The Dawn Wall has plenty of thrills for those who love heights and those who fear them

The Lowell-Mortimer 2018 film, The Dawn Wall, has plenty of jaw-dropping moments of awe and is a thrill for those who love heights and for those who fear them, though it doesn't break any ground in documentary cinema - pretty standard techniques throughout with too much emphasis on talking heads - in what has become a mini-genre, the mountain-climber movie (the recent Meru was one of the best). That said: Aren't these movies always pretty good and worth watching (one of my household members says an emphatic: Yes!). And I have to say that the saga of Timmy Caldwell is one of the best: He's a kid who grew up w/ learning difficulties and w/ a loving dad but one who pushed him to extremes from the earliest age and, fortunately, instead of growing up in rebellion fell in love with rock climbing and by teenage years totally excelled (and dad never became too pushy of too invested in his son's life). Timmy became obsessed with completing unique climb up the wall of El Cap (Yosemite), and the film centers on that climb - and gives us a great sense of the extraordinary difficulty of some of the 32 "pitches" en route to the summit. We get a really intimate view of the struggles of Caldwell and his much less experienced climbing partner (Kevin Jorgeson) as somehow the filmmakers followed them closely throughout the challenge (there's no info on how they shot this film - which is good; the film isn't about itself). Moreover, Caldwell has a fascinating back story, involving an ill-fated climb with his then-girlfriend and a climbing partner, in Krygyzstan, during which they were assaulted and captured by a team of rebel soldiers. So there's plenty of great material in this film, and it's especially worth watching for those who like documentary films that take us for 2 hours to places we'd never go in a million years.