George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as astronauts in Alfonso Cuarón’s new movie.Illustration by Matthew Taylor

In Alfonso Cuarón’s frightening and beautiful space thriller, “Gravity,” the musical score, by Steven Price, builds to brain-assaulting volume, only to break suddenly into silence. The quiet registers on our emotions with greater violence than the ferocious din. In this movie, silence is not only the sound of chilly outer space; it’s the stillness of death, whose easeful allure beckons from the opening sequence to the last. “Gravity” is not a film of ideas, like Kubrick’s techno-mystical “2001,” but it’s an overwhelming physical experience—a challenge to the senses that engages every kind of dread. There’s strong pleasure in it, too; the movie is an adventure story in which each clumsy movement of mass and bodies startles.

At the beginning of the film, an experienced astronaut, Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), is working outside the shuttle Explorer with Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a nervous medical engineer who has never been in space before. Word comes from Houston (Ed Harris is the voice) that the Russians have demolished an obsolete satellite, which is sending fragments, shards, every kind of metallic schmutz, flying through the belt in which the shuttle orbits, some three hundred and seventy miles above Earth. The debris hits the spacecraft with vicious force, sending Kowalski and Stone spinning. Kowalski recovers, propelling himself this way and that with the little thruster jets built into his spacesuit, but Stone is adrift, tumbling over and over—she’s weightless, cut off from communication with Houston, breathing too fast and using up her oxygen. Horror films are nearly always driven by the fear of an unknown thing out there in the woods, or on the other side of the door. The ghost, sooner or later, materializes. What if the ghost were nothingness?

Kowalski rescues Stone from oblivion, calms her down, and sets out goals: get to the International Space Station, climb into a capsule, go back to Earth. The veteran asks the beginner about her life, and tries to get her to fasten on to something that would make her eager to return home. Stone replies that she lost a daughter, and then lost herself. The screenplay was written by Cuarón and his son Jonás, and they have shaped Stone’s floating dilemma as a metaphor for a life that’s in permanent suspension. The movie is told from her point of view. The beautiful Earth, its rivers gleaming in the sunlight, is a long way away, but, we’re meant to think, she hasn’t been on solid ground in years. Apart from a few moments—she strips down to her skivvies and floats upside down; she lands in a capsule and considers ending it right there—Bullock’s presence is just a face inside a space helmet. Both she and Clooney have to do their performing almost entirely with their voices. Yet what’s familiar in the temperaments of these two actors comes through, and that little bit of movie-star reassurance calms us down and allows us to enjoy the movie. Clooney is flippant and needling, but precise and persistent when he needs to be. Bullock is scared, angry that she’s scared, and funny about it. They’re a great team.

For Cuarón, it’s been a long and perplexing journey from “Y Tu Mamá También” (2001), the sexiest above-ground movie in recent years, to the fantastical “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (2004) and the brilliant and disturbing dystopian nightmare “The Children of Men” (2006). It would be hard to find a common preoccupation or style in all this. Cuarón may be a post-auteurist auteur, a great director who reinvents himself with every film. In this movie, the tempo goes from dreamy, drifting slowness, with Earth glowing in the darkness, to the terror of events happening with overwhelming speed. At one point, Stone hangs on to a long steel pole that swings around wildly, like a fairground ride sprung loose from its moorings. The audience itself is hanging at the end of that pole, trying to understand what’s going on; we fight for breath, just as Stone does. Cuarón and his team (the cinematographer is Emmanuel Lubezki) created the movie with a combination of C.G.I. and computer animation and a variety of new lighting and photography techniques. “Gravity” looks nothing like science-fiction fantasy. Just as Ang Lee used C.G.I. in “Life of Pi” to make a boy and a tiger stranded together in a boat seem plausible, Cuarón uses digital technology to make the action as real-seeming as possible. One thing you can say for big-budget movies: they allow the tech crew to invent what it needs to create a certain look. The movies become a kind of lab experiment. This one produced a wild ride that may not be equalled for a long time.

“Enough Said,” Nicole Holofcener’s shrewd new comedy, never makes the audience explode with laughter, but she’s not after hilarity. The writer-director of “Friends with Money” (2006) and “Please Give” (2010) has a wonderful ear for blunders, for jokes that wrong-foot the listener, for kindnesses that don’t quite reach the person they are intended to reach. Holofcener has become a perceptive chronicler of the sentimental side of upper-middle-class life. She ignores the larger world, and devotes herself to such things as friendship, marriage and divorce, the bonds of love and irritation between mothers and daughters. After a sojourn in New York (her native city) for “Please Give,” she has returned to Los Angeles (where she lives), with its sunshine; its casual social life, in which people just drop in and exchange confidences; and its characters such as a local highbrow poet, played by Catherine Keener, who lives in a house that looks like an overplanted garden and dresses in loose-fitting, shepherdess-chic garments.

The poet, Marianne, is the satisfied client of a masseuse, Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who zips around the city with a portable massage table in her little blue car. Eva has a discomforting intimacy with her clients, but what she needs is real intimacy. Divorced, about fifty, with an adored daughter about to go off to college, Eva starts a love affair with a divorced man, Albert (James Gandolfini), also about fifty, whose adored daughter is also heading for school. The first stages of the affair go well enough, but there is a problem. Unbeknownst to Eva, Albert was married to Marianne. Eva, working on Marianne as a client, and then talking with her as a friend, listens sympathetically as the poet endlessly bad-mouths her ex. By the time Eva realizes that Marianne is describing Albert, she’s too embarrassed to say anything. She doesn’t want to end the relationship with Marianne; she’s flattered to be the confidante of a writer who knows Joni Mitchell. And she’s not by nature critical enough to realize that Marianne is a friendless narcissist with a nasty tongue.

The basic plot might have turned up on a network sitcom (some of the harping on body parts is Seinfeldian), but Holofcener doesn’t do slapstick. For her, ordinary encounters are awkward enough without people falling over sofas or smacking their foreheads. The scenes of Eva and Albert’s early days together are classic vignettes of observation. They are both scared, and, like any new couple, spend a lot of time matching tastes and throwing each other curves. They each have a penchant for put-ons and mock insults. They compare feet. They even examine each other’s molars, an activity usually confined to buying a horse. And they weave their daughters in and out of their meetings. The movie encompasses the middle-aged parents’ trial—the bewilderment of pride and anguish as children leave home. Holofcener gives Tracey Fairaway, who plays Eva’s needy daughter, and Eve Hewson, Albert’s prickly, judgmental offspring (she has more than a bit of Marianne in her), enough space to create genuine characters. It’s a movie that approaches novelistic richness.

Like many smart, sensitive people, Eva is scared to be straightforward about what she wants. She’s even a little sheepish, as if she were afraid she would be punished for being assertive. For Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who is so tough in a lot of her TV work, Eva’s tentativeness is something new; she’s good at the stop-and-go approach to the character—nervous smile, rapid wisecracks—though I wish she would cease chewing on her mouth after every line, as if she were doing the punishing herself. Eva’s divorce hasn’t been too painful; Albert’s has left him wounded and defensive. Gandolfini has the difficult task of playing a proud man who knows that he’s unattractive to women—at least, at first. Holofcener and her crew don’t try to make him look better: he has his Jersey-Falstaffian belly and a bulbous nose with a red tip, and he wears a bushy beard. His massive body is much discussed by the women, and the role could have brought out a masochistic streak in a lesser actor. But, in one of his final roles, Gandolfini, without bullying his way through scenes or hiding Albert’s need for love, makes his character a man who knows that dignity is something you must hold on to in life if any relationship is going to work at all. ♦