Seven Years in Tibet

(Columbia TriStar)

Director Jean-Jacques Annaud gives us breathtaking sights and thousands of extras but little else. Brad Pitt plays Heinrich Harrer, the 1930s Austrian mountain climber (and, it turns out, Nazi SS member) who joins an expedition to climb a Himalayan peak and becomes tutor to the young Dalai Lama. In Becky Johnston's script, Harrer's odyssey is a father-and-son reconciliation and an exotic culture tour through the eyes of a Westerner.