Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
A coming-of-age story set in the suburbs of Houston, Texas in the summer of 1969, centered around the historic Apollo 11 moon landing.
Kevin Ward reviewedJuly 5, 2025
A gigantic feel good cup of nostalgia from Richard Linklater. Linklater is a master at capturing the vibe of a particular time and place in his films, in this instance 1960’s Houston during the space race. I’m not a big fan of the rotoscoping animation from his other films A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life, but I actually thought it worked rather exceptionally here. The imagery is crisp and clean and not as loose and wavy as the aforementioned films. It has an imaginative fantastical element weaved into the narrative, but otherwise it’s a pretty simple slice of life / coming of age drama. That nostalgia though is a helluva drug and it gets me almost every time.