Man on Wire & The Walk

[School of Movies 2022]

The Summer Commissions Season continues with an unexpected highlight.

Here we have a brace of films focusing on the same real life event: Man on Wire (2008) and The Walk (2015). The former is a documentary about Philippe Petit the man who walked on a wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The latter is the Robert Zemekis dramatization of that fairly astonishing heist. We recommend you see one or both of them, because they're fantastic in different ways.

The year was 1974, the towers were in the process of being built in Manhattan, and thousands of miles away a French street performer was cultivating a deep longing to traverse the tallest wire in the world. One tiny mistake, one miscalculation and he would plummet to a very public death. But first he had to get up there, and for that he and his cronies were going to need to pull off one of the most extraordinary real life heists of all time.