Gravity

Believe 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.

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.

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.

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.

Gravity is less a feature film than cinema as experience: a new frontier in filmmaking that will appeal to studios trying to attract people to movie theaters.

It's the very definition of a thriller, from the mysterious locale to the unpredictably tumultuous events containing no hope of survival.

It is a big, bold picture that refuses to be timid, and it left me trembling. It's not just a film; it's something that happens to you.

It is exhilarating film-making, engineered with dizzying invention, and it combines commanding 3D digital effects -- some of the best I've ever seen -- with a surprisingly soulful touch.

Gravity becomes a character study driven by a riveting central performance and a radical thrill ride delivered with near real-time urgency which thrusts you through its implausibilities.

Beautiful and poetic, the image of small humans in fathomless space is also elegiac and eventually frightening.