127 HOURS IS BASED on the true story of Aron Ralston, the rock climber who, a few years back, was trapped for five days in a remote part of Utah after a boulder crushed his right arm and pinned him to the bottom of a very narrow crevice. You may have heard about this ordeal because of its famously grisly denouement, and I don't think I'm giving anything away here, since 127 Hours is known more colloquially as "The Movie Where James Franco Hacks Off His Arm with a Pocketknife." Franco is superb, capturing volleys of conflicting emotion—anger! despair! grit! yeeeowwwchhh!—while holding the same physical position for two-thirds of the film; as a technical acting exercise, that can't have been easy, though not as tough as what Ralston managed. But the movie belongs to director Danny Boyle: he pulls out every adrenal trick in the modern filmmaker's arsenal, pushing the mise en scene as close to first-person narrative as film can get. Bonus: it's not quite as gory as you might think.

I ate lunch afterward.