First Man

Damien Chazelle is an enthusiastic, visually expressive filmmaker with practically nothing of interest to say about the human experience.

First Man doesn't just dwell on its subject's achievements. It takes a beat to glance into Armstrong's personal motivations and vulnerabilities while using technical mastery to tell an engrossing true-life story.

A fascinating film, it's difficult to watch at times because there's so much loss and so much risk that we never really thought about that lead us getting there.

In those sequences when Armstrong is heading for the stars, the approach is so immersive on a sensory level -- cacophonous sound design, juddering cinematography verging on the abstract -- that it almost compensates for the void at the film's core.

Chazelle and Singer have created a grueling, prosaic, state-of-the-art docudrama (no imagination allowed) with the heart of a male weepie.

First Man is precise, patriotic, immersive, gorgeous, and flawed. Can people stop complaining about the flag now?

The cinematography in the film is fantastic and for his first film not about music, Chazelle gets the best score of any of his films from composer Justin Hurwitz, one that might just be my favorite score of the year so far

First Man is the first film of 2018 that I have seen where my thought throughout was ‘this needs to be an Oscar film.

That epic Justin Hurwitz's score during the Apollo 11 launch and the astonishing Linus Sandgren's cinematography on the Moon are going to be kept in my memory forever.

First Man is more than just a technical marvel. It is a film that truly captures the struggle and journey of not just America’s race to space but a man’s sacrifice to reach his ultimate goal of walking on the moon.