Carrie

Carrie on

Kimberly Peirce’s 2013 remake of Carrie White’s widely known horror story works adequately as a standalone movie, but more or less exactly copies the prom dress worn by its predecessors. It plays as both a supernatural horror and a coming-of-age high school film, and is a modest success at both. Disturbing more than scaring, with a dark crescendo into the iconic climax at the prom that will still petrify even those who know exactly what will happen, Carrie (the film) doesn’t deserve to be picked on – but it doesn’t deserve to win prom queen, either.

Based on Stephen King’s very first published novel, the story is heavily known, and nothing much has changed with the remake. Carrie White (Chloë Grace Moretz) is that girl who sits in the back of the room and never talks and everyone torments (though was it just me or was there only a few bullies and mostly people sticking up for her this time?). Her mother Margaret (Julianne Moore) does not help. She’s a crazy church lady taken too far, and suspects her daughter of being sinful and also maybe a witch on the side. She forcibly locks Carrie (or as she freakishly calls her, “little girl”) in a closet for hours to make her pray for sins Carrie usually didn’t intentionally commit.

Gravity

No problem here Houston

It’s rare that a movie can command your attention, emotion, and respect as much as Gravity does. Planet Earth, stunningly shot in expansive detail, serves as a beautiful omnipresence almost always looming in the background throughout the film. It doubles both as an impossible goal for lost in space Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) to reach, and a constant reminder that the film does not take place in a realm of possibilities as we know them. Gravity abandons us and its small number of characters in a world far from our own, forcing the characters (and through immersive and absorbing emotional extension, the audience) to survive.

The film’s weightless physics makes every sequence look like a piece of flowing cinematic choreography, intricately imagined and executed by director Alfonso Cuarón. The camera breaks as little as possible, instead bobbing through space with graceful fluidity for up to twenty uninterrupted minutes. Cuarón’s camera movement alone makes the film stand out visually, but even greater are the film’s special effects. As 3D shares (and arguably quality) rapidly decline in the US, Gravity breaks the trend by producing something that cannot be properly experienced without it. Images from the film lingered in my mind days after seeing it. Gravity is a visual masterpiece without any stretch of the imagination.