Saw the new documentary Man On Wire yesterday. It’s about the French tightrope-walker and his friends who sneaked onto the roofs of the World Trade Center in 1974, strung a cable between the towers, and performed a high-wire act for the surprised and delighted crowd below.

Lately I’ve been paying closer attention to the different ways of telling a story in a documentary. This movie has no narrator, just the voices of the participants retelling the events. The filmmakers interject their own comment and sense of humor using music and editing. This film uses actors to recreate scenes that were never filmed originally, which sounds sneaky but serves the story well.

Any work of nonfiction succeeds or fails based on how good the material is. In this case, it’s a brilliant and simple story with some universal themes. It’s about taking a reckless risk for art, about chasing an obsession, and about craving some intense experience in a world engineered to be safe and comfortable. It’s also about success: He did it!

Unmentioned in the film is what happened to those towers. That seems like a missing piece of the story, but on the other hand, what are they going to say about it that the audience doesn’t already know?

Saw the Batman movie yesterday. Fine. Too violent. Didn’t live up to the hype. Also, Gotham City is Manhattan, not Chicago. You can’t have it both ways.

(Update: “It’s a film that is just rewriting the record books every day and redefining our notions of what a blockbuster can be.“)

The most tragic thing about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is that for millions of kids, this will be their introduction to Indiana Jones. Not the swashbuckling hero movies from the 80s, but an incoherent, over-CGI’d space alien picture. (Spoilers follow.)

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Sooner or later, somebody’s going to make a great movie about the Iraq war. Stop-Loss, which I saw this afternoon, isn’t quite it. (Spoilers to follow.)

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1. Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, 646 W 131st St., Harlem. Huge, crowded, hard to get seated for dinner on the weekend, awesome.

2. Bar BQ, 689 6th Ave. (at 20th), Brooklyn. More of a bar, this place makes the list because it’s a block from my apartment and good people work there.

3. Virgil’s, 152 W. 44th St., Times Square. If you must eat in Times Square, eat here.

4. Hill Country, 30 W. 26th St. (near Broadway), Manhattan. They only have one kind of sauce, but it’s really good. Do not get suckered by the weird meat-by-the-pound ticket system.

5. Spanky’s, 127 W. 43rd St., Times Square. A suitable standby if Virgil’s is too crowded.