There are places on this earth where wind, gravity, and air pressure can thrust thousands of gallons of water up from the ocean into immense, towering walls. What's even more amazing is that there are people who will stand on a plank of fiberglass at the top of such a wall and skim down its face. Voluntarily. Eagerly. They're insane, but they're called big wave surfers, and Stacy Peralta's thoroughly enjoyable new film, Riding Giants, tells their story, from the early days of surfing, through its impact on the music and movies of the 50s and 60s, to the exploits of its most dedicated daredevils, past and present. It's just about as fun as a history lesson can be.

Most of the fun is supplied by a cast of colorful characters — like Laird Hamilton and Greg Noll — each of them a surfing icon who gladly and vividly recounts the first day he or she caught a particular wave or got up the gumption to do what had never been done. And Peralta is willing to listen. His film finds a sweet spot between amusement and reverence, honoring the sport by neither taking it too seriously nor gawking at its proponents like they're freaks. It listens to their tales, stands alongside them as they gaze out at the foamy blue, and gives us a pretty good idea of what it's like to walk a mile in their flip-flops.

The movie is filled with stunning footage of painful wipeouts, just-in-time rescues, and amazing physical phenomena, but it also races through boxes and boxes of still photos using animation to make them pop out of the screen like the 3D vistas of a View-Master reel. The effect is similar to the treatment of photos in The Kid Stays in the Picture, a fitting embellishment that makes flat frames seem as thick and glowing as the translucent tubes that the surfers chase. The pictures are propelled by an eclectic mix of songs, including music born of the surf era like the guitar solos of Dick Dale — and music that just sounds like it was born of that era, like the songs of the Stray Cats — as well as modern adrenaline pumpers like Linkin Park and the Hives.

As a dynamic collage, Riding Giants is a dervish, so much so that it's often hard to tell, especially in the movie's rapid first third, whether we're seeing the actual event being discussed or just something similar. But in general the footage is well integrated and frequently awe inspiring. Peralta has a good sense of pace and knows when to be manic and when to slow things down to a dramatic crawl. He has a firm grasp of his material, although he may have a bit too much of it. There's always a bigger wave waiting to be discovered, and for a time it feels like the film may show us all of them, like the projectionist may have spliced one of the reels into a continuous loop whose waves are going to pound the shores into the wee hours.

But the movie eventually arrives at a rousing conclusion, and when one of the surfers seems offended by the term "beach bum," we understand him a little better than we might have at the outset. He might be certifiable, but he's no bum. And although the sport is associated with the beach, that's just because the beach is next to the water. It's like calling star gazers "hill bums" because of where they plant their feet; it's not a love of the hill that turns their eyes upward.

When the Waterboys' anthemic "This is the Sea" plays over the movie's final minutes, any excess repetition is forgiven; all else is forgotten but the mysterious magnitude of the water. "That was the river," Mike Scott sings, "and this is the sea."

I'm not sure if big wave surfers hear music when they ride waves, but this movie makes me think they do: the music of the ocean, the rhythm of their pulse.

In the summer of 1970, rock promoters Ken Walker and Thor Eaton organized a traveling music festival that made its way across Canada in a train that was dubbed the Festival Express. The train occasionally stopped for concerts, but for the musicians onboard, including The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and The Band, the journey itself was as much fun as each of the stops.

Filmmaker Bob Smeaton says that when he recently told one of the musicians about the plans to make a film about the historic tour, he replied, "Great! But what are you gonna use for footage?" To which Smeaton replied, "There were cameras on the train," and the guy said, "There were?" There were, indeed, cameras and tape recorders on the train, but they were so unobtrusive and the spirit so festive that they were hardly noticed.

A festive spirit is exactly what Walker and Eaton were going for, believing that the best way to have great shows was to keep the musicians happy, so they filled the train with free food and booze and even made an impromptu stop in Saskatoon when supplies were running low. One car of the train was dedicated to non-stop jamming, and jam is exactly what the travelers did.

Smeaton has assembled a fun and intimate look at musicians doing what they love, playing music and feeding off of each other's creativity, and like the train that his film documents, he never swerves away from the music and camaraderie. He only pauses here and there to touch on the external forces that could have derailed the tour or the film. Joplin died only two months after the trip, and in the same year many of the bands began to realize the difficulty of remaining at this juncture of culture and commerce. At one stop, fans who objected to the show's $14 price tag tried to crash the party, which frustrated some of the musicians who thought it was a fair price for a day's worth of great music. True to form, Jerry Garcia calmed the angry crowd, and the Dead performed a free set in a nearby park.

The promoters lost a bundle on the venture. Smeaton tells that tale, and he nods to the events that marked the symbolic end of the 1960s, but before getting too far off track he always comes back to the music, which includes "The Weight" by The Band, several songs from the Dead, and no-holds-barred performances of "Cry Baby" and "Tell Mama" by Janis Joplin that bring down the house. The low-key noodling on the train is just as enjoyable as some of the stage performances. The duets between Garcia and Joplin and the late-night jams of Garcia and Buddy Guy show these folks at their most relaxed, enjoying every minute of a ride that came to feel like an oasis in a hectic world.

It all looks effortless, which given the circumstances is quite a feat. The footage shot on the train was scattered around Canada for years, and it was never properly synced with the sound recordings, so gathering the negatives and recordings in one place was merely the first step toward assembling a model train engine that had no instructions. Each concert yielded an audio recording and hours of film from multiple cameras — and that doesn't count the round-the-clock jamming on the train — but few notes existed that might help an editor link a particular audio recording to its related film, so just putting sound with the pictures was a painstaking process. It's amazing that it all looks and sounds so good.

Smeaton retains the grainy appearance of the 16mm film, which has been blown up to 35mm but is otherwise unprocessed, aside from a de rigueur split screen here and there. In some spots the limited selection shows. The Flying Burrito Brothers, for instance, appear without front-man Gram Parsons, and although Buddy Guy launches into a searing version of "Money" he disappears before the end of the song, and his band, finally deciding that he's not coming back to the stage, winds it up without him. It also would be nice to see more footage from the train, but cameramen, unlike musicians, need their sleep.

Still, Festival Express includes enough high points to make the trip worth taking. We're lucky to have this material at all, even with a few rough edges. It's impossible to imagine present-day musicians of this stature being so candid on film and so open to close observation. It was the right time and right place, and even the people onboard seem to know it. Thanking Walker and Eaton onstage, Joplin says, "The next time you throw a train, invite me, man." But it wasn't to be.

In Claire Denis's Friday Night, a woman named Laure momentarily leaves a stranger in the passenger seat of her gridlocked car, and when she returns, he's behind the wheel. She climbs into the passenger seat, and for a few manic moments her car — her life — is out of her control as the man whips through alleys and side streets to circumvent the traffic jam. Laure is on the eve of moving in with her fiancé. She's reticent about the prospect, but Denis lets Laure's fear direct the camera just as it directs Laure's melancholy gaze. By catching just the right faces and turns, the camera conveys Laure's sense of possessiveness toward her car as if it's the last gasp of her vanishing freedom.

Writing about Bruno Dumont's new film Twentynine Palms in Senses of Cinema, Darren Hughes says, "when all is said and done — after the endless driving, the pain-faced orgasms, the countless miscommunications, and the brutal, brutal violence — Twentynine Palms, I think, is really a film about a red truck."

He may be right. Dumont started his filmmaking career by shooting industrial videos, and he has cited a particular shot of a candy factory — where his camera moved into a chocolate machine — as the first time he captured an emotion on video tape, an emotion triggered not by people but by twisting ribbons of dark creamy goo. It's an odd statement, but it may explain why the characters in his more recent features are so mechanical, so tactile, why their sex is so robotic, and why the red Hummer that David and Katia use for scouting photo-shoot locations in Twentynine Palms seems less like a mere conveyance and more like the outer shell of the people inside. They live at the whims of their deeply-programmed desires but are unable, or unwilling, to reconcile them where they conflict, casually stroking themselves while watching TV that they find by turns abhorrent or amazing, unable to turn away, unable to decide if ice cream tastes good or bad, unable to stop eating. But when they're in the truck, these two bundles of contradictions must move together in the same direction, and one of them needs to drive.

Like Laure's car in Friday Night, the red Hummer's trials and fortunes are inextricably tied to those of its occupants, and vice-versa. David and Katia get equal time on the screen, but Katia is so dramatically simple that the character seems to be David's exaggerated view of the woman, and perhaps all women: she can't drive, she's childishly indecisive, she breaks into tears when he glances at a passing woman, and she asks him if he could ever molest children. It seems clear to him that sharing this pool with her will somehow destroy him, but he plunges in headlong anyway. He's courting danger. As they drive across the Mars-like rubble, he stops the truck, jumps out, and urges Katia into the driver's seat as he jogs around to the other side. He's as game, as willfully careless, as Laure when she lets a stranger into her passenger seat, but he goes a step further by encouraging his partner to take the wheel, something that Laure's companion did only when she wasn't looking.

Katia veers into chaparral and scrapes the truck, of course, but this is only the beginning. The truck with the double-entendre name, whose color matches Katia's hair and whose blemishes are removed with a cream similar to Katia's, gradually slips from David's control. Even when he retakes the wheel he remains within Katia's sphere. He drives past a rural house, and she leans out of the passenger window to encourage a couple of dogs to run alongside. One of them is hit. To her, David's callous response proves that he's heartless. Dumont waves his hand and miraculously solves the problem, but David files the incident away and knows that more is coming.

More is coming. Katia attracts another pack of dogs, or so it seems, more vicious than the last, and the two lose control of their truck, but in a bizarre twist of fate, contrary to David's implicit prediction, Katia was not the catalyst of the attack, not even the target. When he realizes this, his picture of himself and his world is upended. His destruction is complete in his feminization, or rather in his reluctant acceptance of Katia's view of men as he understands it. Each of the film's awkward, harshly lit sex scenes concludes with a stylized male orgasm — a man's animal-like grunts — and as the film moves toward its inevitable conflict, Dumont gradually transfers those sounds to violence.

Twentynine Palms is another in a string of recent French movies that seem to be stretching the bounds of what's filmmable. The body is no longer sacred, no longer even a reflection of a person but rather an object, a churning, jerking, oozing machine. But unlike many of their peers, Dumont and Denis seem to be working toward human discovery. Denis uses objects and bodies as windows into her characters' jealously guarded thoughts and as carefully coordinated guides through elliptical stories. And Dumont, for all of his attempts to shoot landscapes devoid of beauty, sex scenes devoid of titilation, and conversations devoid of content, and for all of his attempts to equate humans and machines, he seems to be reducing humanity not to meaninglessness but to its few essential elements — desire, fear, companionship, love, hate, and, death — and the junctures where they conflict.

Dumont's third feature is not an enjoyable movie. I'm not even sure it's a worthwhile experiment. And despite a picaresque locale that screams for such treatment, no single shot in Twentynine Palms comes close to the long shot in Humanité of a man walking briskly along a ridge, nor the shot of his car disappearing into the distance down a country road. But at the very least Dumont is interested in more than just clever games, which positions him leagues away from the likes of Gaspar Noé. In talking about his shot of the chocolate machine, that pivotal point early in his career, Dumont surmised that people are drawn to the turning gears because the machine mirrors their own thought processes. Thus, his films don't so much mechanize humans as humanize machines. He searches for people within their creations, be they trucks or relationships.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is easily Michael Moore's best film, not only because it's the most urgent but also because it has the most elegant form, a complete arc that begins with the decision makers and concludes with the people in the trenches, two poles that are given roughly equal time and feel half a world apart, in every way.

The decision making end, of course, centers around President Bush, and while Moore has a few new details that haven't appeared on the front pages of the major newspapers, most of the movie's impact isn't in the pieces of data that it presents but in how it connects them. Or, rather, how it disconnects them, since one of the central themes of the movie hinges on a simple, irrefutable fact: most of the people doing the fighting in our military are from lower classes and most of the people making the decisions to send troops into battle aren't, a point that Moore makes by first going to his home town of Flint, Michigan, where it's easy to find people who have relatives in the military, then by trying to confront members of Congress, only one of whom has a child in Iraq. In this movie, his trademark ambush tactics feel less like attention grabbing stunts and more like comic illustrations that hang on the outside of a sturdier and far more somber trunk.

Moore's treatment of the September 11th attack in the movie's opening minutes is apolitical and incredibly moving, even now, after every screen and page in the country has shown some version of the event and we've been reflecting on it for over two years. The sequence is more effective, more cinematic, than anything he's ever done, topped only by his later discussion with Lila Lipscomb, a woman whose family has a long record of service in the military, including Iraq. She's articulate and emotional, and she seems to make Moore's points so well that one wonders where he found her. Actually, he says where: she's from Flint.

Part of what's effective about her story is that it's not an argument. It's a woman, a person, a family, caught in the middle and trying to make sense of everything. She's not a prop or a puppet, and it's hard to imagine someone — conservative or liberal — not being moved by her situation and her words. Moore's interview is unlike those he's done in the past; he's rarely seen or heard when she's talking. He lets her go on at length describing the difficulty of living a life connected to the military and reading a letter from her son in a sequence that left the full theater where I saw the movie sniffling and silent. War is sadness and pain, this war, every war, whether you agree that Bush is at fault or not.

There are moments, however, when Moore is also trying to tell us something about himself. While talking to Lipscomb, he makes sure to say that this is a great country, which breaks the flow somewhat because it sounds like a personal defense against his critics, one that he shouldn't have to make, of course, but in these times who can blame him for reminding us, even awkwardly. But later, when Lipscomb walks the mall in Washington to get a glimpse of the White House, he shows uncharacteristic restraint. His camera follows her as she strolls, which provokes an unknown woman to intervene, move in front of the camera, and announce that the whole thing is staged. In earlier movies, it would be hard to imagine him hanging back at this moment, but in this one he lets the two women settle it, stepping in audibly only once to ask Lipscomb to clarify something that the microphone wasn't able to pick up.

Unfortunately, those who are unsympathetic to Moore's cause may be so turned off by the first half of the movie that even the last half, which should be of interest to anyone whose votes or tax dollars are supporting a war, may instead seem like manipulation, typical tear-jerking tricks of the bleeding hearts on the left, after the low blows and cheap shots, the goofy music, the silly superimposing of the administration's heads onto cowboy bodies, and the unflattering, out-of-context footage of Bush. Further, it may seem exploitative of a woman in pain, although a premise of the movie is that this is exactly the sort of thing the elites don't get to see up close, so here's their chance. Critics may also note that for all the names that Moore throws out attempting to connect Bush to oil cartels, he actually draws very few lines between those names and fails to build anything more than a hazy, oil-drenched picture.

I suppose this is the problem with Michael Moore. He's so polarizing, and so notoriously loose with the facts, that the legitimate questions he raises are often lost in the noise. And this movie has as much noise as any of his others. Every lucid observation is nestled in a bed of crackpot fragments. Nevertheless, despite the lack of clarity in parts of his argument, isn't it at least unseemly for so many of the key players in this game to be oil company executives, defense contractors, and financial partners of the ruling family? Isn't it at least worrying that our supposedly merit-based society, which prides itself on a system that connects actions to rewards and penalties, allows such distance between the have-nots who are doing the dirty work and the aristocracy that directs them? And isn't it a bit broad to say that someone like Moore is un-American for criticizing the government in a time of war, especially since the president has said the end of that war should come only after the elimination of something that has existed for nearly all of recorded history?

It doesn't take an acute social or political sense to make these observations, but it's helpful to see them compressed, even amid static, into a concentrated reflection on recent U.S. military action that's far less vindictive than emotional, and worthy of — demanding — a response.