The Walk

There are just too many good movies. That’s my takeaway from this year’s annual exercise in critical masochism selecting the ten best films. My shortlist of 2015’s best movies is anything but short; running well over 30 outstanding entries. It feels like something I say every year, but it’s true; there are more great movies left off my list (like Clouds of Sils Maria and Experimenter and Brooklyn and Heaven Knows What and While We’re Young and about 20 others) than are actually on it. I actively agonized over the last couple slots for hours. (Yes, actual hours. I’m sorry, It Follows.)

The biggest movie screen in New York City is the IMAX at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square on Broadway at 68th Street — 7448 square feet in an auditorium with 600 seats. It’s Thursday, October 15; the last show of the last day of Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk’s run at the theater. In three hours, the film gets replaced by Crimson Peak.

Following a press screening of Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk, the opening film at the New York Film Festival, the director said part of what inspired his movie was that Philippe Petit’s real-life walk was never captured on film. While there are photographs of Petit walking on a high-wire between the Twin Towers on August 7, 1974, as explored in the Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire, video footage of his audacious illegal performance doesn’t exist. In the film, Zemeckis attempts to turn the thrilling walk into an immersive experience with 3D and IMAX, but some moments, especially ones as majestic as Petit’s walk, should remain an unseen mystery.

It’s one those true stories that no one would believe if it didn’t actually happen. In 1974, artist high-wire Philippe Petit walked across a cable strung between the two World Trade Center towers. He didn’t have permission, it was very illegal, and it took an entire team of experts to pull it off. The story was the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire and now it has been dramatized in The Walk, which has just revealed a new trailer.

If you’ve seen James Marsh’s Academy Award-winning documentary ‘Man on Wire,’ you’re familiar with the story of Philippe Petit, the high-wire walker who performed the insanely dangerous feat of traveling, via tightrope, between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. If you haven’t seen ‘Man on Wire,’ you’ll have a new opportunity to learn Petit’s story when ‘The Walk,’ Robert Zemeckis’ fictionalized version of Petit’s book ‘To Reach the Clouds,’ opens next fall.