No longer are documentaries the films you'd expect to induce boredom and sleep. With the new wave of documentaries released this past year including Capturing the Friedmans, Spellbound, and Fog of War, these films are engaging and thought provoking, but also as entertaining as your standard Hollywood film. Touching the Void is yet another to add to this list of documentaries that are allowing the genre to enter main stream movie going consciousness.

Touching the Void is the account of two young British climbers', Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, ascent and descent the western face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. During the descent back down the face of the mountain Simpson slips injuring his leg, rendering him unable to climb. Yates is forced to lower Simpson down the mountain until Simpson slides off of an ice ridge. With Yates and Simpson unable to communicate due to stormy conditions, and Yates sliding slowly towards the edge of this cliff Simpson has disappeared from, Yates cuts the rope connecting him and Simpson.

It is this single event and the rights and wrongs of that which lie at the core of Touching the Void. Through interviews with each of the men we hear about their musings on the journey, this event and what it meant to each of them. Director Kevin Macdonald further underscores the importance and great immediacy of what was at stake by inter-cutting scenes of dramatic reenactments of the men's journey. These dramatic reenactments are what vault this documentary into the growing category of documentaries that are entering the main stream movie going consciousness.

With breath takingly gorgeous shots of the mountain that begin by slowly pulling back on the two men climbing to vertiginous shots down the face of a 10,000 foot cliff, Macdonald places the viewer in these men's boots going up and down this mountain. The way the scenes of recreation are staged feels like a mix of beautiful panoramic cinematography that you'd expect to find in national geographic videos or a television program on the discovery channel coupled with the harrowing drama of what is happening to these two men.

By the film's conclusion Macdonald leaves the audience debating the actions taken by Yates, but also by what desire and determination drives people like Yates and Simon to take on such an audacious and dangerous task as mountain climbing as a form of recreational sport. In his successful blending of two different genres of filmmaking, documentary and drama, Macdonald creates a thoroughly entertaining and engrossing movie going experience that is just as gripping and intense as the latest action thriller playing at your local multiplex. What ultimately makes it better is that it actually happen.