Gravity

Alfonso Cuarón won the first of his two Oscars for Best Director with this nail-biting space thriller. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are two US astronauts stranded in space after a calamitous close encounter with Soviet space junk. The International Space Station is just a short hop — 1500 km — away, but time is tight before the space junk completes its orbit and hammers them again…

The title is ironic, of course. Utilizing cutting edge digital fx, Cuarón conjures the terrifying weightlessness and silence of space, the existential void that envelopes all life on earth. Yet the film is visceral in its impact, and in its way an exercise in abstract filmmaking — “pure cinema,” as Christopher Orr put it in The Atlantic.

Gravity is something now quite rare—a truly popular big-budget Hollywood movie with a rich aesthetic pay-off. Genuinely experimental, blatantly predicated on the formal possibilities of film, Gravity is a movie in a tradition that includes D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, Abel Gance’s Napoleon, Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, as well as its most obvious precursor, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Call it blockbuster modernism.

J Hoberman, NY Review of Books

A stunning display of pure cinema.

Christopher Orr, The Atlantic

Gravity, a weightless ballet and a cold-sweat nightmare, intimates mystery and profundity, with that mixture of beauty and terror that the Romantics called the sublime.

Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail

Media Partner