Critic Reviews

As a piece of watch-through-your-fingers outdoors filmmaking, The Alpinist stands right up alongside the Oscar-winning Free Solo.

The images here are often dizzying and dazzling.

The footage of Leclerc ascending sheer, near-featureless sheets of rock is so defiant of physics that it is easy to forget just how mind-bogglingly dangerous it is.

A fine yarn that arcs towards a memorable denouement.

A portrait of a man who, as one of his contemporaries remarked, feels almost too comfortable on the side of a mountain.

There is a revealing narrative here: a conflict, a climax and a denouement that you may not expect. The Alpinist has built-in drama, simply by virtue of who and what it sets out to document.

Ultimately, Mortimer and Rosen’s film succeeds most as a sincere, wonderstruck tribute to a fellow climber. And if glorifying a sport as lethal as alpinism itself runs a kind of risk, there’s no denying the heart-in-mouth thrill of watching Leclerc in the zone, following an impossible dream and, on his own terms, touching the sublime.

The Alpinist works as a moving testament to Leclerc’s incredible life and the art of alpinism itself, while even finding time to tactfully wrestle with the difficult reconciliation of the reckless danger versus the peerless beauty of such an undertaking.

Leclerc’s lack of introspection — you never forget his youth — puts a lot of pressure on the other talking heads. Fortunately, The Alpinist can always count on Harrington for amusing or poignant beats.

The movie could stand to demystify how some of its most terrifying early shots were filmed. (Later on, we’re told Leclerc agreed to carry a small camera himself to shoot part of a conquest in Patagonia.) But it does capture its subject’s philosophy.