Reaching for new heights in ‘The Eight Mountains’

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

Hollywood writers on strike After contract negotiations broke down on Monday night, Hollywood’s writers went on strike this week, sending shockwaves through all levels of the industry. The Times’ coverage has looked at the strike from all angles. Meg James and Anousha Sakoui broke down why the strike will probably go on for some time. Mary McNamara examined how studios profited from the new golden age of television without passing those rewards along to those who helped create them, noting, “unless we want TV’s boom town to become a ghost town, we need to protect the writers who built it.”

Josh Rottenberg and Anousha collected dispatches from the picket lines outside various studios around town to hear firsthand what was at stake and the reasons why rank-and-file guild members were striking. (I was posted up outside the gates of the Disney lot in Burbank.) Anousha also wrote about the studios’ response to the writers’ dismissal of their counteroffers.

Sammo Hung at the Academy With more than 200 acting credits, stuntman-director-actor-icon Sammo Hung has been one of the best-known figures from the Hong Kong film industry since the 1980s. The Academy Museum is now presenting “Sammo Hung: From Stuntman to Star,” spotlighting his abilities in front of and behind the camera to use inventive physical action and sharp comedy to conjure pure filmmaking joyfulness. Among the titles in the series, running through the 27th, are “The Millionaires’ Express,” “Pedicab Driver,” “Wheels on Meals,” “Dragons Forever,” “She Shoots Straight” and “Mr. Nice Guy.”

Albert Pyun The American Cinematheque is presenting a tribute to Hawaiian-born genre filmmaker Albert Pyun, who died last year at age 69, with “Albert Pyun Remembered: The King of Cult Video.” With a bold, expressive style that often stretched the boundaries of his low-budget action-thrillers, Pyun’s singular visions such as 1982’s “The Sword and the Sorcerer,” 1989’s “Cyborg,” 1992’s “Nemesis” and 1997’s “Mean Guns” will be on full display. These are rare opportunities to see these films in a theater with an audience, so get ready to get wild.

‘The Eight Mountains’

Written and directed by Belgian husband and wife Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, “The Eight Mountains” is an adaptation of the Italian novel by Paolo Cognetti. Set amid the Italian Alps, the story covers years in the complicated friendship of Pietro and Bruno, played as adults by Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi. The movie is in theaters now.

For The Times, Justin Chang wrote, “In tracking a decades-long relationship, forged in a vaguely Edenic wilderness to which it keeps returning, ‘The Eight Mountains’ at times inescapably evokes ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ even if Pietro and Bruno’s love story is, as far as we can tell, a platonic one. … [The film has] a generous, gently unassuming worldview — one that grants everyone their space and their struggles, and that never turns characters into easy symbols or reduces relationships to obvious tensions. In this story, it isn’t an act of betrayal or redemption when a man turns out to be a better, more attentive father to a child other than his own; it simply is what it is, a testament to nature’s unpredictability, a wound and a balm rolled into one.”

For the New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, “The precise nature of the men’s disquiet remains blurry, almost as if no one has ever seen an Antonioni film, though there are suggestions that the world beyond the valley — with its dirty air and noisy streets, its violence and politics — is a prime suspect. Yet even when that outside world bears down on Pietro and especially Bruno, the movie skitters away from messy, unpleasant particulars, which makes its painful passages easier to take but also blunts its impact. Both death and taxes take a heavy toll on the characters, exacting a cost that will make you weep even as the filmmakers smooth out the rough edges, crank the soulful tunes and turn their limpid gaze on a world that, alas, isn’t as beautiful as they seem to want it to be.”

For Variety, Jessica Kiang wrote, “The movie is novelistic in the best sense. It immerses you in the world of its characters — both human and Alpine — on that chimingly deep level that usually only literature can access. But it lives and breathes in beautifully cinematic terms, with each one of Ruben Impens’ stunning academy-ratio pictures worth a thousand words. Although this classic bildungsroman may have been nipped and tucked in the transition from page to screen, in terms of scale and sweep and emotion, little appears to have been lost in translation. … 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.”

For the New Yorker, Richard Brody wrote, “‘The Eight Mountains’ is emblematic of a popular form of art-house cinema. It eschews the ostensibly ginned-up vulgarities and bombast of Hollywood superheroism, franchises, fantasies, and special effects, and it avoids the reproachful disturbances of a world of trouble and discord, of conflicts of ideals and ideas, that are represented or even implied in more substantive movies of authentic artistry (including comedies). … The filmmakers’ self-imposition of a pristinely clean aesthetic results in the kind of emptied, tranquillized, minutely calibrated experience that’s no less a matter of fan service than the latest installment of comic-book I.P., and offers no more meaningful a view of life. And the film presumes to do so with a vanity that mere corporate-style entertainment avoids. It advances its hermeticism not just as a pleasure or even as a privilege but as a virtue.”

Alessandro Borghi, Elisabetta Mazzullo and Luca Marinelli in the movie “The Eight Mountains.”

(Sideshow and Janus Films)

‘Those Who Remained’

Directed and co-written by Barnabás Tóth, the Hungarian film “Those Who Remained” is adapted from a novel by Zsuzsa Várkonyi. Set in the years following World War II, the story follows Aldo (Károly Hajduk), a 42-year-old doctor who lost his wife and child in the Holocaust, as he meets 16-year-old Klára (Abigél Szõke), whose parents also perished in the war. They recognize something in each other and form a fraught emotional connection. The movie is in theaters now.

For The Times, Robert Abele wrote, “ Gently pitched to hold equal levels of hurt and promise, even as it deftly addresses the optics that are hard to ignore, Barnabás Tóth’s richly acted film exudes a faith in human connection as relevant today as such relationships needed to be in the years after World War II for survivors of unimaginable trauma. … It’s already a sign of the sensitive hands we’re in — from the actors, the director and the editor — that when these generation-apart opposites lock eyes in the sterile atmosphere of an examination room, we know what’s passing between them isn’t some illicit spark, but the recognition of what binds them: presenting a brave front to an unjust world. Underneath her mask of old-soul scorn and his hollowed-out professionalism, they feel left behind, without a clear path forward.”

For the New York Times, Ben Kenigsberg wrote, “Part of the idea of the film, directed by Barnabas Toth and based on a novel by Zsuzsa F. Varkonyi, is that only survivors could understand the solace that Klara and Aldo find in their tentative parent-daughter bond. ‘Those Who Remained’ leaves much unsaid about their pasts, sometimes at the risk of seeming coy (the word ‘Jewish’ is never spoken). But Hajduk and Szoke are strong performers.”

For Variety, Alissa Simon wrote, “Many films deal with the suffering of the Holocaust years, but far fewer focus on those who managed to return from the camps. The achingly tender Hungarian drama ‘Those Who Remained’ fills that gap. Perceptively directed by Barnabás Tóth, it taps into a deep well of honestly earned emotion as it tells the story of two traumatized survivors whose relationship helps them to heal and provides them with someone to live for. … In his sophomore feature, the France-born, Budapest-based helmer (perhaps best known for his prize-winning 2018 short ‘Chuchotage’) sensitively establishes and sustains an affecting but understated dramatic tone, aided by his superb leads. He also leaves room for some ambiguity and individual audience interpretation.”

Abigél Szőke in the movie “Those Who Remained.”

(Lenke Szilágyi/Menemsha Films)

‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’

Written and directed by James Gunn, who has left the Marvel universe to take a job leading the rival DC Studios, there is an unusual air of finality about “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.” As Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) and his regular pals (played by Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff and Zoe Saldaña) travel the galaxy to save their friend Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper), they encounter all manner of challenges, adventures and villains with an unexpected emotional impact. The movie is in theaters now.

For The Times, Justin Chang wrote, “Gunn managed the flow of action, comedy, music, character setup and forward momentum more or less seamlessly in the first “Guardians,” and to serviceable if diminished effect in “Vol. 2.” He was famously fired from ‘Vol. 3’ for a spell, and I can’t help but wonder if that short-lived brush with career death spurred him to pull out most of the stops here and emerge with by far the messiest, unruliest and most interesting “Guardians” movie of the three. It’s the one that feels most weirdly and defiantly its own thing, the one least straitjacketed by Marvel conventions. … For all the visual weirdness and misfit irreverence he pumped into these stories, Gunn’s obvious love for these characters has been the trilogy’s consistent and undeniable saving grace. And he notably doesn’t sell out that love as he brings those characters all to a conclusion, or at least a mid-franchise inflection point, that carries an ache of bittersweet feeling.”

Tracy Brown, Michael Ordoña and Jevon Phillips spoke to Marvel fans about their feelings on the current state of the massive ongoing franchise, currently clocking in a 31 films, eight TV series and assorted other projects, and whether Marvel movies are, as one fan put it, at “a tipping point.” As they note, “At a moment when both parent Walt Disney Co. and the industry as a whole are in flux, creative missteps, personnel issues, labor disputes and overexposure have demonstrably weakened the dominant force in American pop culture and raised questions about whether the franchise that reshaped Hollywood in the last 15 years can sustain that influence over the next 15.”

For Tribune News Service, Katie Walsh wrote, “It’s to Marvel and Disney’s credit that they let Gunn deliver such an incredibly weird, gleefully goopy genre picture. It’s a nod to his roots, but there’s a surprisingly emotional core focusing on the origin story of Rocket Raccoon, the snide CGI rodent voiced by Bradley Cooper. The movie seems inspired by ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau,’ and ‘The Stepford Wives,’ with a sci-fi kaiju creature-feature bent, all implanted inside the irrepressibly irreverent ‘Guardians’ universe. … It’s not perfect, but the moral of ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’ is that striving for perfection is not only a fool’s errand, it’s inherently toxic. Gunn exhorts the audience to embrace the quirky, the messy, the flawed, to strive for connection, not precision in this world and beyond. It’s a resonant message at the center of all the din.”

For Vulture, Bilge Ebiri wrote, “There probably exists a universe in which this movie, with its competing quest narratives, cute animals in danger, dense cast of characters, and ceaseless indie-pop needle drops (hello, the The!), plays like yet another obsequious and overpacked recent superhero product. But Gunn has the correct attitude with which to tell these stories. … Gunn also seems more in his element filming action sequences than many other Marvel directors, so ‘Guardians 3’s’ obligatory long-take fight scenes manage to be both coherent and interesting. It turns out that having the right person in the right place at the right time actually makes a difference. Job No. 1 for people who make movies like this is probably to convey your own unfettered enthusiasm to the audience. (Otherwise, what’s the point? Well, money, I guess, but still.)”

From left, Pom Klementieff as Mantis, Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), Chris Pratt as Peter Quill/Star-Lord, Dave Bautista as Drax, Karen Gillan as Nebula in a scene from “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.”

(Uncredited / Associated Press)