Film Carew: Gravity, Rush, Thanks For Sharing, Lovelace

“The silence,” murmurs Sandra Bullock peacefully, when her character, a medical-engineer-turned-astronaut, is asked what she likes about being up in space. What's best about Gravity is the way it uses that silence; how every piece of sound takes place within a space helmet; in the hot breath of exhalation and the staticy crackle of a radio signal; this a rare explosion movie in which each detonation doesn't rattle the surround-sound speakers, but barely makes a ripple. It would've been a daring, avant-gardist choice to have that silence persist through the film; but, soon enough, there's a bombastic score from Steven Price, which is at its worst when pounding out percussive dread or squalling up a scraped-strings burst to go with a lazy jump-scare. Bullock's love of the silence is, really, a piece of cheap foreshadowing; this peacefulness due to be shattered mere moments after she opens her mouth. Space movies exist, after all, so that things can go wrong.

Lamenting the clunky writing or rote characterisation of Gravity - in which Bullock's career-woman has a perfunctory dead daughter, and George Clooney borders on smirking self-parody - is, admittedly, looking at it the wrong way. Alfonso Cuarón's gloriously-visual 3D experience is less piece of narrative storytelling, more theme-park ride; a space-simulator for audiences stuck on earth sporting silly glasses. It attempts to put you inside the helmet, at times literally gazing from Bullock's point-of-view; space seen as first-person-perspective. Cuaron's 'camera', composed in a digital-unreality, floats freely and moves fluently, its vivid images assembled into long, 'unbroken' shots that know tension is released every time you cut away.

It's being sold as an action-movie, but Gravity doesn't feel like one; doesn't have that same tired, verse/chorus formula that bounces between set-piece and down-moment, drama and comic-relief, with market-tested tedium. Instead, it functions as a cinematic manifestation of chain-reaction: when one thing goes wrong, so does another, then another, then another. There's no time to stop and lick your wounds; only a breathless rush in hopes of survival. The movie takes its cue from that, barely waiting 5 minutes before throwing its space-duo into hot water, then hurtling towards its end. As much as it will be praised for its expansive, visionary depiction of space, Gravity is no generic tentpole spectacle, drunk on its own largesse. Instead, it does its work in under 90-minutes, a piece of filmmaking efficiency unheard-of in an era of blockbuster bloat.

“Men love cars!” pronounces Christian McKay's cravat-sporting, champagne-sipping, racing-owner toff, and Rush takes that axiom as its MO; the least you can say is that it knows its audience. Ron Howard's already done the high-testosterone portrait of men who look death in the eye - and the women who worry about them - with Apollo 13, but Rush does so at silly speed, with a collection of stylistic tics out to capture the collective insanity of Formula 1 racing. Importing Danny Boyle's borderline-zany DP-inventor Anthony Dod Mantle, Rebel Alley's dad turns him loose: race days on Rush finding wobbly camera cocked at a collection of upward-tilted angles; the need to know who's winning and who's losing less necessary than capturing the sound and fury of metal coffins hurtling around a tarmac track at lightning speeds. It's a film in which even the on-screen titles are delivered at a jaunty, racing angle.

Rush chronicles the '70s rivalry - sometimes hostile, sometimes fraternal - between F1 foils James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl); climaxing at a final-race-in-1976 in which every character from the movie watches their TVs, an unintentionally-funny finale evocative of Seinfeld's 'The Pilot'. Hunt and Lauda are the original odd couple: Hemsworth all flaxen curls, white teeth, and watching-himself-in-the-bathroom-mirror-whilst-he-fucks-a-stewardess; Brühl an exacting egghead so emotionless he's like an automotive autistic. Hemsworth is drunk on joie de vivre, and often scotch; but Brühl declares: “Happiness is the enemy, it weakens you!” That this is his lament at getting to fuck Alexandra Maria Lara - the glamour in this film's “glamorous” '70s-racing world made manifest - should tilt him towards 'villain' in the eyes of the audience's car-loving-men. But the script by Peter Morgan (who, amongst many credits, previously penned Frost/Nixon and The Damned United, which seem the most apt forebears here) is at pains to present both men on equal footing; to neither be sucked in by Hemsworth's charisma or repelled by Brühl's prickliness.

Asif Kapadia's overrated documentary, Senna, cinematically stalled because it conflated sporting success with human worth; mounting a hagiography on Saint Ayrton that glossed over the fact he was a total dick. Morgan makes no such mistake: Rush is a portrait of inherently flawed men, whose driven pursuit of winning, of “greatness”, borders on mental illness, and whose chosen occupation is a mixture of heroic valour and hyper-masculine stupidity. The screenplay uses the word asshole so much, in so many ways, that it becomes a motif; a term batted back-and-forth between Hemsworth and Brühl in their verbal sparring (online soon: an “asshole” super-cut of Rush). But its persistent presence is also a tacit acknowledgement that these heroes are anything but; that they were, indeed, assholes. Driving cars fast in circles doesn't make them worthy of our admiration, but how and why they did makes them figures of fascination.

Thanks For Sharing is a film about sex-addiction that attempts to tackle the subject with some sense of realism. It's cinematically inferior to Steve McQueen's Shame, but morally superior; there's no gay-panic or sister-killing-hysteria, just a bunch of flawed characters trying to get a handle on a compulsion that's spiralled out-of-control. The film finds the decent debut turn by stupid-popular pop-singer Pink, and also sketches key roles for Goopy Paltrow, all horrible ironed hair and boasts of fitness, and Joely Richardson, long-suffering spouse who's wiser than she seems. But mostly it's a self-described 'sausage-fest': with Mark Ruffalo, Josh Gadd, and Tim Robbins ensconced in the backslappin', hearty-handshakin' boys-club fraternity of an addicts-anonymous program. The darkhorse is Robbins' son, Patrick Fugit, a 'white knuckler' who dares dismiss the group-help model; but delivers a speech - “sorry I've been a shitty son, dad. I don't wanna disappoint you anymore, pop” - torn from the pages of middle-aged-male fantasy. The lingering irony being that Robbins has been the shittiest of dads; Thanks For Sharing filled with people trying to collectively put the painful past behind them.

More than anything, Stuart Blumberg's directorial debut is about America's addiction addiction. About how, in an anxiety-inducing era in which the empowered consumer can have how much of whatever they want whenever they want, even fucking can be turned into a 'disease' demanding 12-step sobriety and submission to a higher power. Every character herein is in recovery from something: abuse, alcoholism, narcotics, painkillers, cancer, OCD; with their turn to God or meditation or obsessive exercising just picking up a new crutch. It's, in that way, a portrait of America; a land of evangelical, born-again Christianity that demands its citizens bear a self-mythologising narrative of rock-bottom, recovery, redemption; where even a coked-up military deserter can become president if he embraces Jesus and Near Beer.

It's par for the stock-screenwriting course for biopics to begin in-medias-res, at a telling moment in the subject's later career, before flashing back to before the myth was born; so stock that that's how Joshua Michael Stern's hilariously-bad Jobs kicks off. But Andy Bellin's Lovelace screenplay earns its flashback when it later does the same flashback all over; a second 'six years before' title sending us back to the beginning, before the same events are replayed from a shaded perspective. The first time around, it's a piece of early-porn-chic, in which the life of Linda Lovelace - who fell into becoming the first mainstream-crossover star of adult cinema - is delivered as glossy cinema entertainment, all super-8 montages and wide-collared-wardrobe and good-timey soul-music stings. Then it skips back - and, seriously, they could've used the record-scratch sound-effect - and cues up the maudlin, moody string-section; seeing the same scenes from the perspective of Lovelace's tell-all autobiography, titled Ordeal.

It's an audacious device, but it doesn't quite work. Its first half is so broadly drawn - all one-note caricatures, explanatory exposition, and lazy montages - that when it retells the comedy as tragedy, the tone feels forced, the emotions ersatz. Peter Sarsgaard's abusive husband is more terrifying, really, the first time around, when his controlling personality signposts an abusive relationship, than when he Hulks out the second time around, becoming a violent, villainous monster.

Sarsgaard sports wild sideburns and a handlebar, one of a host of famous faces in wacky wardrobe. A topless Amanda Seyfried may have earnt all the press, but her parents are played by Sharon Stone and Robert Patrick (the T-1000!), James Franco is Hugh Hefner, Adam Brody is porn-actor wood, Hank Azaria and Bobby Cannavale and Chris North do guido cartoons, Wes Bentley is a photographer(!), Chloë Sevigny has a one-line cameo, and apparently Sarah Jessica Parker had a cameo as Gloria Steinem(!!!) that ended up on the cutting-room floor. With so many famous faces seemingly out to out-mug each other, suspension-of-disbelief is another casualty; an air of celebrity-dress-ups persisting throughout.