Gravity

Alfonso Cuarón, 2013, UK/USA, 91 mins, Certificate: 12

Screening in collaboration with Sydenham Arts

How do you survive alone, adrift in space? How do you keep living when you have lost everything? Can you start over?

Oscar winner Sandra Bullock (“The Blind Side”), is in her finest moment as Dr. Ryan Stone, a brilliant engineer on her first shuttle mission, with veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney). When abruptly, her routine work is interrupted by an unimaginable disaster, she and Kowalski are left as the sole survivors, tethered to nothing but each other and spiralling out into the blackness and the eerie silence of space. Where they don’t belong.

Visionary Mexican Alfonso Cuarón (“Y Tu Mamá También”, “Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban”, “Children Of Men”) writes (along with his son, Jonás) and directs this breathtaking film, which can be at once a spectacular, deafening and extrovert adventure and an austere, quiet and introvert philosophical essay on what it means to be human and the possibility of rebirth.

A film that defies gravity (pun intended), more than deserves the seven Oscars and the 6 BAFTAS that it won, including Best Director in both occasions and is perfect to mark our second in a year collaboration with Sydenham Arts, after the huge success of our July screening of “Three Billboards Oustide Of Ebbing, Missouri” as part of Sydenham Arts Summer Festival 2018 of “Heroes & Heroines”.

Reviews:

★★★★ “For all its stunning exteriors, it’s really concerned with emotional interiors, and it goes about exploring them with simplicity and directness”. Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com