Portland Oregonian by Marc Mohan

The Summit does an amazing job of putting you on the mountain, making it one of the most terrifying horror films a climber or an acrophobe could ever see.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

The Summit tells a multifaceted story that deals with more than the expected peril and exhilaration of adventure tales. Here you'll find love, fear and forgiveness, personality conflicts and cultural differences, even mysteries that have stubbornly resisted solving.

The New York Times by Neil Genzlinger

The film over all is a pulse-pounding success.

Time Out by David Fear

As you watch these actors, you appreciate the endeavor the climbers went through all the more — and as triumph turns to tragedy, you feel the grief winding its way through your shaken nervous systems.

The A.V. Club by Nick Schager

The proceedings somewhat sidestep the issues of risk and responsibility—including the raised, but never fully tackled, question of whether others should have gone back to try to save their fellow, trapped compatriots—that seem most in need of investigation.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Joe Williams

It’s a measure of the movie’s success that we never stop to question how or when the trickery is employed.

Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

I wish the film had probed more deeply into why anybody would face those odds. George Mallory’s “Because it’s there” has never quite cut it for me.

Washington Post by Michael O'Sullivan

Because The Summit jumps around in time and because the events on the mountain happened over two days and at locations often far apart, the already garbled chronology of deaths is made even more confusing.

Philadelphia Inquirer by Steven Rea

There is a lot of finger-pointing. Assertions are made, theories offered, but not much in the way of certainty.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Liam Lacey

The Summit is a mixture of the inventive and the misguided in its attempt to recreate the circumstances of the August, 2008, disaster on the world’s second-highest mountain, K2, when 11 climbers were killed.

New York Daily News by Joe Neumaier

Interviews with survivors fill us in on the personalities of the lost, but the background of K2, with archival footage from 1954, is equally gripping.

The Dissolve by Andrew Lapin

Though Ryan and Monroe prove adept at the film’s most elemental factors, they don’t offer enough backstory or characterization.

Village Voice by Chuck Wilson

The Summit is at its most powerful when the filmmakers simply tell the tale, which gradually develops the unsettling suspense of a horror movie, with K2 cast as the implacable killer.

Arizona Republic by Randy Cordova

Nick Ryan’s documentary looks at the disaster by using interviews, actual footage and re-enactments. The latter move undercuts some of the movie’s authenticity. Granted, there probably wasn’t another way to film it, but it muddies the film’s sense of truth.