Gravity Reviews
Top CriticBelieve the hype: Gravity is as jaw-droppingly spectacular as you've heard - magnificent from a technical perspective but also a marvel of controlled acting and precise tone.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Unfolding as a series of terrifying object lessons in Newtonian physics, the movie lends new meaning to the phrase "spatial geometry."
Gravity is not a film of ideas, like Kubrick's techno-mystical 2001, but it's an overwhelming physical experience -- a challenge to the senses that engages every kind of dread.
Nerve-racking, sentimental and thrilling, Gravity honors terra firma even as it reaches for the stars with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Cuarón and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, keep the audience in weightless suspension right along with the astronauts. For most of us, Gravity is the closest we will ever get to the real deal.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Doctoral theses will be penned on the breath-catchingly realistic, gorgeously choreographed, entirely mesmerizing opening ...
In the end "Gravity" has only the most basic things to say, but it says them so well and presents them so marvelously that it's a cinematic wonder.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Gravity is a celebration of the primal pleasure of movies.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
This is one of the most stunning visual treats of the year and one of the most unforgettable thrill rides in recent memory.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It strives to bring cinema's past, especially the rip-roaring, edge-of-the-seat thrillers Hollywood used to make, into its technological, weightless, oxygen-free future.
Gravity is the kind of enthralling, all-encompassing, giddy cinematic experience that surfaces once in a blue moon.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
It's a rare combination of jaw-dropping special effects and visual artistry, and it also works as slam-bang entertainment with just two actors and a swift running time of 90 minutes.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
An existential action movie that unashamedly embraces the sensation of awe.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Words can do little to convey the visual astonishment this space opera creates. It is a film whose impact must be experienced in 3-D on a theatrical screen to be fully understood.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
A wildly suspenseful zero-g tale of survival 350 miles beyond the ozone layer, Alfonso Cuarón's space saga is emotionally jolting - and physically jolting, too.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
In one form or another, motion pictures have been with us since the middle of the 19th century, but there's never been one like "Gravity."
"Gravity" is a stratospheric achievement. Not just a futuristic drama, it's also a universally human drama about the need for hope in desperate situations.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
"Gravity" must be seen in theaters to be appreciated; the prospect of watching this movie on anything less than a 40-foot screen is tantamount to listening to Beethoven through a tin can and a string.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Even as it looks to the heavens, "Gravity" is bound to earth, where the beauty is in the details.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Gravity's great gift to the viewer is that it gives outer space back its beauty, terror, and wonder.
Gravity into a thing of transcendent beauty and terror. It's more than a movie. It's some kind of miracle.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
The visual splendor of "Gravity" is more than a matter of execution; it's also one of imagination.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
It's a relief to see an unconventional big-budget studio movie that doesn't hew to the same old pounding action beats, or person-to-person physical violence.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Not since 2001: A Space Odyssey has a film so vividly and realistically transmitted the feeling of being lost in the cosmos.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
That rarest of breeds: the intellectual blockbuster.
In a little more than 90 minutes [it] rewrites the rules of cinema as we have known them.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Watch this film on the biggest screen you can find, in 3D IMAX if possible - not to be overwhelmed by its noise and effects, but to join its smart, soulful heroine on her incredible journey and to experience the size of its quietness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Right from the start, Cuaron aims for the moon - and hits it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The movie's an astonishingly detailed, visually painstaking state-of-the-art production that advances what the cinema can show us-even as the human story at its center feels a little thin after a while.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
If our exploration of space emerged from imagination, science and the spark of inspiration, the extraordinary "Gravity" uses those same tools to craft a movie that might correctly be called a thrill ride with a brain.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Accept Gravity as pure, popcorn-munching show business fun and nothing else, and you won't go away disappointed. Leave logic at the concession stand.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
"Gravity" is an amazing movie for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is how Alfonso Cuaron tells what seems like a familiar type of story in a way we've never seen.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
As the credits roll, you may find yourself thinking about real space launches you've watched, or watching man walk on the moon, and remembering that feeling of awe at how man ever developed the technology to explore space in the first place.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Cuarón, a magician who brought personality to the Harry Potter series, is after pure, near-experimental spectacle.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Nearly everything about "Gravity" feels right, from its appropriate but compact running time to its satisfying conclusion.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
A visually enthralling popcorn movie with two big stars (Sandra Bullock and George Clooney) that will rivet vast crowds for every moment of its 90-minute running time with not a second wasted.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Gravity is a crowd-pleasing version of what scientists and mathematicians are said to experience in their rarefied sphere-a wondrous fusion of faith and science.
A hard-science tale that offers a uniquely poetic portrait of hope and survival, "Gravity" is a both a virtuoso technical achievement and a powerfully visceral cinematic experience.
What's astonishing about the film is its hypnotic seamlessness - the way that the director, Alfonso Cuarón, using special effects (and 3D) with a nearly poetic simplicity and command, places us right up there in space along with the people on screen.
This isn't just the best-looking film of the year, it's one of the most awe-inspiring achievements in the history of special-effects cinema.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
I haven't yet fully recovered.
A master class in fluid camerawork, bold, unfussy imagery and special effects that put most recent Hollywood blockbusters to shame.
If the film past is dead, Gravity shows us the glory of cinema's future. It thrills on so many levels. And because Cuarón is a movie visionary of the highest order, you truly can't beat the view.
At once the most realistic and beautifully choreographed film ever set in space, Gravity is a thrillingly realized survival story spiked with interludes of breath-catching tension and startling surprise.
[A] white-knuckle space odyssey, a work of great narrative simplicity and visual complexity ...
