★★★★☆ The flagship restoration of this year's London Film Festival Archive strand, Captain John Noel's The Epic of Everest (1924) is both a spirited log of grand adventure and a sombre testament to the lives lost during a treacherous third attempt to scale the great Himalayan peak. Featuring a new score from Simon Fisher Turner (who also worked on 2011's Great White Silence rejuvenation, again with the BFI), Noel's masterwork is a remarkable feat of filmmaking, shot as it was on specially adapted cameras in the harshest of conditions, but to this day remains both entertaining and surprisingly spiritual.

Having already measured up Everest whilst on leave from his Indian regiment in 1913, Captain Noel was an individual consumed with adoration for the monolithic centrepiece of the Himalayas. It wasn't until 1919, however, Noel first publicly suggested that mountain be scaled, a challenge met in 1920. Though no moving images are known to exist of the first 1921 expedition,...