Interstellar in 70mm

In Claire Denis’s sci-fi thriller, death row inmates are taken to outer space on a dangerous mission taking them dangerously close to a black hole. The film starts with Monte (Robert Pattinson) and his infant daughter inside the ship, a space seemingly too big and hollow for just the two of them. Flashbacks offer dark revelations of what’s taken place there. Eerily calm and enigmatic, the ambience of the ship reflects an undertone of doom—an unknown, vast energy pulling the two survivors into the looming force of the singularity.

Eight astronauts aboard a spaceship, Icarus II, must save a freezing planet Earth by reigniting the dying sun. Capa (Cillian Murphy), a physicist, oversees an explosive device that can reignite the sun, and handles matters calmly despite unforeseen disasters. Set almost exclusively in or around the ship, the film makes excellent use of claustrophobia to increase the suspense billowing in the atmosphere.

Ron Howard directed this tense retelling of the third NASA mission to the moon, where a series of system failures led to three astronauts nearly being marooned in space. Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and Bill Paxton star as the imperiled astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise, with Oscar-nominated support provided by Ed Harris as NASA flight director Gene Kranz and Kathleen Quinlan as Marilyn Lovell. The nominated visual effects team of Robert Legato, Michael Kanfer, Leslie Ekker, and Matt Sweeney recreated the astronauts’ mission with scrupulous visual realism, and the film received a total of nine nominations including Best Picture, winning for its film editing and sound.

In person: actor Jodie Foster and astrophysicist Nivedita Mahesh