An informative and illuminating documentary that chronicles the evolution of sound in cinema, Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound succeeds as an accessible and entertaining ode to the innovators, the craftsmen, and the technology that continues to give the cinema experience new life.

We are often so pre-occupied with the visual component of movies and moviemaking, that the sound factor is taken for granted. This makes sense. Afterall, cinema began with the "silent era" where the visuals and the visuals alone told the story. Yet like all artforms, the act of moviemaking is one built upon evolution. The "talkies" of the 1920s, personified by the likes of The Jazz Singer, began a chain of events and new technologies that bore from it the likes of Psycho, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and so much more. Gradually, our ability to listen to films became that much more advanced, yet we didn't even know it.

Director Midge Costin knows this fact. A professor in the Art of Dialogue and Sound Editing, Costin was also a sound editor on some of the biggest action movie of the Nineties (Armageddon, Con Air, etc). Along with writer Bobette Buster, Costin has delivered an excellently crafted and paced documentary that blends film school with great storytelling. With history as its guide, Making Waves lays out the evolution of sound in film that many will find fascinating.

Subjects like this can be overwhelming, yet Costin keeps things on as grounded a level as possible, thanks to the use of illustrations, and the movies themselves as examples of the different phases cinema sound has undergone. A vast and impressive range of talking heads featuring filmmakers Steven Spielberg, Marin Scorsese, and James Cameron, to revered sound editors Bill Burt (Star Wars), Richard King (Inception) and Anna Behlmer (Braveheart), (plus so many more) provide insight and highlight the significance of the varied technologies, and the application of those technologies, that gave movies a new lease of life.

A delve behind the celluloid curtain to reveal one of its vital, yet under looked processes, Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound is a vital documentary worth watching, and listening to.