Geezers reminiscing about their glory day -- overlooked in the drama of Watergate -- isn't enough to fill 90 minutes.

I don't understand why people like this movie at all. The best I can think of is that it involves some kind of symbolic recoding of the WTC event of 2001. I thought the movie was overwrought and that everyone in it seemed stupid. I was not surprised when one of the accomplices said his memory was foggy because he used to smoke too much pot; they all talk like pot-heads. This film is like an exercise in mind control; you have these lunatics histrionically telling you how amazed you're supposed to be and then they don't give you anything to be amazed at. If the tone had been less strident, it would have been a better film. In fact, I feel that the filmmaker's tendency to blow up every detail out of proportion deflates any value that might be inherent in this dumb story.… Expand

Viseral, real, inspireing, true artistry. I loved this movie.

A bizarre story of a bizarre man... told perfectly. Definitely see this.

The best documentary I've seen. Totally gripping and inspiring.

If this movie were made up, it would be rubbish. As a true tale, it achieves the state of magnificence. What an event. Bravo.

Moving captivating and highly entertaining.

Though I recall Phillippe Petit's walk between the Towers and also sat under his high wire one New Years at St. John the Divine (yes, I'm a fan), I was moved, enthralled, dazzled, by the film's story of how he and his gang so carefully plotted and planned their stunt. Yes, thank you Phillippe and thank you James Marsh, for inspiring us to art, freedom, joy.

A truly great film about an inspiring human being! I'm speechless.

One of the most life-affirming films ever! Thanks, Philippe Petit for reminding me that life should be lived to the edge!

This movie had a really great CONCEPT and a super STORYLINE but it was simply wayy too long. Occasionally funny and moving, it was a 90 minute movie that could have been done in 30 min.

Before I went, I couldn't imagine how a documentary about a tight rope walker would be this entertaining and engrossing. I was dubious when all the critics were so enthusiastic, but they were right.

An daring act that evokes emotion, even now.

I normally love documentaries, but this bored me. I just don't understand why this was so well-reviewed.

Philippe is a emotionally captivating story-teller, and meeting him through the film is worth every penny. The story was surprisingly moving, and beautifully personifies the French ideal of "beauty" and "art". Upon completing the feat, people kept asking why they did it and with their French ideals they didn't understand why there had to be a reason - it was art-beauty, nothing more.

Very watchable. I was surprised since the subject matter is something I had no interest in.

This is a thoroughly awesome yet subtly moving documentary on Phillip Petit's wirewalk of the WTC towers in 1974. I think Ebert's review log line kind of sets the right description for the way "Man on Wire" sits with you. 9/11 is understood throughout but never explicitly mentioned and with good reason. It is a story of the triumph of creativity, art and life in the face of death and destruction. Bravo Marsh.… Expand

Worst movie known to man. Dramatizations really ruin a documentary and this one is full of them. Main character is completely full of himself and makes you want to hate him despite his semi-cool caper. The recent doc on Joy Division was 100 times better. I am a democrat and I now use the term "freedom fries" instead of "French fries" after watching this. Dont be fooled by the reviews like I was, the emperor has no clothes.… Expand

The story is mildly interesting, but is told in such a self indulgent way that it is hard to stomach. They talk about breaking into the WTC and setting up their wire as if they were pulling off some great robbery, sorry but it's more like the time my buddies and I snuck into the Dolphins stadium to take pictures of ourselves with "GO CUBS" painted on our chests. The tight rope walker, Phillipe, wants to martyr himself so badly that he says, the police threw him down a flight of stairs and that he didn't know if he would be put in jail for the rest of his life or what. He continued on because he had to fullfill his dream no matter the cost. Give me a break, his punishment for this feat was to put on a street show for some kids and the city dropped all the charges. Oh and look what he does to his mates and his girlfriend once the feat is completed. He comes off to me as self absorbed, self-centered jerk. The wire walk between the towers in itself is a beautiful site to behold, but I don't see why it warrants 90 minutes of contrived build-up. I still don't understand why they couldn't just ask to setup the wire instead of all the cloak and dagger BS. People shoot movies in NYC all the time and it would provide great publicity for the towers which had just been built at the time. Why would the city say no? The Notre Dam walk I understand not asking there since it is church, but come on - NYC? Sign a few waivers and go knock yourself out, why not? This doc is a waste of time.… Expand

Song of Innocence “Man On Wire.” by Jimmy So “The Sorrow and the Pity” is the domineering parent of its documentary children—the weight of the name can break the backs of all those college dropouts with their cameras. It threw its obsession at a subject as “The Times of Harvey Milk” did justice to a person. It was as good at oral history as Studs Terkel, and “Hoop Dreams” would also later tell a story that no one else would. Its search for truth made it possible for an innocent man to be freed from prison because of “The Thin Blue Line.” All in all, it gave birth to the phenomenon of kids cutting class on “movie day.” Only some concert films and sports documentaries were able to break away, scoffing at solemn gravity and enjoying a joint or a beer. Then, there is the new work “Man On Wire,” concerned with something very much like a musical performance that drains the documentary form of its exhaustive discovery apparatus and floods it with a celebratory spirit. This last-chance child is not interested in examining an issue or investigating the facts. It is not a biography or a story that will shock the world. “Man On Wire” deals with a simple matter—one image, really, when the tightrope walker Philippe Petit lay down a wire bridging the two towers of the World Trade Center on August 7, 1974, and danced on it. Petit, who was born in France in 1948, is now the high poet of tightrope walking. New Yorkers know him—in the early nineteen seventies, he performed slack-rope walking, juggling, and magic tricks in Washington Square Park, where he was practically artist-in-residence; that’s what he is, in fact, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. This all makes him sound professional—he is the most famous high wire artist in the world—but the director of “Man On Wire,” James Marsh, never gives Petit’s contrivances the spirit of profession. He begins the film with oomph, retelling Petit and his crew’s break-in inside the twin towers, only to break off and give us the true star in this star vehicle—not the “man” in “Man On Wire,” but the structure from which the wire was anchored—the twin towers. He shows us a lollipop dream, the World Trade Center the Oz for a dewy-eyed Parisian boy, and Marsh never lets Petit’s boyishness go. The heist-like sequences of the World Trade Center adventure will return throughout the film, and in between Marsh shows us the exploits that prepared Petit for his magnum opus: his first “coup,” three years of preparation culminating in the walk between the towers of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame on June 26, 1971, which surprised the world and was beautiful enough if he never did another walk; and bringing his art to the other half of the globe, he walked between the pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. But as an expose on tightrope walking and as a biography of the man on the wire, it is a failure. The viewer never gets a sense of what the ancient Roman art of high-wire walking is and how Petit changed it with his World Trade Center caper. Petit’s background is not outlined in the film: he was a rebellious middle child in a bourgeois family; his father was an aloof and strict author and war hero, a pilot in the Air Force; he was kicked out of five schools; he’s mostly self-taught; he insists that tightrope walking is not difficult and he himself posseses no special athletic abilities; he claims over five hundred arrests while he performed on the streets of Paris. There is a strong sense that, were we to follow Petit, he would provide a lyrical account of why he turned to a life of magic, juggling and circus acts. As it is, Petit is a superb interviewee, speaking excitedly in fast French-sounding English, eloquent beyond the illusion of the accent. His bust reminds one of Cicero. But all of Petit’s words and all of his friend’s testimonies, accompanied by archival footage of their young idyllic days and their escapades, are only buildup, and all this time the terrible beauty of a small black figure between the twin towers was at the back of my mind. I cared only about that, and when the moment came in the narrative for Petit to step into the skyscraping sky, there was plenty there to convince us that a simple walk can center an ordinary picture, if indeed that here is an image of unutterable wonder. The sensible you might try to shake it off: “It is only a tightrope walk.” But then, you see Petit’s friend cry simply at the revisiting of the memory, and you can’t believe it has that grip on you. It is the memory of a moment that reaches across 34 years, and you find yourself in the same room with the twin towers without feeling fury or pain. It does wonders to the process of grieving, like saying goodbye at the funeral. You don’t care about the bad, you don’t want the truth, you couldn’t care less about the whole picture, and you can’t even stomach the words of consolation. All you want to hear is that one simple story that might or might not have captured or symbolized the person you knew. “Man On Wire” is an elegy to the twin towers. It is remarkable that it doesn’t need to be anything else. What is it with the feather-thin mythology of walking on air, penetrated by a wire and a man with the will to step onto it? When I was preparing for this article, I was reading old articles about Petit and his many feats and plans to walk over this or that (including across the Grand Canyon, which he has yet to attempt). I realized that I was asking myself: “Did he make it? Did he fall?” But of course he didn’t. It is beyond my imagination that a person can survive a nearly hour-long walk a quarter of a mile high in the air—I can’t even walk to my kitchen without stumbling. It takes something so banal and basic as walking to stun you into uncanny awe. There isn’t any mention of the old aggravating sounds of what happened to the towers. Petit and his allies do not break down and talk about it—if they did, “Man On Wire” would be colored by our disaffection. The dance cannot be done again. There have been already films on 9/11 (“World Trade Center”) and there will be more movies about 9/11. There might even be an expansive documentary on the terrorist act, the survivors, Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, or even the towers that were the World Trade Center. But a simple elegy like this? It can only be delivered once. This is all we need to remember the towers, and it has helped us say goodbye. ?… Expand

Best documentary of 2008! Very entertaining! A good caper flick, not a boring "how they did it" History Channel program.

Extremely unusual, extremely inspiring. In a Prozac era, it is so uplifting to see someone with such a lust for life; someone who really experiences life as beautiful. What an unusual person!

Mesmerizing, incredible photography, incredible conception.

The fact that the Twin Towers are there no more lends this film a depth and weight it would not have had were it simply the celebration of a self-absorbed artist's biggest caper/production. Moments of pure magic - the walk itself - are its redemption.

Surprisingly exciting. A great thriller.

This movie is all about what art is : When somebody says something is impossible - let us begin with it. The artistic creativity of an artist is always a balancing act over the rules in human society.

'Man On Wire' is and interesting story about an interesting man who is doing interesting stuff. I watched the documentry on the television and was pulled in to the film and actually couldn't turn the television off, I kind of couldn't walk over to the remote, I was just so concentrated, I was just staring at the television. A epic in documentry history.