Manny Casillas (casillase1)

If you think War Horse is just director Steven Spielberg's way of trying to wrest cheap tears and sentient from us unsuspecting audiences then snap out of it. Cynicism is nowhere to be found in Spielberg's films, and nowhere is that more evident than in his latest about an English farm boy whose beloved horse, Joey, is sold to the service for the battlefields of World War I. An adaptation of the 1982 children's novel by Michael Morpurgo, Spielberg stays remarkably faithful to the source material, but doesn't totally restrict himself to it. Which is a good thing, seeing as how War Horse has already been adapted for the stage in a production that utilizes life-size horse puppets. Spielberg plays the whole thing for real, and used at least eight different horses to portray Joey, the red bay with a white cross on its forehead and four white socks. It's a touching, heartfelt and visually dazzling film, complemented by Janusz Kaminski's incredible cinematography, Michael Kuhn's superb editing and a terrific script by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis.

War Horse begins a bit slow at first but picks up. First life is established on the Dartmoor farm, home to teenage Albert (Jeremy Irvine) and his alcoholic father (Peter Mullan) and practical mother (Emily Watson). Spielberg employs a series of seeping land shots, and fades to black, suggesting this is a film John Ford would likely make were he still with us. Along with a rousing John Williams score, things pick up when Joey is sold to the service and taken to France, where horses were frequently used to haul supplies and ammunition and lead charges into battle. Few horses survived the war, so Albert is understandably worried, even though the British officer purchasing him (Tom Hiddleston, who I'm really starting to love) promises to send Albert news of Joey.

From there the film tracks a series of encounters Joey has, including his run in with a French girl (Celine Buckens) and her grandfather (Niels Arestrup, superb and heartbreaking), and fellow war horse Triphorn. Spielberg stays within the confines of a PG-13 rating, but to his credit, he doesn't skimp on the details that go into the carnage that is war. No one does it like Spielberg. The scene of a frightened Joey galloping through a battlefield and then trapped by barbed wire is a harrowing thing of beauty, as powerful as the subsequent moment when two soldiers from opposing sides join together to free him. War Horse stays with you, let it work its magic.

I doesn't suck and the acting is solid, it's just that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, adapted by director Stephen Daldry (The Reader) and screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) from the novel by Jonathan Safron Foer, is so drunk on its own self-importance it's no wonder it received a Best Picture nomination last week. The driving plot point is, of all things, 9/11, where more than 3,000 children lost their parents in the attacks on New York City. Enter eleven-year-old Oskar Schell (newcomer Thomas Horn), a lonely, but talented and intuitive child, who might have Asperger's, and is still reeling from the loss of his jeweler father Thomas (Tom Hanks). Oskar copes one way by drawing his father falling from the towers and then rising up to the sky. Oskar also hides the phone machine where his father left six messages from his mother Linda (Sandra Bullocks, in her first role since winning an Oscar). The boy also finds ways to deal with his grief by breaking a blue vase from his father's closet, and finds en envelope with a key inside, marked 'Black'. Knowing his father's penchant for games and puzzles, Oskar sets out across New York City's five boroughs to find all 472 residents named Black, and find some sort of answer.

This is delicate business being transacted here, and Daldry, a three-time Oscar nominee for Billy Elliott, The Hours and The Reader, makes sure to be extra careful. Still, his restraint can't hide the fact that the film is rather trite, despite Roth's eliminating of some of the novel's more annoying elements and instead putting the focus squarely on Oskar's mind. Oskar's travels leads him to bash out a tambourine and comes across many characters like Stan The Doorman (John Goodman) and a troubled and divorcing couple (Viola Davis and Geoffrey Wright, both wonderful), all of it seen through Oskar's eyes. The one thing that really gets Oskar out of his shell is his grandmother (Zoe Caldwell) and her tenant known only as The Renter (the amazing Max Von Sydow), who is mute with a 'Yes' written on one hand and a 'No' on the other. Von Sydow gives the most restrained and moving performance of the whole film, while Horn does a decent job of bearing his burden. Extremely Loud does come across as moving and even disturbing, but nor for the right reasons.