Average Rating: 6.9/10
Reviews Counted: 54
Fresh: 45 | Rotten: 9
A tense and gripping spectacular piece of snow-bound historical German film-making.
Average Rating: 6.8/10
Critic Reviews: 14
Fresh: 10 | Rotten: 4
A tense and gripping spectacular piece of snow-bound historical German film-making.
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Average Rating: 3.8/5
User Ratings: 3,011
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A handful of men set aside their differences to conquer one of Europe's tallest mountains in this period drama inspired by a true story. In 1936, Nazi Germany is looking to shore up its reputation in the eyes of the world, and after a pair of German climbers dies in an effort to climb the North face of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps, the state is looking to find another group who can succeed where the earlier team failed. Henry Arau (Ulrich Tukur), the publisher of one of Berlin's biggest
Unrated, 2 hr. 1 min.
Philipp Stölzl, Rupert Henning, Christopher Silber, Johannes Naber
Jan 29, 2010 Wide
May 11, 2010
$0.5M
Music Box Films
All Critics (54) | Top Critics (14) | Fresh (46) | Rotten (9) | DVD (3)
The mountaineers climb for reasons that have little to do with nationalism - reasons the film clumsily attempts to articulate in words. It's far more successful conveying those inspirations with stunning images of them scaling daunting heights.
A straightforward, wickedly suspenseful Man vs. Nature saga of the type that rarely gets made any more.
North Face" is something of an old-fashioned epic shot with modern wisdom and technique, a man vs. nature flick that also weighs the importance of the individual vs. the social while exposing the mean cost of vicarious thrills.
The word "gripping" doesn't do it justice.
This white-knuckle adventure is a literal and metaphoric cliff-hanger that gets a spectacular foothold on an unforgiving mountain.
The result is terrifically suspenseful even if one already knows the outcome.
Harrowing German drama is a real cliffhanger.
Very likely the best movie ever made about mountain climbing, with some barbed commentary on life under Nazism.
Yes, North Face is half a great movie. The mountain steals the show.
It's Kolja Brandt's gloriously edge-of-the-seat/seat-of-the-pants cinematography (much of the film was shot on location) that really packs a natural wallop.
The images of the Eiger are both majestic and harrowing, and the action is as exciting as in any mountain-climbing movie to date.
I have no idea if anything beyond the essentials is accurate. A good deal of it feels more like a 1930s movie than a 1930s event
Philipp Stolzl worked in the same dangerous conditions as the original climbers, and we can feel the chill and peril in our bones. It's a shame, then, that the screenwriter, unlike the camera crew and the characters, was afflicted with such timidity.
There's no subtext and not much character development, but those aren't really missed.
The romantic subplot is underwritten and overwrought. More compelling is ... the impressively harrowing mountain footage.
Harrowing historical yarn mixes Third Reich manliness and white-knuckle mountaineering
Some of the plotting (credited to four screenwriters) is too conventional and convenient, and the clunky running time is a problem - two-plus hours of this material is too much.
With knuckles alternately white from suspense and black from frostbite, the alpinists get progressively harder to tell apart. But the most compelling character, for all its brutal enormity, always was the mountain.
Luise: When you're at the bottom - Toni once told me - at the foot of the wall, and you look up, you ask yourself: How can anyone climb that? Why would anyone even want to? But hours later when you're at the top looking down, you've forgotten everything. Except the one person you promised you would come back to. North
November 4, 2011
Super Reviewer
The scenery was spectacular, and the events astounding, to say the least. Based on a true story, this portrays how the national socialists used mountaineers as a propaganda tool to demonstrate their ideal Ubermensch..by claiming they could conquer the Eiger, or die heroically in the attempt. Why this film hasn't been
January 4, 2011Super Reviewer
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