REVIEW: Apollo 11: Quarantine [2021]

Please do not feed the animals. When you craft a 90-minute movie out of over 11,000 hours of newly sourced video documenting the Apollo 11 mission, the amount of footage left on the cutting room floor is extensive. That’s not to say you should have made a longer film, though. Todd Douglas Miller‘s succinctly titled Apollo 11 is one of the best documentaries to come out of the past decade. Adding more imagery of pre-launch, moon landing, and/or aftermath wouldn’t have improved anything—it may have conversely made it worse. But…

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REVIEW: Apollo 11 [2019]

The Eagle has landed. A black screen with the title Apollo 11 arrives for an instant before we’re whisked away to July 1969 as those in Mission Control and astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins prepare themselves for the first manned spaceflight to land on the moon. There’s no opening interstitial providing context, no narrator explaining what’s next. Director Todd Douglas Miller goes full “direct cinema” here—or at least as much as one can despite adding a propulsive score and expert cuts alongside ample split-screens—to immerse us in…

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REVIEW: Dinosaur 13 [2014]

“Any tampering with this scene is a federal violation and will be prosecuted” It’s crazy how something so genuine in its scientific potential to find answers about our world and fiscal assistance to a small South Dakotan town can be warped and twisted into a sideshow of legal folly. Director Todd Douglas Miller has taken the wonder of what the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research did in unearthing the most complete skeletal remains of a Tyrannosaurus Rex ever found and the flabbergasting fallout courtesy of ownership claims and the…

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