The Eight Mountains review a movie with air in its lungs and love in its heart Movies

Table Of Content

• Making THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS
• Review: In ‘Housekeeping for Beginners,’ a makeshift family evokes universal pain
• Meredith from Georgia Street Design
• Family
• Share your space and start earning
• The 100 best songs of 2023
• Review: A sun-dappled Italian fable, ‘La Chimera’ feels like the discovery of a new language

In the summer of 1984, Pietro, an 11-year-old from Turin, and his mother Francesca rent a house in a village called Grana in the Italian Alps. There they meet Bruno, the last kid remaining in the village; estranged from his parents, he lives with his uncles and aunt. Months later, Pietro's father Giovanni arrives as well and the trio go on a hike. One day, Bruno informs Pietro that Pietro's parents have offered to adopt Bruno so he can go to school in Turin, and his uncle has agreed. Pietro, has a complex reaction to this idea which he identifies as believing Bruno should not be uprooted from his world, and protests the decision. Bruno's father is angry at the interference and soon takes him away to work for the summer and they do not see each other again for some time.

Making THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS

My dining room brings my love of the world to my home with the custom-designed Paul Montgomery wall panels. It defines my wanderlust and desire to be in exotic, faraway places. The magical mix of flora and fauna that would never be found together in nature delights me. The English Room’s Holly Phillips shares with us a glimpse into her favorite room design, along with how her dining room was inspired and came together with a magical mix of flora and fauna.

Review: In ‘Housekeeping for Beginners,’ a makeshift family evokes universal pain

Pietro visits Lara who tells him that she now understands how little she means to Bruno in comparison to his mountain. Pietro remarks that he wandered too far away and should have stayed there. He makes up with Bruno who accepts his life living alone in the mountains. Bruno tells him to not worry about him for the mountain has never hurt him. A prematurely uprooted childhood friendship reverberates across years of absence, only to be rekindled with joy, regret and a sense of irreversible loss.

Meredith from Georgia Street Design

The story begins in the summer of 1984, when 11-year-old Pietro and his parents, who live in Turin, spend the summer in a small Alpine village. It’s here that Pietro meets Bruno, a boy roughly the same age, who swiftly becomes his friend and guide. The region, with its scenic lakes and jaw-dropping vistas, is a boundless sun-drenched playground. And the writer-directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch joyously capture the boys’ rambunctious, rough-and-tumble innocence, the pure happiness we see coursing through their faces and bodies as they run, wrestle, yell and explore.

Family

As rescuers had broken into the house by making a hole in the roof, Pietro reasons that the house will therefore not last either because in some lives, there are mountains to which one cannot return, including the one at the center of it all. As he plays soccer with children at Asmi's school, he realizes that all that remains is to wander the eight mountains because on the highest mountain, he lost a friend. Returning to Grana, he informs Bruno of his plans to settle down in Nepal and probably will not be returning to Grana yearly; Bruno invites him to dinner.

Scaling the mountains between us - The New European

Scaling the mountains between us.

Posted: Wed, 10 May 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

So it’s a relief to report that Tóth, co-adapting with Klára Muhi a novel by Zsuzsa F. Várkonyi, handles this intermittent tension — both what’s interior and unarticulated, and what’s externally threatening — with an appreciative subtlety, and without a hint of soapiness. Tóth nods cautiously toward a dignified ambiguity, what can exist in the molecules between vulnerable souls in the process of rebuilding. Aldó, played by Károly Hajduk, is a wiry, disheveled figure with benevolent eyes and a haunted air, whose entire life is his ob-gyn practice since losing his family in the camps. When he meets angrily self-possessed 16-year-old patient Klára (Abigél Szőke), she’s coming out of a delayed puberty, still writing letters to parents whose absence she can explain away, and railing against life under her discipline-intensive, exasperated great-aunt Olgi (Mari Nagy). There’s an easy, flinty chemistry between Marinelli and Borghi, which is especially interesting given each is somewhat counterintuitively cast in a role for which the other might seem a more obvious choice.

The 100 best songs of 2023

It’s Me, Margaret” and “Tótem” A young girl’s coming-of-age and her family’s joy and heartache are perfectly observed in both Kelly Fremon Craig’s underappreciated Judy Blume adaptation and Lila Avilés’ haunting work of poetic realism. “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” and “Earth Mama” A highly intelligent way with the camera and a deep, intuitive understanding of Black motherhood and childhood distinguished both of these sterling debut features. “About Dry Grasses” and “Godland”Two of the year’s most visually and intellectually immersive films, each pitting one very small man against a vast, sprawling landscape. “The Eight Mountains” is directed by Oscar-nominated Felix van Groeningen (“The Broken Circle Breakdown”) and Charlotte Vandermeesch. The cast includes Luca Marinelli, Alessandro Borghi, Lupo Barbiero, Cristiano Sassella, and Elisabetta Mazzullo. The Eight Mountains screened at the Cannes film festival, and is released on 12 May in UK cinemas.

Review: A sun-dappled Italian fable, ‘La Chimera’ feels like the discovery of a new language

Think where man’s glory most begins and endsAnd say my glory was I had such friends. His interviews, reviews, and other commentary on film also appear regularly in Slashfilm, Decider, and Little White Lies. Charlotte, have you been back in front of the cameras since working behind them? I’m curious if having served as a director has affected at all the way that you approach being an actress.

Film Credits

While she’s based in Dilworth, most Mary’s clientele comes straight out of Charlotte. Mary and her firm Mary Tobias Miller Interior Design offers various services to commercial and residential clients. Sometimes you just want everyone to go away and leave you alone so you can finish that damn magnum opus, which is no small task when your more popular and acclaimed friends are constantly overshadowing you. The tetchiness of the creative temperament is on grand, empathetic display in “Showing Up,” Kelly Reichardt’s exquisitely observed art-world comedy, and “Afire,” Christian Petzold’s tense, biting tale of a working holiday gone awry. Both feature expert, vanity-free performances — from Michelle Williams and Thomas Schubert, respectively — playing such memorably self-serious grumps that you almost want to see them co-star in a crossover rom-com sequel. There’s nothing like watching a movie with an audience — and, as I realized a few months ago, there’s nothing like watching an audience watch a movie.

There are moments when these ravishments come close to the touristic, though this is attenuated by the filmmakers’ unexpected use of the boxy Academy ratio. Here, this square framing has the old-fashioned quality of early still photographs, particularly in some of the opening scenes, which avoids the postcard-like associations these landscapes might have had in wide-screen. These early scenes are intoxicating, partly because it’s very pleasant to watch happy children just be happy together, and this is an especially stunning place to explore. Like Pietro, you are immediately plunged into the region’s splendors and mysteries, its densely sheltering foliage, enigmatically abandoned corners and dramatic, seemingly limitless vistas.

Pietro hikes to a peak he and his father Giovanni reached decades ago and finds the summit book in which Giovanni had written on that occasion. In this and similar summit books on other mountain peaks he finds his father's experiences and feelings during hikes there with Pietro and Bruno and later with just Bruno. Later at dinner, Bruno and Lara argue over financial issues with her accusing him of having his head in the clouds. 15 years later, 31-year-old Pietro has found a job at a restaurant in Turin. One winter night, he receives a call from his mother that his father has died.

Andrea Rauccio is listed as the Steadicam operator, but the credits for camera operators are lengthy, and the entire crew deserves credit. There are times when the camera is so far back that all you see is an entire expanse of white, with a tiny person trekking across the blinding snow. It may be a cliche to say the mountains are the third main character in the film, but it's the truth. In time, he makes it to the top and, barely pausing to take in the staggering view, crows in triumph to his friend Bruno (Alessandro Borghi), who’s doing some construction work down in the valley below. It’s a blissful, tender image of friendship that, like so many images in this movie, contains bittersweet multitudes. Here are two pals sharing a moment of exquisite communion, but who are nonetheless forebodingly separated by a chasm, one that will keep widening despite their every attempt to bridge it.

His dream is to take over his aunt and uncle's abandoned dairy farm, where he can make cheese and live the life of his ancestors. The passage of time, and Pietro's voiceover, show the film's novelistic source material. It’s the spreading tale of a friendship that begins one mid-’80s summer, when city kid Pietro (played as a child by Lupo Barbiero) comes with his mother on vacation to Grana, a tiny fading hamlet nestled under the crushing, snow-capped immensity of the nearby Alps.

The precise nature of the men’s disquiet remains blurry, almost as if no one has ever seen an Antonioni film, though there are suggestions that the world beyond the valley — with its dirty air and noisy streets, its violence and politics — is a prime suspect. Yet even when that outside world bears down on Pietro and especially Bruno, the movie skitters away from messy, unpleasant particulars, which makes its painful passages easier to take but also blunts its impact. Both death and taxes take a heavy toll on the characters, exacting a cost that will make you weep even as the filmmakers smooth out the rough edges, crank the soulful tunes and turn their limpid gaze on a world that, alas, isn’t as beautiful as they seem to want it to be.