Gravity

A film set in orbit. A shuttle is out for a repair. Doctor Stone is fitting hardware to a telescope on her first mission. A warning comes. The pieces of a destroyed satellite have spread through orbit and pass the same point every ninety minutes. The debris arrives. The shuttle breaks up, the crew is killed, and Stone is spinning in the void with nothing attached. From there the film is a series of attempts to reach something. A space station, an escape capsule, a fire, oxygen running out and fuel running out. What the narrative is interested in is not space but solitude: there is a loss in the character's past and the film makes her live it again in the void. The cast is very small. It is almost a one-person film and there is no other human on screen for long stretches. The opening runs over thirteen minutes and is built as a single unbroken shot; the camera turns continuously and the sense of direction is deliberately taken away. The sound design keeps a rule. There is no sound in space and the film holds to it; everything heard comes through contact or over the radio. Most of the image is digital. In most scenes the actors hung inside a box of lights and everything outside their bodies was made afterwards. The film won seven Academy Awards, including Best Director, cinematography and the sound categories. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are in the cast. Alfonso Cuarón directed. Who it is for: anyone who wants a technically ambitious, tense and short film. Who it is not for: anyone looking for depth of story; the narrative is simple and states its emotional line outright.