The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

This film has mystery and passion, it climbs mountainous heights and rewards you with the opposite of vertigo: a sort of exaltation.

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

The performances are subdued and sublime, highlighting each character’s efforts to reject or embrace his fate, or both.

Chicago Tribune by Katie Walsh

The love story that is The Eight Mountains expresses this ineffable relationship between those who know us best and the places in which we find ourselves with a rough-hewed grace and profound knowingness.

CineVue by Christopher Machell

Its social reality – that of the emptying and decline of rural regions in Italy – is contemporary and vital, but there is something deeper and simpler at play here. In that simplicity, with its notes played purely, there is no need of distortion or abstraction to justify itself.

The New York Times by Manohla Dargis

The spiritual dimension of Pietro and Bruno’s bond has its appeal, and one of the movie’s pleasures is that it takes male friendship seriously. There’s an expressly erotic dimension to the men’s love for each other, as can be the case with intimate relationships, though not an explicitly carnal one.

The Irish Times by Tara Brady

Happily, Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi put in mountain-sized performances to offset the film’s silences and propensity for postcard shots, bringing heart and guts to the chilliest scenery. A worthwhile hike through many obstacles to friendship.

TheWrap by Ben Croll

What sets The Eight Mountains apart is the degree to which co-directors van Groeningen and Vandermeersch strip away so much pretense and artifice, leaving nothing but a strong central question: What makes and prevents people from meaningfully connecting? The filmmakers then strike a refreshingly unsentimental tone when answering it.

The Associated Press by Jake Coyle

Just as the film’s near-sole setting — a remote mountain cabin beneath the peaks of northwestern Italy — beckons Pietro (Luca Marinelli) and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) throughout their lives, the intoxicating atmosphere of The Eight Mountains is a cherished retreat I’m already eager to revisit.

RogerEbert.com by Sheila O'Malley

Directed by Belgian filmmakers Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix van Groeningen, The Eight Mountains works slowly and patiently. It doesn't rush. This may be frustrating for some viewers, but the film works because of its slowness and patience, not despite it.

IndieWire by Ella Kemp

The Eight Mountains lovingly adapts Paolo Cognetti’s novel of the same name, a valentine to brotherhood and a shape-shifting tale of self-discovery, resilience, nature and love — platonic but more steely than any rock you could climb – that somehow rarely feels like it treads a single step of the endless stream of movies and literature capturing the ever-evolving yet enduring nature of all of those just mentioned things since time immemorial.

Time Out

Much like climbing a mountain, the two-and-a-half-hour runtime may occasionally feel arduous, but the emotional release is worth it once you reach the peak.

Variety by Jessica Kiang

Stately and serene from a distance, but up close riven with the fissures and follies of a friendship that costs both men so much but gives them even more, the movie, too, is a mountain.

Los Angeles Times by Justin Chang

This is the rare movie that understands how tied we are to the physical and psychological spaces of childhood, how our families and the traditions they raised us with can be both nurturing and limiting.

The Playlist

The Eight Mountains is a sentimental ode to those singular friendships we make in our lives, the kind that can’t be severed by any amount of distance, physical or temporal. Even when there’s so much left unsaid, it’s the comfort they find in each other that resonates most.

Screen Daily by Wendy Ide

It’s a fairly conventional, risk-averse piece of filmmaking, but the film’s gentle, meandering story works its way to a conclusion which plays out in a minor key, suggesting that certain cycles are hard to break and that even a seemingly idyllic life comes at a cost.

The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney

It’s a pleasurable enough watch — nicely acted and with a gentle rhythm tuned to the main characters’ searching paths as they drift in and out of each other’s lives over 30 years — though ultimately, it lacks weight.

The Film Stage by Jose Solís

Whatever its pictorial beauty, often significant, this adaptation of Paolo Cognetti’s bestseller exemplifies my distaste for films that depict toxic masculinity without questioning it, or even suggesting there is nothing heroic or brave about refusing to leave behind damaging practices as long as they perpetuate some limited idea of what constitutes manhood.