127 Hours: Critic Reviews

127 Hours offers a daunting challenge to a filmmaker: How do you rivet an audience when your protagonist can't even move? The answer is that there's an awesome freedom to Danny Boyle's filmmaking.

To say that this movie gets under your skin is only barely a figure of speech. It pins you down, shakes you up and leaves you glad to be alive.

At its centre is a magnificent performance from James Franco...

I have never before seen something yucky on screen make an entire cinema audience suddenly hunch forward and bury their heads in their laps at the same time, as if in some secular mosque for wimps.

It's a movie worth seeing, even when it's barely watchable.

How do you make a movie about immobility? For a hyperactive stylist like Boyle, whose movies are at best thrillingly kinetic and at worst represent death by a thousand cuts, the solution turns out to be absurdly simple. He heads inward.

A passionate, bloody argument for engagement with the world.

As Franco goes from fearful to resigned to resentful of the spot he's in, we're absolutely hooked.

Mr. Franco is simply terrific, and Mr. Boyle's trademark exuberance creates a dizzying succession of images that get the movie not only out of the canyon but into its hero's mind.

The latest from Danny Boyle is actually an ode to survival, a bracing story of man and nature and an exhilarating sensory experience. It's my favorite movie so far this year.

In his impressive follow-up to Slumdog Millionaire, the Academy Award-winning director honors the lure of solitude while at the same time celebrating the beautiful necessity of other people.

127 Hours may be occasionally overdirected, but it's never under-felt... and more importantly, Franco's work goes a long way toward making Ralston's story live.

From such harrowing beginnings, it's rather awesome what an entertaining film Danny Boyle has made with "127 Hours."

Aside from an exhilarating opening and a gruesome climax, the movie isn't all that rich emotionally; all the visual razzle-dazzle winds up serving a pat lesson about people needing other people.

It's a coming-of-age story -- blunt, mythic, gut-wrenching.

The nightmare becomes a tribute to Ralston's bravery -- without casting him as a hero. He just got tired of waiting to die and decided to live.

Directed and co-written by Danny Boyle in a style that travels from ecstatic to nerve-wracking and back, this is a film about perseverance, strength and the importance of always letting people know where you're going.

Fraught with tension, yet never claustrophobic, 127 Hours is a phenomenal piece of work in which a fine actor and an innovatively cinematic director join forces to keep you gasping for oxygen all the way.

[Franco's] take on Ralston feels both credible and compelling; few actors could have made us care so much, or disappeared so completely into the role.

Like all great movies, "127 Hours" takes us on a memorable journey. Which is not easy when 90 percent of the movie takes place with a virtually immobile hero in a very cramped setting.

It's a tribute to Boyle's filmic flair and the humanity he wears on his sleeve that we can recall how Ralston's 127 hour saga ends and still be stunned, moved and thrilled by the finale.

Sleek and stylish, harrowing yet heartening, Danny Boyle and James Franco bring their best picture to the big screen.

Shiver-making moments aside, in a important way 127 Hours suffers from the filmmaker's lack of nerve, a reluctance to let the audience taste Ralston's dread and the expectation of a slow, absurd death.

Boyle turns the near-death tale into a riveting re-enactment that will keep audiences squirming in their seats.

Franco is up to every bit of Boyle's challenge, capturing Aron's transition from clownish outdoorsman and party boy to an introspective chronicler of his own impending demise and a visionary lunatic.