Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (2022, dir. Richard Linklater)

The imaginative son of a NASA administrator reminiscences about his late-1960s Florida suburban childhood. Gentle, charming, if slight rotoscoped semi-autobiographical movie. The space mission stuff is pretty much simply a hook to hang the nostalgia on. Not that this is a bad thing in this case. Recommended.

Here’s the trailer.

Marooned [AKA Space Travelers] (1969, dir. John Sturges)

A US space vehicle suffers a failure prior to re-entry: NASA works on solving the problem. Stolid SF drama trying to present a realistic version of an Apollo-ish space race-era disaster possibility. Slow and serious, and not especially dramatic as a consequence.

Here’s the trailer.

First Man (2018, dir. Damien Chazelle)

Biopic of Neil Armstrong, from test pilot to Apollo 11 days. An impressionistic, oblique approach doesn’t really penetrate the subject, leaving Gosling free to offer another blank, introverted performance. Impressive rather than good, though with a sterling cast of character actors in support.

Spacewalker [AKA The Age of Pioneers] (2017, dir. Dmitriy Kiselev)

An account of the first Earth orbit with a spacewalk, the 1965 Voskhod 2 mission with Alexei Leonov and Pavel Belyayev. Excellent true-life drama; a counterpart to The Right Stuff and Apollo 13 in its mix of mythic modern heroism and actual space danger. Recommended.

Moonwalkers (2015, dir. Antoine Bardou-Jacquet)

The CIA try to hire Stanley Kubrick to fake the Apollo 11 moon landing. Weak-sauce low budget farce with a shaky grasp of space history, though with some game playing in service of a duff script and an old idea.

Hidden Figures (2016, dir. Theodore Melfi)

Early 60s. During segregation and the Cold War, black female mathematicians work behind the scenes at NASA. Hidden Figures is a great crowd-pleaser, deftly telling a civil rights history, a romance, and a race into space story. Highly recommended.