Up, up and away

SPACE - that elusive final frontier - has served the movies well over the years as a real but ever-mysterious backdrop for stories about heroes and monsters, explorers and extra-terrestrials, and all their imagined interplanetary exploits. However, no film has the pull of Gravity when it comes to conveying what it might be like to float un-tethered in outer space - alone and adrift among the stars.

In Gravity, director Alfonso Cuaron has made a visually stunning and emotionally stirring movie about astronauts lost in space, harnessing the fear and fascination associated with a place that represents a Great Unknown for most mortals. It's a feat that should earn him a place among the celestial bodies of the cinematic world.

At its core, Gravity is a simple tale about a routine shuttle mission to make repairs to the Hubble Space telescope - until things go horribly wrong, of course.