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
Alfonso Cuarón
Sandra Bullock, George Clooney
USA
2013
English
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Screenwriter
Alfonso Cuarón, Jonás Cuarón
Cinematography
Emmanuel Lubezki
Editor
Alfonso Cuarón, Mark Sanger
Original Music
Steven Price
Production Design
Andy Nicholson
Art Director
Mark Scruton
Also in This Series
Amelie
One of the most popular French films of the past 25 years, Amelie is a delightfully whimsical confection from the ever-inventive Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Audrey Tautou stars as a young Parisienne who resolves to make the world a happier place...
The Conversation
Gene Hackman is Harry Caul, 'the best bugger on the West Coast', a surveillance expert whose jealously guarded anonymity is threatened when he happens across what seems to be a murder plot.
The Fall (4K Restoration)
Shot over four years across 24 countries, cowritten by a six year old girl, and entirely self-financed by commercials director Tarsem, The Fall is such a mind- (and eye) boggling movie it's hard to believe it actually exists. Yet here it is!