Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
Netflix | Release Date: March 25, 2022 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
79
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 39 Critic Reviews
Positive:
35
Mixed:
4
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Little White LiesDavid JenkinsApr 12, 2022
Apollo 10 ½ is about the subjective intimacy of history, and how all events are just an equally-sized, vibrantly-coloured fragment in the kaleidoscope of our mind. Read full review
100
The GuardianPeter BradshawMar 30, 2022
Youth is a great theme of Linklater’s, but presented without any great directional moralising or emotional narrative. Being young just is. This is a film of enormous charm. Read full review
100
Original-CinJennie PunterMar 25, 2022
Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood is definitely Linklater's most granular film, rich in the small details and moments of daily life that unite to power the biggest stories of our times. Read full review
95
TheWrapAlonso DuraldeMar 13, 2022
Unlike the “memberberries” school of nostalgia that can reduce itself to “I had that lunch box!” Linklater gets granular and specific (and thus universal) about his memories and his perceptions of the world at that time. Read full review
91
The A.V. ClubJordan HoffmanMar 28, 2022
An essentially plotless but engaging and enriching recollection of childhood steeped in warmth, grace, honesty, and crystalline specificity. Read full review
90
CNNBrian LowryMar 31, 2022
It's a gauzy indulgence in nostalgia that sweetly captures a very specific time and place, which should broadly speak to Linklater's contemporaries who somehow survived childhood before our society adopted most of the pesky rules designed to ensure that they do. Read full review
90
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerMar 31, 2022
Apollo 10½ is a portrait of innocence untainted by any agenda other than the need to convey as honestly as possible what it felt like to be that particular boy at that particular moment in history. It’s a movie about how we conjure and commemorate our pasts. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesNoel MurrayMar 24, 2022
The larger point of this movie is that our own pasts sometimes seem like a fantasy — a dream we half-remember — where what actually happened and what we merely imagined both now seem equally impossible. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyMar 13, 2022
It’s clearly a labor of love, a unique reflection on an unforgettable summer, inviting us to share in a moment of communal spirit which now seems to belong to another world. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleTrace SauveurMar 24, 2022
It may feel somewhat slight when it’s all said and done, but Apollo is packed with Linklater’s unique voice and breezy attitude that makes you feel right at home. Read full review
88
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottApr 5, 2022
From “Dazed and Confused” to “Boyhood” to “Everybody Wants Some!!,” [Linklater's] become one of Hollywood’s chief purveyors of nostalgia, mining it for both humor and poignance. What’s more, he does it consistently well. With "Apollo 10½," he’s done it again. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeMark FeeneyMar 30, 2022
As in Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), about the last day of school and first night of summer vacation in a Texas town in 1976, Apollo 10½ maintains a wondrous balance between Lone Star specific and anywhere-in-America general. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenMar 28, 2022
Apollo 10 ½ is so adept at making the mundane magical that it almost doesn’t need the conceit that gives the movie its title. Read full review
85
PolygonRafael MotamayorMar 31, 2022
Apollo 10 1/2 is a charming, visually striking blend of history and fantasy that captures the way children see and process historical events happening around them, and considers what they choose to remember — and how those choices affect them as adults, and the worlds they choose to build around them. Read full review
83
ColliderRoss BonaimeApr 1, 2022
Apollo 10½ can at times feel like the greatest hits of Linklater and what made him who he is, but that’s a welcome change, and a reminder of his strengths as a filmmaker. Read full review
83
The Film StageJohn FinkMar 16, 2022
The film may be Linklater’s warmest and most nostalgic precisely because of its specifics. Read full review
83
IndieWireDavid EhrlichMar 13, 2022
This semi-autobiographical sketch isn’t really a story at all so much as a sweetly effervescent string of Kodachrome memories from the filmmaker’s own childhood — the childhood of someone who was born in a place without any sense of yesterday, and came of age at a time that was obsessed with tomorrow. Read full review
80
ScreenCrushMatt SingerApr 6, 2022
Despite the lack of conflict, Apollo 10 1/2 is a charming and engrossing 95 minutes, mostly because of the way Linklater blends his memories and dreams of that period, and filters both of them through the medium of Rotoscoped animation, which produces images that are somehow both surreal and hyper-real all at once. Read full review
80
The New YorkerRichard BrodyMar 31, 2022
Apollo 10 1/2 unites the inner and outer life in a form of cultural autobiography, and it does so with a unique sense of cinematic style and form. Read full review
80
The New York TimesA.O. ScottMar 31, 2022
Apollo 10½ is more a modest memoir than a whiz-bang space epic. Its view of the past is doggedly rose-colored, with social and emotional rough edges smoothed away by the passage of time and the filmmaker’s genial temperament. Read full review
80
Rolling StoneDavid FearMar 30, 2022
Apollo 10 1/2 starts off as a fantasy, a family comedy and a loosey-goosey flashback. It exits as a tribute to imagination, which — like so many of Linklater’s best movies — uses something personal as a jumping-off point for something poignant, funny, expansive, and ultimately moving. Read full review
80
EmpireJohn NugentMar 30, 2022
A dreamlike time capsule of a historic event, told from a kid’s perspective and rendered in beautiful animation — only Richard Linklater could have made this film. Read full review
80
Paste MagazineAurora AmidonMar 22, 2022
It’s a stylish meditation on childhood that isn’t afraid to indulge in all the sentimentality that goes along with that. Almost 30 years after Dazed and Confused, Linklater is still reminding us exactly why childhood is a uniquely special thing. Read full review
80
VarietyPeter DebrugeMar 13, 2022
Turns out, this movie isn’t so much about space as it is about time travel, or more specifically, taking Linklater and his followers back more than half a century. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Brad WheelerApr 6, 2022
The nostalgia quotient might be indulgent overload for some, though catnip for others. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzApr 1, 2022
A film like Linklater's brings you inside the consciousness of a person whose perceptions of the world are simultaneously constrained and curious, and open to new experiences. Read full review
75
ObserverOliver JonesMar 30, 2022
Stan’s trip to the moon may fade into the ether, but his ride down the highway with his brothers and sisters, all of them unsecured on the flatbed of a pickup truck is so brimming with immediacy that it won’t even matter. Read full review
75
The Associated PressLindsey BahrMar 30, 2022
As with most Linklater joints, it’s so sincere and so sweetly true that you can’t really fault it for not reinventing the wheel. Just like a story that your parents have told or maybe you’ve told a million times before, it’s comforting. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineKeith WatsonMar 28, 2022
Apollo 10½ ultimately suggests that memory distorts and amplifies just as much as it preserves. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreMar 23, 2022
Apollo 10 1/2 might have been utterly forgettable without the rotoscoped adding of computer-painted rose-colored glasses. But in this form, it becomes something timeless, not autobiography (Linklater’s parents divorced when he was 7), but a sweet and somewhat innocent memory play animated in brighter-than-real-life color, a summary of how things were in an America that accomplished great things even as its institutions strained at revolutionary/evolutionary change that continues to this day. Read full review
75
ConsequenceClint WorthingtonMar 16, 2022
The result is sleepy and somewhat solipsistic, but that’s part of the charm of a Linklater joint, especially the personal ones. It truly feels like a filmmaker opening his mind to us and inviting us to share in his dreams. Read full review
75
The PlaylistJason BaileyMar 13, 2022
The jankiness of this structure is a bit much, at least on first viewing, drifting into memoir material for so long that it the picture feeling shapeless for a good long while. But then again, that’s our Linklater, and complaining about narrative aimlessness is kind of like coming out of a Scorsese movie bitching about all the voice-over. It’s a new Linklater, is the point, and that’s good news indeed. Read full review
70
Film ThreatAndrew StoverJan 5, 2023
Loosely based on Linklater’s experiences growing up in the 1960s, Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood is not so much a space adventure as a pleasant reminder of the essence of youth and the comfort of memory. Read full review
70
Screen DailyTim GriersonMar 15, 2022
By this point, the 1960s have been sufficiently chronicled and celebrated, but the specificity of Linklater’s portrait nevertheless has a poignancy to it. Read full review
70
IGNSiddhant AdlakhaMar 13, 2022
Richard Linklater’s animated Apollo fantasy is scattered, but sweet. Read full review
60
The TelegraphTim RobeyMar 31, 2022
It’s warm, cosy and very Linklater: it definitely exudes more chill than urgency. Read full review
55
SlashfilmJosh SpiegelMar 30, 2022
This is a sweet, friendly, low-key affair that often feels less like a story and more like a home movie Linklater collected to share with his grandkids. Read full review
50
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreApr 1, 2022
The film’s litany of details about growing up in the Houston area in the ’60s isn’t enveloping — instead, in its drone of vintage sitcom titles and reminiscences about fecklessly riding in the back of a pickup on the freeway to the beach, it feels, for the first time from Linklater, like a lecture about how things were better back then. Read full review
40
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeApr 4, 2022
Unfortunately, it becomes clear that the film is all backdrop, a boomer nostalgia trip with little in the way of actual story. Read full review
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