DVD
We all love watching Tom Cruise go ‘free-soloing’ in Mission: Impossible. But the reality of going up a peak without a rope is rather more brutal than Tom would have you know. Watch just a few minutes of Jennifer Peedom’s exhilarating documentary Mountain (PG) ★★★★★ and you’ll have seen more close-ups of bleeding palms and shredded fingernails than on any number of impossible missions.
For every shot of a joy-filled climber hurling himself from one improbable hand-hold to the next, there’s another showing you a mountaineer hurtling downwards at speed.
Thanks to the wonders of timelapse photography you also watch as a near- monochrome mountain study that Ansel Adams would have died for becomes a Rothko-style colour-medley and then a real-life Jackson Pollock.
Even though it is mumbled through by Willem Dafoe, the script sounds like poetry. Written by Robert Macfarlane, it’s a gorgeous paean to nature and the worship we owe the world.