Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

It takes a tremendous amount of delicacy and tact to pull off a movie about 9/11 without making the audience feel it's been strong-armed. Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, based on the Jonathan Safran Foer novel of the same name, puts you through the wringer.

The protagonist is a prodigiously intelligent nine-year-old boy named Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), who exhibits some characteristics of autism. His father, Thomas (Tom Hanks), who has turned daily life into a boundless adventure for Oskar, dies in the World Trade Center, leaving behind a series of phone messages that only Oskar hears before he hides the tape. When Oskar finds a key in an envelope marked "Black" hidden in his dad's closet, he goes on a secret mission to track down the lock it fits—which requires him to visit every person with the last name Black in the greater New York area. His companion on these trips is the old man (Max von Sydow) who is renting space in his grandmother's apartment in the next building. He too carries the marks of a traumatic past: the man doesn't speak, communicating his thoughts and responses on pieces of paper.