Metacritic reviews

It’s a profound, affecting and beautifully told chronicle of faith, family, obsession and the language of music.

The pieces are there for a profound piece of work, and The Song of Names’ high points are worth the occasional narrative slog.

Literate, sober, soulful, and considered as it is, the movie is also a little overly scrupulous in its tastefulness.

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.

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.

What he discovers is powerfully moving, but every step of his journey — and of the copious flashbacks that fill in various blanks — tests the viewer’s patience. It’s like eating an entire box of stale cereal to get to the prize.

Mainly, this movie chatters when it should sing.

In the end, the film is unable to bridge the gap between the emotions it elicits and the messages it imparts.

It’s a fatally old-fashioned and lugubrious historical drama, muting the emotional payoff it labors so hard to deliver.

There’s ultimately too much strained seriousness in The Song of Names' dramatically flimsy and symbolically heavy episodic narrative, making Girard and Caine’s already dated feel-good historical drama seem especially tacky.