‘The Eight Mountains’ Review: A Stirring, Sprawling, Epic and Intimate Tale of Friends in High Places
variety.comJessica Kiang Mountains are not formed in an instant. Tectonic plates may buckle like the crumpling hoods of crashing cars, but it’s a collision that takes thousands of millennia to play out, and on a human timescale, seems infinitesimally slow.
An inch here, a millimeter there, even the most imposing ranges were built in increments; rocky peaks rising pebble by pebble.
It’s just one way that the vast, vertiginous landscapes of northwestern Italy so well suit Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s quietly magnificent “The Eight Mountains”: The film, too, is a slow, gradual accretion of detail that builds to a spectacular vista across the ridges and troughs, the spires and valleys of a lifelong, life-defining friendship.
Based on the award-winning Italian bestseller “Le Otto Montagne” by Paolo Cognetti, the movie is novelistic in the best sense.
Read more on variety.com
