Gravity

La La Land

Crit

Yes, this was a good way to have my heart broken on Christmas evening.

Oops: was I supposed to say "spoiler alert"? Sorry, but if you don't recognized perfectly matching Mia (Emma Stone) and Seb (Ryan Gosling) as doomed from the get-go, you have neither lived enough nor seen enough movies. In fact, if you don't recognize that from the get-go, you probably don't even recognize that when they meet with cute mutual enmity (in an LA traffic jam, he leaning on his horn, she flipping him off), they're destined to fall in love. You should probably see Why Him? instead.

I was gaga over Damien Chazelle's breakthrough Whiplash, and I also loved 10 Cloverfield Lane, which he wrote (and which also reminds me that in fact I had not had to wait until The Autopsy of Jane Doe to see an excellent horror film this year), but let's face it: there's a lot not to like here. Neither Stone nor Gosling is any more than passable (and maybe a bit less) as either a singer or a dancer, and I suspect that if you listened to the soundtrack before seeing the film, you'd find the songs uniformly un-special. And then there's that long dramatic segment in the middle, when doom is rearing its doomy head and the film altogether forgets that it's a musical, never mind a musical comedy.

And yet.

The songs are not out of context, and in context they charm, and the leads' very humanly minimal mastery of vocal and terpsichorean technique is irrelevant when we've already fallen for them individually and as a duo. It's also a terrific film to look at, and after it has broken your heart, it finds a genius salve to melt that sucker altogether. Just beautiful.

Trailers

• Going in Style--Another unnecessary remake.
• The Shack--Looks unbearably uplifting.