The most effective climbing thriller since Touching the Void.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 5, 2020

This is gripping stuff, a tautly directed, white knuckle suspense yarn with a keen sense of time and place.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 5, 2019

North Face is at once exciting and horrifying.

| Mar 2, 2019

This is a solid, well-crafted, emotional film, which does not need the hook of being based on a true story to be a fantastic one.

| Aug 9, 2018

Harrowing German drama is a real cliffhanger.

| Original Score: 4.5 | Dec 29, 2010

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.

| Original Score: 7.1/10 | Jul 4, 2010

Very likely the best movie ever made about mountain climbing, with some barbed commentary on life under Nazism.

| May 11, 2010

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.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 30, 2010

The images of the Eiger are both majestic and harrowing, and the action is as exciting as in any mountain-climbing movie to date.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 29, 2010

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

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 28, 2010

A straightforward, wickedly suspenseful Man vs. Nature saga of the type that rarely gets made any more.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 16, 2010

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 25, 2010

There's no subtext and not much character development, but those aren't really missed.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 18, 2010

The romantic subplot is underwritten and overwrought. More compelling is ... the impressively harrowing mountain footage.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 12, 2010

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.

| Original Score: B | Mar 12, 2010

Harrowing historical yarn mixes Third Reich manliness and white-knuckle mountaineering

| Original Score: B | Mar 12, 2010

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.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 12, 2010

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.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 11, 2010

The word "gripping" doesn't do it justice.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 26, 2010

This white-knuckle adventure is a literal and metaphoric cliff-hanger that gets a spectacular foothold on an unforgiving mountain.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 25, 2010