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100
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Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
An improbably bountiful subject -- kids on skateboards turning themselves into virtuoso artist-athletes -- has been brought to life in a wonderful, unpretentious documentary.
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91
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Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
A dazzlingly crafted documentary about the teenage surf punks of lower Los Angeles who singlehandedly transformed skateboarding into the extreme sport it has become.
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90
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Washington Post
Using home movies, photos, a brilliant soundtrack and candid, articulate interviews, director Stacy Peralta (one of the original Z-boys) details the birth of a pop culture phenomenon.
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88
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Boston Globe
Does a terrific job of evoking the electric magic of an extraordinary era.
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75
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Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Here is an entire movie about looking cool while not wiping out. Call it a metaphor for life.
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75
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USA Today Mike Clark
The film is, however, almost inevitably wistful for the past, and many of its emotional touches come from juxtaposed then-and-now footage of the participants.
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75
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Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
Exhilarating, breathless, must-see chronicle of the skateboarder revolution and evolution.
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70
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The New York Times Stephen Holden
As this taut, viscerally propulsive insider's history of the sport in its early years skids and leaps forward with a jaunty visual panache, it is impossible not to be seduced by its hard-edged vision of an endless teenage summer.
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50
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Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
A more impartial filmmaker might have understood the need for other voices to balance against all that attitude, might have understood how hungry the film makes us for even a single non-adulatory moment.
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50
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San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann
Exhilarating but blatantly biased.
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