Movies

In the Brooklyn-set tween drama “Abe,” a 12-year-old boy (Noah Schnapp, of “Stranger Things” fame) tries a culinary solution to unite the Palestinian Muslim and Israeli Jewish sides of his family: fusion food. Directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Grostein Andrade, this is a maudlin and predictable film, with oversimplified, kid-friendly takes on complex political issues. It’s also a surprisingly joyless production, lacking the stylistic and emotional flair to deliver even on the cheesy, feel-good promise of the setup.An early scene introduces us to Abe’s dysfunctional family life. His birthday dinner features three cakes: one from his maternal grandfather, with the name “Avram” piped on top; another says “Ibrahim,” as his paternal grandparents prefer to call him; and the third, made by the budding chef himself, features his name of choice, “Abe.” None of them have candles because his parents — his adamantly atheistic father, Amir (Arian Moayed), and agnostic mother, Rebecca (Dagmara Dominczyk) — were too busy bickering. Soon, the celebration descends into a bitter argument about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[embedded content]It’s a rough situation for a shy and friendless middle-schooler, and Schnapp plays the part with winning, wide-eyed despair. But the screenwriters, Lameece Issaq and Jacob Kader, render Abe’s identity crisis in exasperatingly superficial ways, as a haphazard string of stereotypical oppositions: His Jewish grandfather encourages him to take a sip of wine during the Sabbath, while his Islamic grandparents teach him that drinking “dulls the brain.” (There’s also a random confrontation at a bar mitzvah with a high school bully who makes digs about terrorism.)In his quest to reconcile these conflicts, Abe finds inspiration online in an unlikely source: a Brazilian-American pop-up run by a curmudgeonly chef, Chico (Seu George), whom Abe manages to annoy enough to be allowed into his kitchen as a trainee. This opens “Abe” into another cultural — and culinary — world. But it’s rendered in the same flat and uninspired ways as Abe’s home life. Chico’s lessons are reduced to swift montages that are all tell and no show: Abe writes down words like “synergy” and “textures” and makes flavor maps in his notebook as the camera glides cursorily over spices and sauces and fruits, without any attempt to capture the sensations of taste and smell, the luscious pleasures of cooking and combining new foods.Ultimately, it’s not even food that brings Abe’s family together, but fear and concern when he runs away after yet another showdown. One could interpret this as a metaphor for the naïve futility of Abe’s plan to resolve political differences with a meal, but that would give the film’s thin, inconsistent script much more credit than it deserves.AbeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

The Icelandic director Hlynur Palmason, in his second feature-length film, shows an acute sensitivity to the potential relations between environment and cinematic pace. He exercises that quality in ingenious and galvanic ways in “A White, White Day,” an eerily gripping study of grief — and impotence in its face — with the trappings of a revenge thriller.Ingvar Sigurdsson plays Ingimundur, a rough-hewed semiretired police officer in late middle age. He lives in a small community on the eastern coast of Iceland, a land both beautiful and harsh, a sparsely populated environment where time itself seems to hang in the cold air.Ingimundur spends time with his former colleagues, dotes on his adorable 8-year-old granddaughter, Salka (a remarkable Ida Mekkin Hlynsdottir), and works on renovating a building for her, and his daughter and her husband, to live in. Part of this process is shown in a startling series of static shots, taken at various times of day and even seasons, early in the movie, a montage that pulls the neat trick of feeling both fast and endless.[embedded content]But Ingimundur is mostly haunted. The movie’s very first shot follows an SUV driving down a twisted length of road, and then plunging through a guard rail down a steep incline. The vehicle, we’ll learn, was driven by Ingimundur’s wife, who died in the accident.“She used to cut my hair,” he says. “I think I miss that.” Ingimundur doesn’t talk much about his wife, but the way the resourceful actor Sigurdsson delivers those lines evokes formidable emotional life. The house renovation work doesn’t fill the emptiness he feels. Then Ingimundur finds, in his wife’s things, evidence that she was having an affair. He latches on to this like a ravenous infant, and pursues the neighbor who was his wife’s lover.Palmason, the director (and writer), conveys obsession with affinity but also detachment. He chooses crucial moments in the unfolding disaster of Ingimundur’s pursuit to pause and consider, for instance, the objects in the character’s room — a small metal box, a smooth rock that could serve as a paperweight or a murder weapon, and more. A tense discussion among family members is eventually all but drowned out by an obnoxious children’s TV show that little Salka watches, and Palmason’s camera is drawn to the screen like a moth to flame.Rather than diminish the scenario’s suspense, these accents and off beats accentuate it. The result is an emotionally wringing film, equally effective in the narrative and tone-poem departments.A White, White DayNot rated. In Icelandic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Film Movement’s Virtual Cinema. More