Jean-Louis Blondeau/Polaris Images

The World Trade Center towers were one of my favorite places in New York. When I visited the city throughout the '90s, I would make a point of heading there around sunset so I could stand on top of the outdoor observation deck and watch the sun slip behind New Jersey and the lights come on all over Manhattan.

It is for this reason and many others that I'm thankful for the new documentary Man on Wire. It's a look back at French high-wire artist Philippe Petit's incredible 1974 achievement: when he and a team of friends and others strung a wire between the very top of the two towers and then Petit walked out into thin air.

The movie is structured around contemporary interviews with Petit and most of the co-conspirators who helped him slip past the towers' security with his high-wire equipment. Petit comes across as both delightful and manic, what you'd expect of someone who spent six years dreaming and planning his most famous conquest. His charisma is also evident in these interviews, as he, in ways both modest and immodest, talks of the difficulties and setbacks he encountered. And when he remarks, "What a beautiful death, to die in the exercise of your passion," we can grasp the passion he's talking about.

This charisma is what drew so many people to his side. And while I had trouble sometimes remembering who was who as the movie cycled through its talking heads, their various perspectives give a striking sense of the monumentality of the project and the cleverness of the team. Petit's girlfriend at the time likens it to a bank robbery, and the movie builds on that tone.

Director James Marsh carefully balances these interviews with re-creations of various moments as well as footage the group took of their preparations. Shots of Petit practicing on a wire in a field give a sense of the joie de vivre he brought to his art, as do high-wire acts in Paris and Sydney.

But it's the World Trade Center project that Petit is known for, and the film carefully builds the suspense leading up to the fateful night when the team sneaked into both towers and the morning when Petit walked out over the city. Even though I knew what happened, the movie is so well edited by Marsh's editor Jinx Godfrey I found myself becoming more and more nervous, more and more excited. If only there had been more footage of the actual event; the same photos, incredible as they are, get repeated as people describe what happened. And the movie's denouement is both a bit confusing (who fell out with whom?) and anti-climactic.

Still, as thrilling as Petit's feat was, what I'll remember most about Man on Wire are the Twin Towers themselves. The image of them falling has been utilized in so many manipulative ways, it feels right to see them snatched out of the hands of politicians and restored as buildings that sometimes inspired dreams.

Jen Tracy/Sony Pictures Classics

The mumblecore movement, marked as it is by a general lack of movement, has been ripe for parody ever since a sloppy, white, twenty-something first pointed his camera at slackers talking about their relationships. It's a loosely defined aesthetic of low-budget filmmaking among friends, and while its best movies -- like those by Andrew Bujalski and Joe Swanberg -- are intimate and funny, they're always a millimeter away from solipsism.

In 2005 Mark and Jay Duplass made The Puffy Chair about a downbeat road trip and a romance on the rocks. It was an early, unremarkable entry in the catalog, but their second film, Baghead, sinks a stake more firmly in the ground. The story involves four out-of-work actors who see a micro-budget indie flick at a film festival and decide, hey, we could do that. So they head to a cabin in the woods to write a screenplay for themselves.

The jokes practically write themselves, but the Duplass brothers demonstrate that the filmmakers who are best prepared to poke fun at mumblecore are probably the mumblers themselves. Once they've isolated their four characters from the world, a dozen friendly and romantic possibilities arise, many of them drawing from a setting the Duplasses are likely familiar with: the script brainstorm. But like the best films of their peers, what could have been a pointlessly self-referential exercise, where every bit of dialogue seems lifted from the filmmakers' lives, Baghead shows a nimble and discriminating editorial sense. All of the dialogue is banal by design, so the trick is to navigate a mundane conversation and cull the important bits that are as normal on the surface as everything else. "I think you're so amazing," says one of the girls to one of the guys in a quiet moment, sounding vaguely hesitant, as if she's lingering on "so" because she needs to think of a convincing adjective. Then she adds, "You're like my friend and my brother," which isn't quite what her pal wants to hear.

But more impressive than the understated humor of the dialogue is the brothers' tremendous facility with genre conventions. What looks casual isn't, and when the film begins to shift its tone away from simple parody into something a little creepy -- after all, our heroes are alone in a remote cabin -- the Duplasses blow their cover. Despite the cheap, herky-jerky camera, they're more precise filmmakers than I'd imagined. And as the suspense takes hold, they provoke the question, "What kind of movie is this?"

Part of the reason this strategy works is that it springs from the humble seeds of mumblecore. The Blair Witch Project, shot with similar technical constraints, attracted audiences who'd been told they were in for the scare of their lives, but Baghead comes from a tradition of friends talking to friends about friends and friends-of-friends. On camera. So the unexpected creepiness is unsettling because, when it arrives, the film has left the comfy couch with no indication of how far it intends to stray or even if it meant to go this far. Am I supposed to have these goosebumps? Is the call sorta coming from, you know, inside the, like, house?

Like Bujalski's Mutual Appreciation and Swanberg's LOL, Baghead seems incapable of supporting too-lofty expectations. It's a wonderfully entertaining film carefully engineered from toothpicks. Don't sit on it. Don't stack your back issues of Film Comment on it. But marvel nonetheless at its casual ingenuity.

MGM

I was almost 16 years old when Wargames was released in 1983, and it quickly became one of my favorite movies. You didn't have to be a teenage hacker (I wasn't) to thrill to the sight of a high school wiz kid saving the world. But what particularly captivated me was the overt political message. A few months later, I wrote a play about the dangers of nuclear weapons, which seemed to impress my English teacher, but maybe she was just giving me points for nervous outrage.

I wasn't the only person nervous about global thermonuclear war back in those days. Protests against Reagan's missile buildup abounded in 1982-83, and people's fears culminated in the broadcast on Nov. 20, 1983 of an infamous TV special The Day After, which portrayed what life would be like after a nuclear holocaust. Everyone knew what the DEFCON scale meant. And I distinctly remember our social studies teacher asking how many students thought a nuclear war would happen in our lifetime, and most of our hands went up. Imagine today's chatter about global warming but on a topic that could instantaneously and without warning destroy millions of people.

Watching Wargames again 25 years later, I'm not surprised that it feels dated and a bit slow. It's amazing how much more frenetic today's blockbusters are. And for better or worse, few of us worry much about computers accidentally setting off World War III. But I am still impressed that the movie decided to take on such a controversial and, let's admit, depressing subject. And Wargames tackles it head-on, with nuclear war a real and awful possibility, not like the ridiculous set-up of global warming in The Day after Tomorrow. When Matthew Broderick (acting in just his second film and still working out the nervous tics) "teaches" the computer to stop the wargame, the machine remarks, "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." No matter how simplistic that might sound, it had real political bite in 1983, and even today it makes me shiver a bit not knowing if our own leaders believe it.

What I didn't realize in 1983 was how much the Wargames script owed to Stanley Kubrick's masterpieces Dr. Strangelove and 2001. The former is directly echoed in the opening scene, as two men in charge of a nuclear missile receive a coded message to launch the bomb. But while irony abounds in Slim Pickens flying a bomber over the Soviet Union, Wargames plays the scenario straight and for maximum tension. And as there's no irony in Wargames, there's little of 2001's metaphysics, just the plot point of a computer gone amuck.

But if Wargames lacks the depth of its forebears, it does provide the winning smile of a 20-year-old Ally Sheedy, which should not be underestimated. And it also has a beautifully executed faux ending. Unlike today's multiple endings that feel like they're pre-programmed in some screenwriting software, Wargames makes you think victory has been achieved only to snatch the rug out from under you. And in this case, that misdirection is what had us pondering the political message as we walked out of the theater. Yeah, Matthew Broderick might've saved the day, but would anyone be able to the next time?

• Dennis Lim traces "The Evolution of the Fight Scene, from The Duke to The Dark Knight", and includes ten clips as illustrations.
• Although the formatting makes the page a bit difficult to scan, Jonathan Rosenbaum's latest "Global Discoveries on DVD" column in Cinema Scope has enough gems to keep your player warm through the fall, and, if you can play PAL and non-region 1 discs, probably into November. I recommend triple-clicking each paragraph as you read.

Palm Pictures

I first noticed the director Rolf de Heer when I saw his powerful Western The Tracker. That movie confronted head-on the colonial legacy that's plagued relations between whites and aborigines in Australia. Four years later, de Heer decided to leap over those post-colonial difficulties by collaborating with an aboriginal village and bringing their stories to the big screen. The result is the delightful Ten Canoes.

The film actually uses a double framing device. The narrator (David Gulpilil from Rabbit Proof Fence and The Tracker) tells a story about an older man with three wives. When his younger brother takes a fancy to one of those wives, the older man tells an ancient tale that mirrors the first story. De Heer shows the two stories in parallel, which might seem confusing, but he makes things beautifully clear by using color for the ancient tale and slightly over-exposed black-and-white photography for the more contemporary one.

What follows is a lovely film about storytelling and aboriginal life. From the opening gorgeous helicopter shot over the plains and swamps to the way each character is introduced with a head-on closeup, de Heer obviously wants to introduce the audience to this land and culture and let them speak for themselves. The movie begins with Gulpilil intoning, "Once upon a time," but then he laughs and remarks, "It's not your story, it's my story," cheekily poking fun at the Western fairy tale tradition to let us know "his" tales might be a bit different.

The narratives are relatively simple, and as Gulpilil himself points out, they take a while to get to their destination. My suspicion is that in a less exotic setting, many moviegoers would find themselves bored, but their culture is so different from ours that there's always something to notice. Furthermore, the cinematography, both brilliant color and striking black-and-white, is stunning. And the dialogue is comically earthy with jokes about farting and penis size, a reminder that certain movie conventions cross any cultural boundary.

For the past 14 months, J. Robert Parks and I have intermittently hosted a podcast at my personal site, Errata. The cleverly-named Errata Movie Podcast was an audio program for your iPod or computer that featured movie reviews, film festival reports, interviews, and general chit-cat.

The same podcast, same people, and same obsessions have moved from Errata to Daily Plastic. The program will appear every two weeks, and thanks to new vegetable-processing technologies, it's made entirely of post-consumer waste.

It's the Plastic Podcast, and it picks up precisely where we left off at Errata. Since it never biodegrades, completists may want to check out the program's fabulous archives which began there and continue here.

There's a gem buried behind each rotten bulb of fennel. We promise.

NOTE: If you subscribe to the Errata Movie Podcast in iTunes (which is free, by the way), your subscription will merge with the Plastic Podcast automatically. It's really just a name change.