. Watched on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The beloved superintendent of New York's Roslyn school district and his staff, friends and relatives become the prime suspects in the unfolding of the single largest public school embezzlement scandal in American history. Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2007.