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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. (2012.02.18)

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. (2024.02.09)

A mistake squared – a bad adaptation of a bad book (or rather a book that tries too hard). The literariness is manifested from the opening minutes through the voice-over, though this time it finds its justification in the nature of Oskar, who communicates mainly with himself. Daldry didn’t manage to emulate the book’s expressive richness. Compared to the book, the story in the film is told in an incomprehensibly conventional manner as an inverted Oedipal (melo)drama with a very clear aim (exalting the motif of seeking/expedition), recast in material form just to be sure. The Oedipal aspect is inverted only on the surface, as Oskar declares when lashing out that he would prefer that his mother had died instead of his father, his notional arch-enemy, but the father-son issue is dealt with throughout the film. Whereas the book managed to be gripping at least in the passages that take on the perspective of Oskar’s grandparents, the film filters events exclusively through the young boy’s naïve point of view. So, Oskar certainly knows more than his peers, but – as in the book – it isn’t clear if this involves memorised facts or if he is a little genius. The protagonist is unreadable and strange only in a way that suits the filmmakers’ purposes. The film’s atmosphere is also characterised by vagueness, as on the one hand it contains moments of levity (often unintentional, e.g. when Sandra Bullock reveals her parallel mission, which not even an elite CIA agent would be ashamed to carry out) and, on the other hand, it is unable to view the subject of death from a distance, without the burden of charged emotions. Oskar’s statement that “I don’t know a single thing that I didn’t know when I started” applies equally to him and to us, as the film is infected with the fear of remembering what actually happened. It only re-enacts a national tragedy without in any way deconstructing it. The delay in revealing information that pushes the plot forward in a direction that is already known to us is thus all the more tiresome. I had thought that such tenderness and false compassion in relation to 9/11 were already passé. Apparently, I was wrong. 45% (2012.08.10)

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… :-) (2012.02.11)

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. (2013.07.07)