Apollo 11 2019 ***

The super-doc format requires a huge amount of contemporaneous footage to work; fortunately for the makers of Apollo 11, pretty much everyone twigged to the significance of their mission to the moon and back, and pretty much every second of the voyage that could be filmed, was filmed. Of course, some moments, like the docking and return of the module, have to be covered via simple animation, but there’s still a few unseen gems here, like a view from the spaceship window as the craft smashes through into Earth’s atmosphere. The lack of talking heads or commentary makes Apollo 11 something of an ambient experience in the cinema; the impact of the moon-landing sequence in particular will be diminished at home, but Apollo 11 will remain a key artefact in our future understanding that Stanley Kubrick did not fake these events in a  film studio.