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70More than delivers on the excitement and terror of this existential flirtation with one's own mortality. Where it falters is trying to link this event to Nazi-era politics and a feeble love story.
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88This white-knuckle adventure is a literal and metaphoric cliff-hanger that gets a spectacular foothold on an unforgiving mountain.
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75These fears explain why in its scenes on the Eiger itself, North Face starts strongly and ends as unbearably riveting. They also explain why it was a strategic error to believe this story needed romantic and political subplots.
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A straightforward, wickedly suspenseful man-versus-nature saga of the type that rarely gets made anymore.
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63While the movie is never dull, its romantic fodder doesn't do justice to any period at all.
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63It’s a literal cliffhanger and the next worst thing to being there.
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63Director 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.
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50At some two hours, the film is 30 minutes too long. Cutting out the melodrama and sticking with the daring-do is the answer.
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60All the retroactively enlightened symbolism gets monotonous, and reaches an absurd apex with the introduction of a party-line newspaperman played by that scowling emblem of Teutonic depravity, Ulrich Tukur.
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67North Face is a gripping, at times downright epic, account of men vs. mountain vs. other men (and, what the hell, one woman).
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67The movie's still quite affecting -- in part because of its simple, old-school earnestness, but mostly because Stolzl does white-knuckle work behind the camera to make you feel the height, pain and awe of the grueling ascent, and the bottomless terror and exhaustion after everything goes horribly, horribly wrong.
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90This is a film done right by just about every measure. The extremes of the story seep deep into your bones -- the beauty, the allure, the desperation and especially the cold in this world where life literally hangs on rope and what Mother Nature chooses to throw at you.
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80Transfixing in the way that well-told life-and-death adventure tales inevitably are. It is the film’s more mundane elements -- an awkward, under-nourished love story and half-baked politics -- that are problematic.
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Director Philipp Stölzl makes the movie a tad more political (i.e., anti-Nazi) than it needs to be, but Fürmann's stoic performance reduces the story to its harsh, true fundamentals.
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70An often grippingly staged mountain movie that's good but not great.
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70North Face also deals with actual events, offering plenty of thrills and spectacular vistas.
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58The historical backdrop is fascinating and an important part of this story, but there’s a pervasive sense that director Philipp Stölzl and his screenwriters soft-pedal it as much as possible in order to exalt their heroes.