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100An improbably bountiful subject -- kids on skateboards turning themselves into virtuoso artist-athletes -- has been brought to life in a wonderful, unpretentious documentary.
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91A dazzlingly crafted documentary about the teenage surf punks of lower Los Angeles who singlehandedly transformed skateboarding into the extreme sport it has become.
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91This collision of skate punk and pop-culture archaeology is the most entertaining slice of cultural history I've seen in years.
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90Enormously enjoyable, high-adrenaline documentary.
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90So much fun that its considerable worth as history and sociology seems almost incidental.
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Using home movies, photos, a brilliant soundtrack and candid, articulate interviews, director Stacy Peralta (one of the original Z-boys) details the birth of a pop culture phenomenon.
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Propulsive and highly satisfying documentary.
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89That they were just hormonally blitzkrieged kids at the time, unaware of their role in history, only makes Peralta's superior doc that much more winning.
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88Raucous look at an equally raucous phenomenon.
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88Does a terrific job of evoking the electric magic of an extraordinary era.
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88There's great action moviemaking here: You learn what it means to "carve" a pool, as you learn what it means to "close off" the boxing ring in Ali.
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83The overall effect is awe and affection -- and a strange urge to get on a board and, uh, shred, dude.
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75Here is an entire movie about looking cool while not wiping out. Call it a metaphor for life.
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75Few sports films catch their time, place and sport so well. For skateboard fans, this is a must. But it's also a great ride if you know nothing about the sport or what it meant. At the end of this movie, you will.
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75In keeping with the unrefined spirit of the '70s, the movie is deliberately haphazard and proudly retains all its mistakes, including narrator Sean Penn going up on his lines.
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75Exhilarating, breathless, must-see chronicle of the skateboarder revolution and evolution.
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75The film is, however, almost inevitably wistful for the past, and many of its emotional touches come from juxtaposed then-and-now footage of the participants.
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75Highly entertaining.
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70If the sign of good documentary is its ability to enthrall you regardless of your prior interest in the subject, then Stacy Peralta's hugely entertaining film earns high marks.
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70This movie is a sun-dappled documentary about skateboarding, about the thrill of speed, the joy of reckless youth. Turning it into an academic example of the problems of history -- of who tells it and how it gets told -- is a lot less fun.
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70As this taut, viscerally propulsive insider's history of the sport in its early years skids and leaps forward with a jaunty visual panache, it is impossible not to be seduced by its hard-edged vision of an endless teenage summer.
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70A fascinating story, albeit with some missed opportunities in the telling.
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70We expect some depth and perspective from filmmakers, but even in talking about the movie Peralta sounds like an ex-high school quarterback who never got over the Big Game, or an old campus revolutionary who's never glimpsed the folly that went along with the fervor.
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60Makes for unexpectedly giddy viewing.
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50A thumping soundtrack, including David Bowie's "Rebel Rebel" and Pink Floyd's "Us and Them," fuels this high-energy look at a pack of underdogs who sowed the seeds for today's extreme sports craze.
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50Exhilarating but blatantly biased.
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50A more impartial filmmaker might have understood the need for other voices to balance against all that attitude, might have understood how hungry the film makes us for even a single non-adulatory moment.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 12 out of 13
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Mixed: 1 out of 13
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Negative: 0 out of 13
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JohnL.10I really enjoyed this documentary and thats saying a lot because I usually find them pretty boring.