Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I liked the first half hour and some of the moments by the end (for instance, bonding with the mother), the rest either didn’t bother me, or got on my nerves. There’s a lot of pathos and cheap emotions, but it was the suppressed emotions that felt more sincere than, for example, that insufferable Spielberg’s war horse. Technically, it’s your typical flawless Daldry, but these type of weeping, smooth dramas simply can’t make me jump in joy, regardless of how well they are made. The sensitive ones, though, will probably rejoice… :-) (11/02/2012)

This movie requires some proper mental preparation, because it can drag you into such a whirl of emotions that it will knock you down and you won’t recover until a week later. Alright, that might have been a bit of an exaggeration. I actually expected this film to affect me more. On the other hand, it kept me in some sort of emotional suspense from start to end, which is a feat no other movie has achieved before. 9/11 affected a lot of families and each of them dealt with it in its own way. Thomas Horn plays a boy who has to deal with one such unexpected event, and I have to admit that he played his character so perfectly that I felt chills running down my spine. It’s true that sometimes he was being infuriating, but children’s behavior is like that, and I was no different as a kid. On the other hand, we might not even imagine what was going through his head, which is one of the reason why I’m bowing down before the actor. In some scenes, I thought the boy was going to keel over. In my opinion the movie is a job well-done and I completely ignore some opinions of the good-for-nothing users on this site about how it is completely predictable, targeted and expected. If someone expects something from the film that bothers them in advance, then they simply shouldn’t watch it. I think it would be for the best not only for themselves but also for the people around them. (07/07/2013)

Daldry's inconspicuous journey of self-discovery, which suffers from transparency of the theme, however, doesn't score any less than the director's previous hits for me. Perhaps it's thanks to excellently cast (and sympathetically understated) supporting roles, or perhaps it's because I don't need ballet, Nazism or Virginia Woolf to appreciate the film. A dazzling Thomas Horn is enough for me, who in more dramatic moments holds his own against Sandra Bullock, and Max von Sydow, who can convey profound emotion with just a glance, even without a single word. Maybe they wanted to connect and refine some of the Black's scenes a little more, but even so, the march through New York with a tambourine and a backpack is a very unexpected surprise. (18/02/2012)

This film on the topic of 9/11 could have been incredibly moving. With the cast of Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, and Max von Sydow, it was practically impossible to go wrong. Nevertheless, the result is only awkward, illogical, and uninteresting. The eponymous book by Jonathan Safran Foer managed to captivate its readers more. Perhaps due to its creative annexes. (09/02/2024)