Extrêmement fort & incroyablement près

Saw this movie in the theatre and thoroughly enjoyed it.Recently saw it again on the movie channel and enjoyed it even more.The young boy was phenomenal,others were very good as well especially Max Von Sydow of course.Don't understand why people put down this movie, must be just complainers! I'll never forget where I was on 9/11 and can't imagine what it must have been like for New Yorkers.This movie shows many different people of the city in many different ways and I believe was very well done. I know the young boy was not a professional actor and its hard to believe he isn't, hopefully he might pursue the craft but I believe he wasn't that interested. Definitely a must see and probably twice to get everything out of it!

This was a very good movie. Its moving and raw at times, a different sort of 911 story, from the view of a child losing a father. On that level it was relatable for me and at times I found it painful to watch the 9 year old boys grief, anger and confusion.

Sandra Bullock is excellent as his mother, watching him from afar as her son searches NY city for the lock matching a mysterious key that once belonged to his father who was killed in the World Trade Center. Thomas Horn does an incredible job as 'Oskar', what a exhausting role for him. He suffers from an (undisclosed) mental illness and his freak out scenes are super well done, intense. I also enjoyed Max von Sydow. Tom Hanks' role is small here, mostly shown through flashbacks.

Ultimately the story will grip your heart, its about healing and how not everything in life can be explained. I think I probably appreciated this movie more because I had read the book first though. This must have been a hard translation to make and I think they did a good job. I liked the changes especially in regards to the mother being more aware. 4/12/15

Although the main character is a young boy, it is not a children movie, and cannot be recommended to all families either... This boy has teenage emotions and adult attitudes, and most of his deeds or conceptions cannot be considered as examples for "normal" families. And how to distinct stubbornness from persistence? The plot - having a tragic/sad background - is rather uneven and some unrealistic moments (e.g. mother's assistance in searching), with trivial pre-ending and expected ending. However, the movie contains 2 excellent (Thomas Horn and Max von Sydow) and at least 4 great performances (Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, John Goodman, Viola Davis). Thanks to them, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is pleasant to watch, but I am unable to explain why I had a kind of internal discontent when the credits appeared... Perhaps too vast scrutinizing with general human topics? Still, this movie is for you if you search something different.

This seems to be really one of those cases of you'll either love this movie or completely, totally hate it. I personally really wasn't expecting much from this movie and knew very little about it as well but I was completely surprised and wowed by it. It's a really warm, heartfelt movie, filled with both adventure and drama.

Things could had so easily turned cheap and sappy in this movie but it really didn't. Instead the movie at all times felt like a real warm and honest one, with some great storytelling in it and no, I'm normally absolutely not a fan of Stephen Daldry's movies and directing approach. What I absolutely loved about this movie is that it's being told almost entirely from the eyes of a child, who has lost his father and is trying to cope with it by going on, what he thinks, is the one last adventure through the city of New York, that his father had planned for him.

Really, over the years we have had many adventure movies of course but how many of them successfully combined it with some true heartfelt drama in it as well. On that level this movie is already really an unique and original one, that works on so many different levels.

It seems that the only reason why some people have some major problems with this movie and are even offended by it is because its drama involves 9/11 and uses its events to emote its audience. And of course while they have a point about this, I didn't feel at all as if it was using it in a cheap or gimmicky way, to easily get emotions from its audience. The only one thing I will complain about was that it kept referencing a bit too much at it at times. Really, one mention of it could had sufficed but the movie instead kept using some flashbacks at times, which were still powerful but it got done 2 or 3 times too many in my opinion. Besides, there were times I even got confused by it and didn't always intermediately noticed that it was a flashback I was watching.

I was absolutely loving all of the characters in this movie and also really liked it that the movie had the guts to portray a little kid as a little kid for a change and not one with some fake emotions, feelings and thoughts. Everybody was a kid once, some much longer ago than others but I do believe everybody should be able to identify in one way or another with its main character, played by the young Thomas Horn, who made his acting debut with this movie. But the same more or less goes for all of the other characters as well, who got very well written and got played by some well known and great actors. This movie probably features both Tom Hanks' and Sandra Bullock's best performance of the past years and Max von Sydow, who never says a word in this movie, even got nominated for an Oscar for his role in this movie.

Really, this is one of the best 2011 movies I have seen and it also definitely ranks among my favorite ones as well.

8/10

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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a film that haunts you all day after the closing credits. I just watched it this morning, Sept. 11th, 2012--weeping continually, which is not a typical reaction from me. Powerful stuff.

The story is about a child who lost his father in the World Trade Center attacks on that fateful day in our country's history. It is his journey to reconnect with his father's memory by going on a quest to find the lock that fits the key left mysteriously in a vase in his father's closet. Along the way, this shy and sensitive boy Oskar is forced to meet and interact with a range of citizens, and to hear their stories too.

More importantly, it is about connectedness. It is about realizing that you aren't alone in your pain, and learning how to reach out to others for help and comfort. It is about realizing that your alone-ness is an illusion.

I loved, loved, loved the chemistry of the father and son in the flashback scenes, loved the delightful and unconventional expeditions they embarked upon, and enjoyed coming along with Oskar and The Renter to solve the final mystery of the key. I thought that the child actor playing Oskar was wonderful in this breakout role; he carried the movie quite well, almost singlehandedly-- except for those scenes with Max Von Sydow's silent character, The Renter. Of course Von Sydow stole the show, and totally deserved his Academy nomination. In all, the actors were brilliant and compelling to match the heartfelt script.

Yes, there was a certain amount of emotional manipulation involved in this tearjerker (what else could you expect from a Sandra Bullock production nowadays?). I can overlook that and wholeheartedly recommend EL&IC to anybody as possibly the best "9/11" film to date.