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A more sober, less in-your-face documentary than Peralta's great skateboarding flick.
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100An exhilarating, often mind-blowing history of surfing.
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91Traces the sport to its Polynesian beginnings, then zooms in on the genesis of 20th- century Southern California surf culture -- the boards, the bikinis, the laid-back cowabunga.
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May well be the most thrilling and educational surfing movie ever.
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90One of the best surfing documentaries ever filmed.
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90The Maverick's sequence is perhaps Giants' most viscerally exciting and poignant.
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90Every sport, and every sports film, must have its superman. The role is filled here by Laird Hamilton, who, we are told -- and, more astonishingly, shown -- took "the single most significant ride in surfing history." Seeing is believing.
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90By land or by sea, there aren't many movies that can move you like that.
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90This is vicarious cinema at its best.
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88Riding Giants is about altogether another reality. The overarching fact about these surfers is the degree of their obsession.
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88Magnificent if overlong and oddly structured surfing documentary.
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88For those dazed and dazzled by surf anarchists Noll and Clark, Hamilton comes off as the sport's technocrat, but he boldly goes where no surfer has gone before.
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88Giants has SO many insistent high points, in fact, that its breathlessness threatens to turn monotonous.
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88The risks these guys take seem outlandish, their accomplishments otherworldly.