In Telluride, a Peek at ‘Gravity\'

TELLURIDE, Colo. - In its 40th year, the Telluride Film Festival has added an extra day and a new site, the 650-seat Werner Herzog, housed in an ice rink at the edge of town and named for the German director who has been a regular presence here for most of the festival's history. The Herzog was the scene Saturday night of the first North American showing of “Gravity,” which arrived from the Venice Film Festival on a vapor trail of excited buzz.

“Gravity,” which stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts stranded, like David Bowie's Major Tom, far above the world, brought a shot of pure, giddy entertainment to this high-altitude gathering of serious-minded cinephiles. Directed by Alfonso Cuaron from a script he wrote with his son Jonas, the film uses 3D to evoke the feeling of weightlessness experienced by the characters. It also brings some of the wonder and mystery back to cinematic space, inviting comparisons to Stanley Kubrick's “2001” and Ridley Scott's “Alien,” and making most recent science-fiction epics seem clumsy and earthbound by comparison.

Another movie about the fight for survival in a hostile environment, J.C. Chandor's “All Is Lost,” has drawn crowds here, as have the tributes to the film's star-and only cast member-Robert Redford. Mr. Redford, playing an unnamed man on a foundering sailboat in the Indian Ocean, utters barely a word in “All Is Lost,” which anchors an allegory of human survival within an intensely practical story of desperate troubleshooting.

While it is considered somewhat gauche to speak of the Oscars here in the San Juan mountains on Labor Day weekend, the fact is that the last three Best Picture winners (“Argo,” “The Kings Speech” and “The Artist”) encountered their first North American audiences here. Mr. Redford's name is already at the top of any list of presumptive best actor nominees, and it is likely to be joined by Chiwetel Ejiofor, the star of Steve McQueen's “12 Years A Slave,” which arrived in Telluride as a sneak preview.

Based on a memoir by Solomon Northup, a free black resident of New York state kidnapped into slavery in 1841, “12 Years” is by far the most ambitious of Mr. McQueen's three features (“Hunger” and “Shame” are the others) and an impressive blend of radical and conventional movie techniques. Its violence is appropriately harsh, given Mr. McQueen's determination to illustrate the full cruelty of American slavery, but it is also emotionally accessible and thought-provoking in a way that should engage audiences and extend the discussions about race and film that have rippled around “The Help,” “Django Unchained,” “Lincoln” and more recently “Lee Daniels' The Butler.”