Here are review links for this film submitted by our members:
- Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Texan Reviews
- Ken Bakely @ Film Pulse
- Excerpt: It’s a movie with an unwavering faith in the lessons we can learn from the past, but it shuns inappropriate nostalgia or uncritical revisionism.
- Caio Bogoni @ Cine Grandiose [Portuguese]
- Excerpt: The bland result of an exaggeratedly reticent narrative.
- Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat @ Spirituality and Practice
- Excerpt: Story of NASA’s quest to land a man on the moon and the reluctant hero who took that first historic step.
- David Crow @ Den of Geek
- Excerpt: The result is a film that at times can be a little too happy in its own company, and one that is less passionately engrossing than Whiplash or La La Land. Yet it most definitely will engross, carrying you well beyond that first step.
- Karl Delossantos @ Smash Cut Reviews
- Excerpt: Claire Foy owns this movie. So many biopics about famous men always have the doting wife archetype that often is relegated to sitting in the background and worrying about her husband. In First Man, Foy doesn’t just support him, she challenges him.
- Herman Dhaliwal @ Cinema Sanctum
- Excerpt: I can definitely see First Man testing the patience of an audience who may want a straightforward biopic, but Damien Chazelle has other things in mind, and I find that his impulses are far more interesting as well as emotionally resonant. The moon landing sequence is one for the ages.
- Vadim Grigoriev @ kinoblog.com [Ukrainian]
- Mark Hobin @ Fast Film Reviews
- Excerpt: Josh Singer’s screenplay is more interested in Neil Armstrong the man, than in detailing what the rest of the world was thinking. That gives First Man a unique perspective on this story.
- MaryAnn Johanson @ FlickFilosopher.com
- Excerpt: Damian Chazelle finds a dreamlike reverie amidst rocket-powered mechanical brawn. As wonderfully, nerve-wrackingly exhausting as it is movingly intimate.
- Charlie Juhl @ Citizen Charlie
- Excerpt: Damien Chazelle studies the humble, quiet man behind the mission. The history book facts are all here, but First Man works as a character study rather than moon thriller – what makes Neil tick, how does he summon nerves of steel when the rest of us would panic to become that notorious “whitey on the moon”.
- [New] | Wesley Lovell @ A crisp, technically proficient telling of the American moon landing that ignited a generation’s imagination and propelled U.S. scientific advancements into the following decades. “First Man” is Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to “La La Land,” the multiple Oscar-winning musical that famously lost to “Moonlight” in Best Picture.
- Jared Mobarak @ JaredMobarak.com
- Excerpt: Chazelle impressively depicts [Armstrong’s personal] struggle throughout, but he goes above and beyond during the climactic lunar landing. The moment’s hugeness ultimately tore it from [his] hands. Now it’s finally been given back.
- Pat Mullen @ Cinemablographer
- Excerpt: Neil Armstrong might have been the first man to walk on the moon, but we’ll all feel like we’ve been there after seeing First Man.
- Aaron Neuwirth @ We Live Entertainment
- Excerpt: When it comes to terrific biographical adventure films such as this, the eagle has landed.
- Eddie Pasa @ Gunaxin
- Excerpt: First Man may be a movie about Neil Armstrong and the Space Race, but it triumphs more as a film about the American ideal and the dedication towards making it a reality.
- Joao Pinto @ Portal Cinema [Portuguese]
- Excerpt: It isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s a very enjoyable biopic!
- Don Shanahan @ Every Movie Has a Lesson
- Excerpt: Unlike the popular space race films that have come before it, not a millisecond of First Man feels like typical hero worship celebrating astronaut and aeronautical engineer Neil Armstrong. What is not trumpeted as heaps of grandiose praise by Academy Award-winning La La Land director Damien Chazelle is instead honed into a poignant and resolute testament of honor.
- Andrew Wyatt @ The Lens
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