Everest

Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur is drawn to terror spawned by elemental peril, as seen with 2012 survival drama The Deep and his snowbound TV drama Trapped, so it's no surprise that his most ambitious English-language feature to date is an epic mountaineering nailbiter based on the real-life events that took place on a blizzard-hit Everest in 1996. He re-stages the climbers' journey steadfastly and clearly (no mean feat in a snowstorm when everybody's wearing outdoor kit), and benefits from a screenplay by William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy that matches the vertiginous action with the emotional fallout of an adventure gone tragically wrong. Unless you know the destiny of the actual individuals - Josh Brolin's determined amateur, Jake Gyllenhaal's cocky rival, Jason Clarke's expedition leader (whose pregnant wife, played by Keira Knightley, waits for him at home) - you'll be gripped by the fateful climb, shot in freezing temperatures in the Austrian Alps, Iceland and Nepal. Implicitly critical of the sheer conveyor-belt nature of the now-commercialised climb, Everest offers a cautionary tale about thrill-seeking that sadly still resonates in the present.