The Venice Film Festival started earlier today, with Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity opening to critical praise and boosting its chances during the awards season. Its two stars, George Clooney and Sandra Bullock attended the festival and spoke with reporters.
Variety's Justin Chang heaped praise on the film, which is Cuaron’s first since Children of Men. Chang predicts that the film should be an international success. He wrote that Gravity “is at once a nervy experiment in blockbuster minimalism and a film of robust movie-movie thrills, restoring a sense of wonder, terror and possibility to the bigscreen that should inspire awe among critics and audiences worldwide.”
Chang added that it is a “rare” film that will have viewers wondering “‘How did they do that?’ even as its central premise is so simple and immediately gripping that one might just as readily ask, ‘Why didn’t anyone do it sooner?’”
The Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy said that the thriller is “as close to feeling like you're in space as most of us will ever be.” He said that the filmmakers make it look as if the film was actually made in space. He said that cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki “has outdone himself here with images of astonishing clarity that, given the finesse of the 3D here, you practically feel you could step (or float) into.”
According to The LA Times, U.K. writers also had praise for Gravity. The Guardian gave it four out of five stars, comparing it to the acclaimed Russian film Solaris.
“Like Tarkovsky's Solaris... the film thrums with an ongoing existential dread,” Xan Brooks writes. “And yet, tellingly, Cuaron's film contains a top-note of compassion that strays at times towards outright sentimentality.”
Gravity hits theaters in the U.S. on Oct. 4. You can check out what Clooney had to say about the film below.
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