"For All Mankind..."

In Sunday's Los Angeles Times, Dennis Lim writes:

Since the birth of movies, the moon has exerted a fascination as a mythic location. In 1902, the cinema's original magician, Georges Méliès, used a projectile cannon, cardboard sets and a host of camera tricks to imagine "A Trip to the Moon." Fritz Lang's final silent film, "Woman in the Moon" (1929), also envisioned a fanciful lunar expedition and in the process apparently invented the blast-off countdown. Just this year, director Duncan Jones used the evocatively barren moonscape as the setting for his eerie little existential drama, "Moon."

Compared to these sci-fi fantasies -- and even alongside other nonfiction films about the moon and space travel -- Al Reinert's 1989 documentary "For All Mankind" has the obvious edge of immediacy. The film consists simply of footage shot by the astronauts who took part in the Apollo program, interspersed with occasional scenes at NASA's mission control center in Houston.

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