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Film of the Week: The Eight Mountains is now streaming

Published almost 2 years ago • 2 min read

Hello Reader,

​The best movie of 2023, The Eight Mountains (tied with Other People's Children), is now on Criterion Channel in Canada and the US! It's also available to rent/buy on VOD.

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The Eight Mountains

It won the Jury Prize at Cannes last year and is the best movie of 2023. You can now see it on VOD and/or the Criterion Channel in Canada and the US.

Here's an excerpt from my glowing review:

Felix van Groenigen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s The Eight Mountains is an epic story of a friendship between two unlikely boys over decades and across continents. Local Bruno (Cristiano Sassella) and city-dweller Pietro (Lupo Barbiero) are the only children in a small Italian town one summer. They become fast friends. Class differences and what those mean for growing up quickly tear them apart. A loss more than a decade later unexpectedly brings them back together. A piece of land ties them to each other for another decade. This intimate story feels sweeping in scope, thanks to the many wide shots of the characters against the awe-inspiring landscape.
Just as Daniel Norgren croons on the soundtrack about “time slip[ping] away,” The Eight Mountains is about the ebbs and flows of time and friendship. In one scene, the children part ways at the end of the summer. In the next cut, it’s summer again. One night, child Pietro storms up the stairs to his room. When we cut, he’s an adolescent (Andrea Palma) who hasn’t spoken to Bruno in years. Fifteen years go by in a flash. Nico Leunen’s editing never draws attention to itself, slyly stretching and shrinking time to align with its emotional weight. A summer full of possibilities features many scenes, some of them long. Years get elided into a brief voiceover and a couple of quick images.

​Read the full review​

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Best,

Alex Heeney

Editor-in-Chief, Seventh Row

P.S. You can now search our entire archive of interviews and reviews/essays on our website! You can also browse everything we've published in order of publication date (starting with the most recent pieces). We're working on an archive of our podcasts that's searchable by film.

Seventh Row

Seventh Row is a nonprofit Canadian film criticism publication and publishing house. We're dedicated to helping you expand your horizons by curating the best socially progressive films from around the world and helping you think deeply about them. This newsletter is run by Seventh Row (http://seventh-row.com) but features exclusive content not found on the website.

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