The Summit

Documentarians Mark Monroe (writer) and Nick Ryan (director) chronicle (and recreate) the August 2008 Himalayan disaster in which 11 mountaineers died on the slopes of K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, and, in some ways, more dangerous than Mount Everest (victims came from France, Ireland, Nepal, Norway, Pakistan, Serbia and South Korea). Ryan and Monroe seamlessly combine the climbers' own video footage, reenactments, and interviews with survivors of the international expeditions, showing the inevitable contradictions that crop up in the recollections of mountain climbers in an oxygen-deprived crisis. The movie's very seamlessness is a trifle unsettling at times, as it's not always easy to tell what is authentic and what is staged. But it hardly matters in the end: The movie is harrowing.