It’s an expensive 2013 production, so naturally it’s the best-looking space movie I’ve seen.

The zero-gravity condition in various spacecraft spots in 2001: A Space Odyssey becomes dizzying zero-gravity spinning and ceaseless floating in Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity.  The striking outer hardware of spaceships in 2001 becomes an ugly jumble of fascinating hardware, lengthy cables and all, in Gravity.  It’s certainly a technical improvement on Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film.  There is also a bit of Alien-style violence (a dead astronaut with a big hole in his face) and a shot of a space technician played by Sandra Bullock shedding her astro-suit a la Jane Fonda’s Barbarella (ugh), revealing a pair of shorts but without getting topless.  Thus Cuaron was influenced by several other sci-fi pics, yet Gravity is indeed its own movie, a singular achievement.

I don’t know why so much goes wrong for Sandra as she struggles in the heavens, but it’s quite a spectacle when it does.  And I saw the film in 2D, not 3D—surely even more enthralling.  There are terrifically vivid closeups of Bullock, and blunt, beguiling cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki.  Enjoy.

Weightlessness Tests (Photo credit: San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives)

Fay Grim (2008), by Hal Hartley, is superficial and ridiculous.

A sequel to Hartley’s odious Henry Fool, it stars the gifted Parker Posey as a bemused woman, Fay Grim, who is patently not much of a character but must endure intelligence officials and locate her missing husband, Henry Fool, at the same time.  Semi-political comedy not at all funny, it tells of the CIA’s fervent interest in the possibility that Henry has written a code which, as J. Hoberman puts it, “amounts to a secret, highly damning history of the Reagan Era.”  Close to every artistic choice Hartley has made in FG is highly damning to his film.  Again, it’s superficial, but also the tone falls apart, the camera is always tilted, the story is monstrously intricate, the whole blasted movie is foolishly offputting.  A Grim situation.

Fay Grim (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Despite a few clinkers, the 1960s were a good decade for cinematic Westerns.  March of  ’60 saw the last Randolph Scott picture Bud Boetticher directed:  the 75-minute Comanche Station.  Ride the High Country or True Grit it ain’t—it’s minor—but still has a lot going for it.

An original screenplay by Burt Kennedy has Jefferson Cody (Scott) trading with Comanches for a captive white woman.  Indian aggression at a stagecoach station forces Cody to escort the woman (Nancy Gates) to her home, but they’re in the company of three crooks, interested in reward money for the damsel’s return.

A likable Western, Boetticher’s film tries to resist banality (up to a point).  It’s a pleasant-looking work with a truly lovely actress in Miss Gates and some veritable (because nudity-free) sensuality.  Further, it has an imaginative score by Mischa Bakaleinikoff.

English: Nancy Gates in Comanche Station (1960) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Nicole Holofcener has a new movie out—Enough Said (2013)—and again she has nothing to say about politics (or religion) and everything to say about human relationships and the undesirable behavior therein.  Good for her.

Critic Joe Morgenstern is right:  Eva, the main character, is a needy middle-aged woman who faces an empty life.  This is precisely why she is practically displacing her daughter, about to go off to college, with her daughter’s best friend, and why she becomes so anxious to know whether what is being said about the man who starts courting her is the truth (Enough said!).  The person doing the talking is the man’s ex-wife, and the man—her new beau—is overweight Albert.  That Eva is ignorant about the nature of love, the love she will be expected to show, is a significant subject in the film.

Like her other pictures, Holofcener’s current effort is an intelligent comedy.  Julia-Louis Dreyfus, as Eva, was born to play this character, and the late James Gandolfini is soothingly true and sympathetic as Albert.  The film is poignant, with far-from-stale dialogue:

Eva:  “I’m tired of being funny.”  (Funny in what sense? we wonder.)

Albert:  “So am I.”

Eva, after a pause:  “But you’re not funny.”

Slightly thought-provoking, this is not everyday dialogue.  Holofcener wants to make movies for the ages.  That may well happen with some of them, Enough Said included.

James Gandolfini (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Agnieszka Holland film, In Darkness (2012), from Poland, relates the true story of a Polish sewer worker and the few Jews he hides from the Nazis in the city sewers.  Coarse and initially unprincipled, the sewer worker later turns compassionate and solicitous.  Of course the bulk of the film’s sympathy goes to the Jews, but they too are pronouncedly flawed.  They can be selfish, disloyal and ungrateful.  Meanwhile the Polish collaborators with the Germans—as well as the Germans themselves—are stunningly vile.

Familiar in certain ways, gratifyingly fresh in others, this perfectly made movie is a masterwork of period realism.

(In Polish, etc., with English subtitles)

Agnieszka Holland. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)