On the specific formal achievement of Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity (2013) and what it requires of its viewer.

Gravity is a survival film that is also a formal argument about cinema's relationship to space. The zero-gravity environment denies the film the compositional conventions of surface cinematography: there is no horizon, no ground level, no stable spatial reference. The camera can move in three dimensions rather than two, and Lubezki uses this freedom to create a spatial language that had not existed in cinema before.

The opening shot — the long, continuous take that begins with Earth from orbit and ends with Sandra Bullock tumbling through space — is the film's thesis statement: space is beautiful, empty, and lethal. The shot is long enough that you begin to feel the absence of sound, the absence of friction, the absence of everything that makes the Earth survivable.

But the film's formal achievement is inseparable from its emotional argument. Gravity is about a woman who has decided to die and finds she cannot. Every technical choice — the claustrophobia of the suit, the disorientation of the tumbling, the unreachable voice of Clooney — is in service of an emotional journey that the film executes with complete commitment.