Winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, In the Shadow of the Moon encapsulates the history of the Apollo space program, which put a dozen men on the moon between 1969 and 1972, with rigorous tunnel vision. This British production doesn’t ask how much the program cost, or whether it was in any objective sense worth it; nor does it discuss the factors that led the Apollo missions to be discontinued. It only glancingly looks at the tenor of the times—civil unrest, unpopular war, seismic shifts in social paradigms, etc. Its only concern is to show the goal and the men who strove for it, and to rekindle for a little while the sense of wonder we felt nearly 40 years ago at the thought of men actually walking on the moon. To this end, filmmaker David Sington raided the vaults at NASA for the original negatives of Apollo footage, finding along the way some that had never previously been seen, and restored it to pristine condition. More importantly, he conducted on-camera interviews with most of the surviving Apollo astronauts, whose reminiscences are the heart of the film. A fittingly iconic set of men in their 70s (didn’t NASA ever hire anyone ugly?), they retain an infectious sense of awe at their experiences, though delivered in unpretentious and down-to-earth fashion: Looking at footage of himself climbing down the lunar module’s ladder to the surface of the moon, Buzz Aldrin indicates the moment when he attained a previously unknown record, becoming the first man to pee on the moon. The one surviving astronaut who wouldn’t be interviewed is Neil Armstrong, who apparently prefers that his status as the very first man to walk on a world other than Earth not be identified with a particular face. The one inescapable downside of In the Shadow of the Moon is the realization of how far America’s image has slipped in the world in the years since these astronauts were seen as having accomplished something monumental not for their country but for all of mankind.

Hollywood has been in an awfully vengeful mood lately. In the last month they’ve already given us Kevin Bacon and Jodie Foster as 1970s-style vigilantes in Death Sentence and The Brave One. The Kingdom isn’t exactly from that template, but it more directly depicts the cause of the American anxiety these movies are exploiting—the murderous activities of terrorists in the Middle East. Set in Saudi Arabia, The Kingdom opens with a sequence in which dozens of employees of an American oil company are slaughtered in their enclave—while playing softball, no less—in a terrorist bombing. Of course, the Saudi rulers would prefer to cover up all of this rather than expose the growing number of such activities in their own domain. (Bad for business, y’know.) What they weren’t counting on was that one of the victims was the best friend of FBI agent Jamie Foxx, who tears himself away from quality time with his son to lead an ace investigatory team to Riyadh. As archetypal as the inhabitants of any given foxhole in any given WWII movie, these include tough chick Jennifer Garner, wisecracking Jason Bateman and sagaciously drawling Chris Cooper. The fact that the US government doesn’t want them there stirring things up gives them no more pause than does the uncooperativeness of the Saudi army. In a style that was more appropriate in his jock epic Friday Night Lights, director Peter Berg shoots everything with handheld cameras that do less to impart a feeling of immediacy than of confusion. Not that it matters—despite the presence of a sympathetic Saudi cop (Ashraf Barhom) and some unearned attempts at humanitarian ambiguity in the final reel, this is an action movie unpersuasively disguised as a political thriller, suggesting that even the most innocent looking citizens are as likely as not to be bomb-wielding terrorists. But then, what can you expect from a movie that credits “Kissinger Associates” among its advisors?