Everest Review

Kormakur took his cast to the Khumbu, and it shows in ways a stage could not fake: thin light, real wind, ladders laid across blue crevasses in the Icefall, a scale in the wide shots that makes the human figures read as mistakes in the frame. Salvatore Totino's photography is the reason to sit through this. The writing is another matter. Eight or nine climbers in identical parkas and goggles is a problem the film never solves, so a death below the South Summit registers as an event rather than as a loss.

Jason Clarke is quietly excellent as Rob Hall, decent past the point of safety, and his last radio call to Keira Knightley in New Zealand is the one scene that hurts. Josh Brolin gives Beck Weathers a Texan bluster that curdles well. Gyllenhaal's Scott Fischer is a ponytail and a shrug, a rival guide presented as loose and generous and then removed without the film ever deciding what his looseness cost anyone. Emily Watson and Robin Wright are stranded on telephones. The mountain is drawn with far more care than the people standing on it.