Review: In 'Everest: The Other Side,' dreams, exhilaration and risk combine in terrifying Imax

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Set us as preferred Documentary filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin specialize in capturing what no one else has done before, and when it comes to climbing docs, they’ve been at the summit since “Meru” and the Oscar-winning “Free Solo.” Now, with “Everest: The Other Side,” they’ve made their most visceral, vertigo-inducing experience yet — in Imax, no less — while also tackling the aspects of this extreme discipline that leave a lot of us unable to fathom its appeal.“Everest: The Other Side” is, in some sense, two films, an unfinished one and a revived one, built on how a love story between ski mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson inspired an epic quest over many years: to not only scale the rarely summited Chinese side of Everest but to then ski down it.Over 15,000 people have made their way up Everest’s Nepalese side to the top.One quick snapshot in the film, showing a cramped single file of mountaineers, laughably suggests it’s everybody’s reachable bucket-list item.

But only a handful of souls have ever gone up the treacherous, unforgiving north face — 9,000 steep miles of snow, rock and ice with a gnarly gully given the forbidding name the Hornbein Couloir.Going down is even harder.

Movies From a new “Resident Evil” reboot from the director of “Weapons” to Oscar contenders starring Mikey Madison and Tom Cruise, here are the movies we’ll be at this fall.If the most famous answer to why climb Everest was George Mallory’s “Because it’s there,” you may believe the only response to why ski down it is: “Because it’s insane.” And yet, after listening to Nelson tell the filmmakers what it meant for her to find a kindred spirit of resilience and adventure in Morrison — a bighearted guy who’d been through devastating loss in his life — the notion...