Moonage Daydream
Neon | Release Date: September 16, 2022 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
83
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 34 Critic Reviews
Positive:
32
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Movie NationRoger MooreSep 28, 2022
An organized riot of images and sounds, Moonage Daydream is perhaps the only way a documentary biographer could approach the story of David Bowie. Brett Morgen (“Crossfire Hurricane”) has made his true masterpiece, the perfect film to celebrate a multifaceted life of aesthetic excess. Read full review
100
The Observer (UK)Mark KermodeSep 20, 2022
What Moonage Daydream does manage to do is to share some of the adventurous spirit of its subject – a chameleon who wasn’t afraid of falling flat on his face while reaching for the stars. If Bowie’s career teaches us anything, it’s that no one can laugh at you if you’ve already laughed at yourself. Certainly his capacity for balancing seriousness with self-deprecation (“No shit, Sherlock!”) remained one of Bowie’s most endearing traits. Read full review
100
NMEAlex FloodSep 16, 2022
Yes, we get footage of the alien glam god, Ziggy Stardust, strutting across stage and scrambling teen minds with his otherworldly rock and roll. But off-duty, Morgen portrays a quieter icon – deeply thoughtful, often isolated and with a quirky sense of humour. Read full review
100
ColliderMaggie BoccellaSep 13, 2022
Morgen manages to encapsulate that intimate relationship between artist and audience with Moonage Daydream, using only disparate pieces of footage and some clever illustration to nail exactly what it’s like to adore David Bowie. Read full review
100
Time OutPhil de SemlyenMay 25, 2022
Whatever your favourite side to the limitlessly faceted David Bowie, this magnificently mind-bending film serves it up in a 140-minute career-spanning opus that races by in a snap of the fingers. It’s almost as extraordinary as the man himself. Read full review
100
The Film StageLuke HicksMay 24, 2022
At a lengthy 140 minutes, the film flashes by. The deeper you go the more you want to know, and the more there is to know. Read full review
100
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 24, 2022
It’s a glorious celebratory montage of archive material, live performance footage, Bowie’s own experimental video art and paintings, movie and stage work and interviews with various normcore TV personalities with whom Bowie is unfailingly polite, open and charming. Read full review
100
The TelegraphTim RobeyMay 23, 2022
Moonage Daydream, a wildly creative tribute to everything Bowie achieved over four and a half decades, sets a sky-high bar as cinematic fan-service, and it leaves you buzzing. Read full review
91
Entertainment WeeklyJoshua RothkopfMay 23, 2022
Pruning would hamper the unencumbered risk-taking on display, which extends to some atmospheric animation (as it did with Morgen's Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck), and instantly vaults the effort to the top of the Bowie docs. The music itself, gorgeously remixed by Bowie's longtime producer and friend Tony Visconti, has never sounded better or stranger, with isolations of instrumental passages that stick in mind. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesCarlos AguilarSep 15, 2022
Wielding chaos into cinema — rather than creating an accumulation of factoids and anecdotes told by those who knew the performer — Morgen manifests a sensorial invocation of Bowie’s spirit, suited to delight acolytes and nonbelievers alike, for a tribute worthy of his unclassifiable genius. Read full review
90
VarietyOwen GleibermanMay 25, 2022
Watching Moonage Daydream, there are essential facts you won’t hear, and many touchstones that get skipped over (in the entire movie, you’ll never even see an album cover). But you get closer than you expect to the chilly sexy enigma of who David Bowie really was. Read full review
90
SlashfilmRafael MotamayorMay 25, 2022
The best and most profound parts of Moonage Daydream are when we just get to hear Bowie share great quotes about his creative process, how he loved to challenge himself by traveling to unknown places to grow as an artist, and how he learned to embrace life and be curious about everything. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleSteve DavisSep 15, 2022
At first, you may question whether this is all some elaborate head game, but gradually the creatively unorthodox approach to pay tribute to a man who gravitated toward unconventional artistry enlightens more often than it disorients. Read full review
88
The Associated PressJake CoyleSep 14, 2022
Sometimes Bowie, who refers to his public persona as “an intoxicating parallel to my perceived reality,” seems to be weighing himself like he would a piece of art. With an electric eye, “Moonage Daydream” finds the slipstream of that reality. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comBrian TallericoSep 9, 2022
Moonage Daydream is a stunning achievement in editing, cutting across eras and settings not to the rhythm of the music as much the mood of it. Read full review
84
TheWrapSteve PondMay 23, 2022
Moonage Daydream is a bracing, gloriously messy (or, more likely, gloriously messy seeming) celebration and immersion in all things Bowie. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubJordan HoffmanSep 12, 2022
If there’s a message at all in Moonage Daydream, it is secondary to the experiential nature of the movie. That’s hardly a knock. One goes to a concert to be thrilled, not necessarily to gather life lessons. Leave that sort of thing for the other, lesser documentaries. Read full review
83
ConsequenceMorgan EnosSep 1, 2022
Moonage Daydream reveals a man who took a tremendous bite out of the apple of life — and millions of star-people won’t soon forget. Read full review
83
The PlaylistJack KingMay 24, 2022
The scope shrinks in the final third, as Morgen seemingly retreats into a more comfortable linear chronology — the last twenty years of his life blast past as quickly as his first — but whew, this is one helluva technicolor starship. Read full review
83
IndieWireSiddhant AdlakhaMay 24, 2022
More sensory experience than straightforward recounting, the documentary by Brett Morgen (“Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck”) is about feeling your way through a chaotic world with Ziggy Stardust as your anchor. Read full review
80
Screen RantNadir SamaraSep 26, 2022
Moonage Daydream doesn't really concern itself with David Bowie’s effect on the world; it lives and dies inside his own mind, and the decisions he made that impacted his art. Read full review
80
TimeStephanie ZacharekSep 19, 2022
The beauty of Brett Morgen’s velvet-and-facepaint collage Moonage Daydream is that it doesn’t try to be definitive. Instead, it’s a glide through Bowie’s career, hardly complete yet somehow capturing both the spirit and the genius of this most enigmatic and alluring artist. Read full review
80
Rolling StoneRob SheffieldSep 16, 2022
It could have been a straightforward documentary about the David Bowie story — but who wants straightforward when it comes to Bowie? Instead, Moonage Daydream is a gloriously innovative trip into the Thin White Duke’s mind, written, directed, and edited by Brett Morgen. Read full review
80
EmpireLou ThomasSep 12, 2022
A spectacular documentary portrait of a great artist and extraordinary pop star. Despite a few omissions, it’s a triumph of Sound And Vision, and essential for every David Bowie fan. Read full review
80
CineVueJohn BleasdaleMay 26, 2022
Morgen presents a sense of Bowie as a man who is in search of himself and who, through philosophy and a bold commitment to art, finds his wisdom. Read full review
80
Total FilmJordan FarleyMay 23, 2022
Unconventional, almost to a fault, Brett Morgen’s impressionistic, experiential Bowie documentary is an electrifying oddity. Read full review
75
ObserverOliver JonesSep 19, 2022
We may never completely know the answers to all of Cavett’s questions, but Morgen’s film shows definitively that the sound and vision Bowie left behind, when writ large and loud on the silver screen, makes for an otherworldly journey of beauty, mystery, and transformation. Read full review
75
Washington PostPat PaduaSep 12, 2022
Far from a nostalgic package of greatest hits, “Moonage Daydream” suggests that pop music is at its best when it’s mysterious. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineKenji FujishimaSep 9, 2022
Brett Morgen is less interested in factual biography than in eliciting a sense of the man as an artist and personality. Read full review
70
The New York TimesA.O. ScottSep 15, 2022
It’s less a biography than a séance. Read full review
70
Screen DailyFionnuala HalliganMay 23, 2022
Much of this film has never been seen before, and it is a true treasure trove. It feels, like Bowie’s career, though, incomplete, and certainly the period between his later-in-life marriage to Iman and death after the final, unsettling Blackstar recordings is vague and reliant on what the director/producer/editor calls ‘musical mash-ups’ which he designed and edited to have a trancey, hypnotic effect. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeMark FeeneySep 15, 2022
Morgen’s immersive, sometimes convulsive, visual approach justifies the format. This is filmmaking that’s anything but chaste. Intentionally overwhelming, “Moonage Daydream” is indulgent and overproduced — which suits its subject. Read full review
50
Film ThreatAndy HowellSep 15, 2022
Part of the problem with Moonage Daydream is that it is trying too hard. Read full review
40
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyMay 23, 2022
Moonage Daydream is short on insight, and ends up feeling more enervating than enlightening. Read full review
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