[Mark Rabinowitz] There are plenty of reviews of James Marsh's recent Magnolia Pictures release "Man on Wire" out there. In fact, I bet there are half a dozen on the indieWIRE blogs alone, but I wanted to add my two cents. This is beyond a well made film. It's a documentary cum heist film-suspense thriller, which is saying quite a bit for a documentary, really. Not only that, but it's gorgeously photographed and edited. It's exactly what the Cinema Eye Honors folks mean when they talk about the use of craft in documentary.

The fact that Marsh, along with a supremely talented crew and a raft of fantastic archival footage have created a suspense film where no suspense should realistically exist is exceptional. We know Philippe Petit didn't fall. Yet we're locked to the screen, with "Can he do it?" running through our brains. For me, I simply cannot compute. What he's done is so far out of the realm of believability that the suspense was real. I simply could not believe that anyone would do something so patently insane. The thing is, he's not insane, at least not by any conventional measure. He really is the ultimate dreamer. He dreamt of the thing that no one else on the planet could even imagine and he pulled it off with a profound beauty seen only in the rarest of circumstances.

Photo © 2008 Jean-Louis Blondeau / Polaris Images