Director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala have a new movie out, The City of Your Final Destination (10 screens), and, no that's not another sequel in the Final Destination horror series. It's about a young professor who is trying to write a biography of a dead author and must travel to Uruguay to get permission from the dead author's wife, brother and mistress. Like almost all the other Ivory films, it's based on a novel. That's just the first of many reasons I have been fighting against Ivory for years.

Ivory and Jhabvala and producer Ismail Merchant, who died in 2005, first teamed up on The Householder (1963), and their partnership continued until The White Countess (2005); the only difference was that The Householder had been based on Jhabvala's own novel, rather than someone else's. At some point in the 1980s, the trio's films came into fashion, coinciding with the first years of the blockbuster era. The Bostonians (1984) earned a couple of Oscar nominations, and then A Room with a View (1986), Maurice (1987), Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990); Howards End (1992) and The Remains of the Day (1993) all had critics, art house audiences and Oscar voters salivating. Ivory received three Best Director nominations, Merchant landed three Best Picture nominations, and Jhabvala won two Oscars for her screenwriting. There were a few acting nominations and wins, and a whole bunch of nominations for Best Costume Design.

These so-called "literary" films were seen as a refreshing, intelligent alternative to the "brainless" mainstream stuff that was coming out at the time. Self-professed highbrow viewers convinced themselves that they had received a much-needed dose of culture. That's fine, but it's absolutely not true. The first problem was that the Merchant-Ivory team, as well as its audience, bought into the myth that cinema was an inferior art form to literature, merely because it was a few thousand years younger. This myth also fails to consider a comparison like, say, Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1950) versus Dan Brown's novel "The Da Vinci Code."

It's fine to adapt a novel into a movie, and it has been done brilliantly hundreds of times, but the other problem is that Ivory and team don't really bother to make movies that actually move. They're more like books on tape; they're faithful transfers from one medium to another. Ivory is not an artist or a creator in his own right. A look at the new movie reveals that he's not particularly interested in conveying information visually, when it can be conveyed in expository dialogue. And he's completely oblivious as to how to emotionally build a scene, as in the clumsy sequence when a character is about to receive a deadly bee sting. He has directed some good performances over the years, notably from Anthony Hopkins and Laura Linney in the new film, but they're just flat-out great actors.

Ivory generally fails to show his own personality in these movies; after all these years we know very little about him except that he likes books. (Does he even like movies?) Merchant-Ivory is to the 1980s and 1990s what Stanley Kramer was to the 1950s, serving up timely political and/or social messages in his movies, at the expense of anything personal. To me the most incredible thing about movies is the emotional impression, the emotional texture they can give off as the result of a strong personality. It's a way of visiting another person's dreams and desires and perhaps recognizing them as something like our own. By deliberately proclaiming that these things are bad, Kramer, Merchant, Ivory and others have all missed the point.

Perhaps the biggest shame about The City of Your Last Destination, however, is that the film, and cinemtagrapher Javier Aguirresarobe, really captures the sense atmosphere and temperature and free-flowing air in its South American setting. It's relaxing for the viewer, and the opportunity was there for Ivory to at last relax -- and goodness knows that at the age of 81 he deserves to -- but the movie still moves rigidly and without an organic flow. Ivory still labors under that slavish and mythical devotion to the written page.