Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Directed by Stephen Daldry

(PG-13)

**

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The premise of this handsomely made movie “sounds like a recipe for offensiveness,” said Robert Levin in TheAtlantic.com. Adapted from a Jonathan Safran Foer novel, it follows an 11-year-old boy as he wanders New York City on a quixotic hunt to reconnect with his father, who died in the Sept. 11 terror attacks. But the story isn’t meant to heal America; it’s simply an attempt to get inside the mind of a particular 11-year-old who’s grieving, and it’s made memorable by the “genuine” bond that emerges between its young star and a mute elderly companion. Extremely Loud is “not a terrible film, exactly,” said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon​.com. But it may be “something worse.” Too “polite and pretty and classed-up,” it turns the “nebbishy intensity” of Foer’s quirky fable into “Hollywood mush.” The actors do their best, said David Denby in The New Yorker. Newcomer Thomas Horn is “very adroit” at playing the precocious Oskar, and Tom Hanks is charming as his dad. But the boy’s personality grates. When Max von Sydow’s heavy silences feel like “an enormous relief from Oskar’s incessant prattle,” something’s gone wrong.