Mexican film director Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También) has more than proven his worth in the American studio system with the wonderful dystopian doomsday thriller Children of Men. We have waited seven years for his next masterpiece, but the time has finally come: a thousand kilometres above the earth, no less, with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock in the only two roles and in digital 3D. In this claustrophobic space thriller, Dr Ryan Stone (Bullock) and veteran lieutenant Matt Kowalsky (Clooney) are introduced in a sublime and uninterrupted scene which lasts no less than 15 minutes. They are two astronauts who are repairing the Hubble telescope on behalf of NASA. While he plays the fool and she tries to focus, the camera crashes and tumbles about weightlessly as a life-sized earth looms up on the horizon. However, after a collision with space debris, the wreckage is soon zipping past their ears like bullets and before they know it they find themselves floating helplessly in space, looking for each other, for oxygen and radio contact with earth. Cuarón has no equal when it comes to staging action scenes as realistically as possible. In his typically intense style and with astonishingly long takes, Gravity keeps viewers in a stranglehold for the whole 90 minutes. Instead of chopping up the action and using fast cuts, Cuarón prefers to film everything in long fluid movements, as if he really could creep into the astronauts' helmets or a cramped space capsule with a digital camera. The fact that Cuarón once again proves himself to be an unconventional storyteller and a gifted professional turns Gravity into a refreshingly unpredictable and hugely intelligent action film. At the same time, however, it is also a nail-biting survival thriller set in outer space and a realistically raw drama in which Cuarón alternates breathtaking vistas with claustrophobic intimacy.