Review: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

September 11th, 2001. Pretty bad day, overall. But ten years on, 9/11 is beginning to take its place alongside the Vietnam War in inspiring a genre of American cinema in its own right, and the story of how the day unfolded and its aftermath resonated is taking shape through filmmakers' eyes. The wounds are still raw, but while there might have been cries of "Too soon!" when Oliver Stone and Paul Greengrass released World Trade Center and United 93 respectively in 2006, in relative terms these guys waited longer than Coppola did before Apocalypse Now. Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close couldn't be accused of insensitivity: it's the first film I've seen to treat 9/11 as a historical event and look at the loss suffered in retrospect, rather than put you right in the middle of the clouds of debris or a doomed aeroplane.