For All Mankind

For All Mankind (1989) is Al Reinert's documentary about the Apollo program, and you can watch it online on iFILM. No narrator explains anything to you. The men who flew to the Moon do the talking, over the film they shot on the way there.

Reinert spent years sifting through NASA's vaults and stitched nine separate Apollo missions into a single voyage — launch, weightlessness, the gray dust underfoot, that small blue Earth hanging in the window. Twenty-four astronauts went to the Moon between 1968 and 1972, and here Jim Lovell, Michael Collins, Charlie Duke, Eugene Cernan and the rest recall what it actually felt like up there. Brian Eno's score turns the archive footage into something close to a trance.

Eighty minutes, and the whole thing rests on one thing: it's real. No reenactments, no actors, just the trip as the crews lived it. If the loud space blockbusters have worn you out, this quiet, hypnotic film shows you the actual thing. Stream For All Mankind (1989) online on iFILM.