127 Hours

Danny Boyle’s movie is based on the true story of Aron Ralston, a 27-year-old mountain climber who got pinned by a boulder and whose only chance of survival is to amputate his trapped arm. Ralston wrote a book about his ordeal, so you can pretty much figure out how he made it out alive. For much of the movie’s 90 minutes, Aron (James Franco) is on his own – hiking, climbing, writhing in pain underneath a giant rock – so it takes a deft filmmaker to pull off all this isolation. It also takes a skilled director to make the climatic scene’s mix of squirm-inducing butchery and endurance work, and the man behind the ultra-bloody 28 Days Later … is more than up for the task. Franco is at his best here, but this isn’t a one-man show. Boyle is just as much the star -- his hyperactive direction keeps things moving, even when it’s just Aron and all those rocks onscreen. Boyle uses some of his typically flashy camera tricks in 127 Hours: skewed angles, first-person viewpoints, split screens. But he also lets his camera just take in the large, gorgeous vistas surrounding Aron. In a way, it’s the most open — and openhearted — Boyle has ever been. It’s a riveting piece of filmmaking and one of the best movies of the year.