The North Face. A German movie about early attempts to scale the north face of the Eiger. It was excellent - the climbing scenes were superb, there was a beautiful, coy romance between the two main characters, and it dealt well with the audience's knowledge of where else German pride and nationalism led the world and its young men, apart from to scale mountains (though the fat, rich Jew was perhaps a tad overdone). One of the best films I've seen in a while, and quite a tonic when compared to...
Trans-Siberian, a tedious, grey movie where none of the characters were believable, least of all the female lead - supposed to be a religious do-gooder with A Past, but she was too anodyne to be plausible as either. To be fair to the actress, the script didn't help, as we had to believe that she was a former wild child, but still naive enough to wander off with the Italian ne'er-do-well. It was just a rather dull movie, except for a horrible, gratuitous torture scene (from which the party involved made a full, if not miraculous, recovery). I don't know why I persisted with it. Well, I do - I was hoping that the female characters might get their kit off, but this being Siberia, there was little enough of that either.
