127 Hours (15)

AVID mountain climber Aron Ralston meets Megan and Kristi, who are lost.

The trio flirt and enjoy a dip in a subterranean lagoon, and the girls invite the handsome thrill-seeker to a party later that same day. Aron accepts their invitation and continues alone. As he attempts to traverse Blue John Canyon, the rocks give way, sending him plummeting to the bottom, his arm pinned against the wall by a heavy boulder. After five days alone, with all hope seemingly lost and his strength evaporating in the sweltering heat, Aron elects to amputate his trapped arm with a pen knife in the hope he can run for help before losing too much blood.

Adapted from Ralston’s memoir, Between A Rock And A Hard Place, 127 Hours is a gut-wrenching account of a man who fully expects to die in the baking earth. Director Danny Boyle employs a mosaic of flashbacks, memories and dreams to achieve the seemingly impossible feat of bringing energy and movement to a film that is set, almost entirely, in one location. Franco’s fearless performance holds us spellbound.

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Gnomeo & Juliet (U)

GNOMEO is a blue garden ornament, living on one side of Verona Drive, while Lord Redbrick presides over the garden next door.

He protects feisty daughter Juliet by consigning her to a castle-shaped garden feature. A chance encounter between Gnomeo and Juliet sows the seeds of true love, but her bullying cousin, Tybalt, would rather mow down a blue than see the two families united in holy matrignomey. Shakespeare’s tale of star-cross’d lovers is given a new lick of paint in Kelly Asbury’s fast-paced computer- animated comedy.

Some gags are recycled from the screenwriters’ compost heap (“I’m not illiterate – my parents were married!”) so, for all its boundless cheer, Gnomeo & Juliet is not quite the perfect gnomance.

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Henry’s Crime (15)

TOLL booth collector Henry inadvertently takes part in a bank robbery and is sentenced to three years.

When freed, Henry decides to rob the bank for real. “I did the time, I may as well have done the crime,” he concludes defiantly.

He plans to break into the bank vault via the dressing rooms of a nearby theatre, which is staging The Cherry Orchard, in which he takes the lead role.

Henry’s Crime is a mediocre crime caper that follows a similar romantic trajectory to Shakespeare In Love, with a doomed on-stage romance between actors spilling into the dressing rooms. However, Malcolm Venville’s film doesn’t have as many snappy one-liners.

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