Synopsis
North Face tells the story of two German climbers Toni Kurz and Andreas Hinterstoisser and their attempt to scale the deadly North Face of the Eiger.
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Cast
- Benno FürmannToni Kurz
- Florian LukasAndreas Hinterstoisser
- Johanna WokalekLuise Fellner
- Georg FriedrichEdi Rainer
- Simon SchwarzWilly Angerer
- Ulrich TukurHenry Arau
- Erwin SteinhauerEmil Landauer
- Branko SamarovskiAlbert von Allmen
- Petra MorzéElisabeth Landauer
- Hanspeter MüllerSchlunegger
Recommendations
- 90
Los Angeles Times
This 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. - 80
The New York Times
Transfixing 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. - 70
The Hollywood Reporter
More 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. - 70
Variety
An often grippingly staged mountain movie that's good but not great. - 70
Village Voice
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. - 67
Portland Oregonian
The 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. - 63
Boston Globe
It’s a literal cliffhanger and the next worst thing to being there. - 60
Time Out
All 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.
