Oskar Schell is searching for the lost sixth borough of New York. I hadn’t heard of it either, but it’s there, just as sure as Brooklyn or Queens. The sixth borough is also a metaphor, but first comes the adventure.

America’s own Atlantis is just the latest of many such reconnaissance missions, devised by a father who understands his son is different. Not different in the way Harry Potter was different, but different and special in his appreciation of pride itself. Oskar is proud of his quests and his father. He is proud of his place in a world that doesn’t understand the wonder of its own invention. No one thinks of Central Park as magical, but it is. Thomas used to tell his son a bedtime story of how the park made its springtime journey from the sixth borough to its home in Midtown Manhattan. Even when Oskar didn’t believe him, it was enough that he desperately wanted to.

A message left at 9:12am changed everything. That morning, people began to wonder if they’d ever believe in anything again. Oskar was not one of them. Not when his father left for work, nor when he rang from a meeting on the 105th floor of the World Trade Centre. And even when he called for the sixth and final time, and Oskar knew he wouldn’t be coming back, he still believed in the mission left behind. A year would pass before Oskar could again venture into his father’s study. There, amongst possessions as varied as you’d expect a professional Jeweller to have accrued, Oskar would find a key. He believed that key would unlock something in New York. He believed it would unlock something in himself.

The post 9/11 drama is fraught with the propensity for morbid sentimentality. Cynicism is easy to come by when perfectly average movies boost themselves upon still deeply-felt traumas. Some, like the affecting United 93, would arrive at it honestly, and will rightly live on as a monument. Others are better forgotten. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close belongs more to the former than the latter, but I have sympathy for its detractors. You could write about how dewy-eyed it is in the biggest, boldest letters you could find, and still you wouldn’t have sufficiently made your point. Oskar Schell is cotton wool precociousness, who speaks like a character written and not lived. He shares with his contemporaries an untrue wisdom, voiced in run-on speeches that stop for neither man nor breath. He was once tested to see if he had Aspergers; a syndrome for the very smart who can’t run straight, his dad used to say. “The tests weren’t definitive.”

Binoculars, tambourine, and an Israeli gas mask; everything a grieving boy needs to stretch his father’s last moments to an eternity. As he sets off in search of the lock, he is chaperoned by his memories. They carry him along railway tracks and bridges, into the homes of the good and the kind. In this film, there is no other. Oskar conducts a city-wide Guess Who? game, its rules engineered to play into his endless fascination and the unfiltered manner in which he expresses it. He rages against the dying of the light, building a shrine to the family answering machine, with its recordings of calls made but never answered. It is the sound of a ghost, condemned to be play forever on repeat.

Subtlety is the first casualty in embracing accessibility; good sense occasionally another. I can’t attest to what taste there is in repeatedly referencing the tower’s so-called ‘jumpers’, but it certainly feels cheap on screen. Having conceived of this lost borough as a metaphor for the tragedy, the film did not need to extend itself to specifics, which only serves to muddy already delicate waters. Oskar himself is far less dubious, even if his artificiality is as galling as his condition – be it Aspergers or wonderment – is alienating. There is no accommodating that, since your enjoyment of the movie rests entirely on his fearless shoulders. Then again, with a certain kind of attitude, you weren’t going to like E.T. either.

As a director, Stephen Daldry gamely bridges the gap between Robert Zemeckis and Spike Lee, whose powerful 25th Hour is a surprisingly close relation, particularly in its extended coda. Both films are beholden to the human desire for closure, and of finding hope within the wreckage. Lee used 9/11 as a backdrop, while here it takes centre stage. Some will find its methods twee, others simply offensive. My own experience was far more positive. Extremely Loud is an honest movie, and many times a lovely one. It has a few surprises that feel genuine. They don’t cheat the story, which is important. There is nothing subtle about its view on the human condition, nor the likelihood of its premise. No 9-year-old would ever walk the length of New York to find a lock. But then it’s also a movie: you’ll get over it.

This is not above board. No one else knows.

George Smiley is quiet for the longest time, and when he does speak, it is with steady conviction. It’s amazing how glasses and an overcoat can transform a man. Gary Oldman, who shone so brightly as Stansfield and Sirius Black, disappears entirely into the body of a retired civil servant. He sits precisely, with eyes that move deliberately around the table. There they are: Tinker, Tailor, and Soldier. You’re wondering where the Spy is. So is everyone else.

Six men at the heart of the British secret service. This is their war room, from whence authors like John Le Carre envisioned ignoble men fighting back the red menace. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is Le Carre at the height of his paranoia. Shadowy figures move with impunity in a world of codenames and double agents, owed to Governments observing the maxim of security through obscurity. The screenplay is littered with references to The Circus and the Reptile Fund, offered without further explanation. This is not a film that waits for its audience.

In 1973, a British agent is dispatched to Hungary to meet with a defecting general. They sit at an outdoor cafe. Prideaux, the Brit, stirs his coffee and observes first the string band playing across the street, and then their waiter, who is sweating profusely. A shutter on a first floor window bangs gently in the breeze. We have long associated such stillness with trouble, and Prideaux feels it too. He turns to leave, only to be shot in the back. As the crowd scatters, his lifeless body slumps onto the cobbled street amidst passing screams and the revelation of a mole.

Two men had long suspected such a high-level intrusion. They had grown uneasy at the influence wielded by a small cabal of top officials, whose reputations were built on covert Soviet Intel obtained under the ‘Witchcraft’ program. They eagerly shared their bounty with their Americans counterparts, who, in turn, imparted their own. When Smiley – forcibly retired from the service some time ago – is contacted by an old figurehead to investigate his former associates, the stories he finds ring familiar. One woman was blacklisted after having brought allegations against the Soviet cultural attach to London. Another, a former agent working out of Istanbul, tried to alert his handlers to a double agent, only to be labelled a murderer, fugitive and Communist sympathiser.

You see how the film moves, but the pieces are ever in flux. There is nostalgia for a time passed; that of the great war, when the lines were more clearly drawn. Now, no one seemed to know what, or who, they were fighting. Claustrophobia was inescapable when even friends and neighbours were suspects for the enemy within. The set design amplifies that suffocation: authentic and referential, paying homage to a dusty era staffed not by attractive faces when average ones would do. The key players – Oldman, John Hurt, Toby Jones – are rightly aged. They move with the weight and anger of their years, cast for that and not some ill-defined point of marketability.

There is a tricky plot to follow – trickier still when its various strands are finally united – but there is no shame in asking an audience to concentrate, or even to watch again. Indeed, it is to be applauded. A weighty novel and its subsequent 7-part TV series have been drawn down into a concise, 2-hour work. Events are not always clear; explanations curtailed by the necessary push for time. So many complex films are needlessly so, and we respond with boredom. Here, our attention does not falter. What awaits is a stirring conclusion to the beat of La Mer, which some may better remember as Bobby Darin’s Beyond The Sea. Such a strange epilogue to the world that has gone before. That a dry 70s conspiracy should resolve in a french pop song and a return home; triumphant, as it ought to be.

Unsurprising, perhaps, that a film marketed for its fleeting perversions is, all told, a simple love story between two men. A Dangerous Method is one prom night away from Freud and Jung: The College Years, naively capturing the formation of modern psychotherapy amid the burgeoning friendship of its architects.

Keira Knightley’s role in all this has been, if not exactly oversold, then certainly mischaracterised. Sabrina Spielrein is a profoundly troubled young woman. Knightley imbues her with violent tics that would have you believe a dislocated jaw, so distended is its appearance. Upon her arrival in a Zurich hospital, she is cared for by Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), a psychiatrist with a keen interest in the virgin field of so-called talking therapies. Their sessions – akin to more modern practices in all but formality – are witness to Jung slowly unpeeling a childhood beset not just by violence, but the torment of her having enjoyed it.

It is clear how David Cronenberg’s film could be confused with a more sordid exploration; likened to a yesteryear Secretary, perhaps. Yet far more profound than its brief moments of masochistic punctuation are the scenes between Jung and Sigmund Freud: his friend, confessor and rival. Their relationship spans several years, and shifts with time. In the beginning, they relate as eager mentor and student, untroubled by discussions lasting 13 hours without pause. Despite his own theories oftentimes being dismissed as spurious, Jung quickly found Freud – already in his 50s by the time of their meeting – an altogether more intoxicating prospect than he had bargained for. He would later caution a friend that “he’s so persuasive; so convincing. He makes you feel you should abandon your own ideas and simply follow in his wake”.

Spielrein is not the third point of a love triangle. Instead, her function is as a point of divergence for the two men. In finally relenting to his patient’s sexual frenzy, Jung is humiliated; scolded for his childish indiscretion. Relations sour further when Freud learns of his friend’s expanding interest in the occult: in the mystical voodoo of tarot and the supernatural. Such fascinations seemed evidence of an intellect in disarray, unable to reconcile its primal drives with an otherwise ordered and idealised life. It was to be a fracture that manifested not only in Jung’s crumbling relations with Spielrein and Freud, but in that of his wife, Emma, and Otto Gross: a confidante whose own ideas on sexual morality would ultimately give rise to those very perversions.

Two titans of philosophy, given body by compelling performances. Fassbender, to whom cinema seemingly owes an entire year of box-office receipts, is the embodiment of denial in a role that sees his intellectualism transformed into paralyzing guilt. He certainly has the face for it. As depicted, Freud is more austere than popular perception would have it, and little room is found for his infamous drug habit. Vigo Mortisson succeeds his deranged turn in Eastern Promises by disappearing into our most famous of thinkers, not by means of prosthetic, but in adopting a rigidly disciplined manner wholly removed from his own.

These characters employ learned gamesmanship in a headfirst dive into the pool of repression. Nonetheless, at a brisk 90 minutes, A Dangerous Method is terminably sleight. Were it not for the weight of Fassbender and Mortensen’s respective performances, the film could easily have collapsed into pompous melodrama. Thankfully, it consistently punches above its weight. Here is the picturesque origin story of a now widely-practiced field. It was not always thus. “Columbus had no idea what country he’d discovered. Like him, I’m in the dark”, Freud conceded. “All I know is I’ve set foot on the shore and the country exists”.