APOLLO 11

The images from the aforementioned archives look startlingly pristine. From the criss-cross of boot prints in the lunar dust to Neil Armstrong's watery gaze after first landing, it's a remarkable record of a remarkable moment in human history.

Miller's conception of the film was centred on a direct cinema approach - similar in many respects to the cinéma vérité genre, direct cinema was characterised initially by filmmakers' desire to directly capture reality and represent it truthfully, and to question the relationship of reality with cinema. 'Apollo 11' contains no voiceover narration or interviews beyond what was available in the contemporary source material, similar to Asif Kapadia's documentary 'Senna', which depicted the life and death of Brazilian motor racing champion Ayrton Senna. There's also a minimum of on-screen text - mainly to identify who's who, and to provide some basic numerical data about time, distances, and so on.

'Apollo 11' will make you gasp at its sense of scale. Rockets were toweringly huge. The crowds watching the launch were enormous. The distance between the astronauts and mission control back in Houston, Texas was unimaginable. We watch and listen as a radio communicator records the three astronauts' heart rates (three glowing tadpoles wriggling along a black computer monitor) during the launch sequence - Collins and Armstrong's were both well over 100, but Aldrin's was surprisingly just 86, which was pretty much a normal resting rate.

'Apollo 11' also goes out of its way to evoke the era in which it was originally shot. There's genuine interest and engagement in the voices of network TV anchormen like Walter Cronkite; in another scene, the controllers gossip about the Chappaquiddick scandal engulfing the Kennedy clan.

Matt Morton's score, recorded using instruments available in 1969, shifts between coolly meditative during the astronauts' initially calm journey to growing urgency when they're fretting over potentially fatal obstacles like fuel shortages.

With so much crystal-clear recorded footage of the moon landing available, the story of 'Apollo 11' feels more like a time-travelling thriller and less like a conventional documentary. It's a virtuoso feat of editing, and awe-inspiring in a way that rescues that phrase from cliché. We're not so much hearing what happened in the past as seeing it happen before our eyes.