Brett Morgen's Crossfire Hurricane and Cobain: Montage of Heck bent the rules of the rock documentary, but his David Bowie film, Moonage Daydream, smashes them to pieces.

| Dec 27, 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.

| Oct 19, 2022

...a thoughtful, meditative, almost trance-inducing rumination on the meaning of art and life.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 30, 2022

If you’re a fan of the Thin White Duke in all his guises and want to recreate that Pink Floyd laser show you got baked at when you were 15, this is the movie for you – see it on an IMAX screen for additional cosmic brain damage.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 23, 2022

Moonage Daydream is more a vibe than a narrative.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 22, 2022

This is an experience: an immersive, kaleidoscopic fantasia.

| Sep 19, 2022

The grist is often great... but their potency can’t survive being mashed and VFX’d into a two-hour-and-20-minute music video. What could?

| Sep 19, 2022

In Moonage Daydream, Morgen... feints inquiry while reveling in and soaking up the dynamic mystery, spectacle and wonder of the original man who fell to earth.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 19, 2022

From disposable glam-pop culture to timeless matters of life and death via a kaleidoscopic montage of music, mime, painting, acting, animation and dance, all filtered through a cosmic wardrobe of ever-changing clothes, hair and teeth.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 18, 2022

Moonage Daydream is a trippy, kaleidoscopic and experiential film that is closer to a video installation in a modern art museum than a biographical doco you might scroll across on a streaming service.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 18, 2022

If nothing else, Moonage Daydream captures him as we’d like to remember him: dazzling, sensitive, full of questions—and in the end, as happy, probably, as a truly brilliant person can ever be.

| Sep 17, 2022

Moonage Daydream reminds you why the ideal of a Bowie biopic is always doomed to fall short, because there’s only one actor cracked enough to inhabit this role. And that’s the man who lived it night and day for all those golden years.

| Sep 16, 2022

In its uncritical and estate-sanctioned hagiography, the documentary film diminishes, rather than enhances, our understanding of a 20th-century master.

| Sep 16, 2022

“Moonage Daydream” is the first graduate school-level music documentary — it omits the basics and glories in the details, which actually gives the film a greater authority.

| Sep 16, 2022

... Bears the thrilling hallmarks of all-access swagger while frequently slipping into the pitfalls of brand management.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 16, 2022

Morgen too often indulges his aggravating instinct to cut away from his captivating subject to bombard us with enervating frippery. Desperately, manically trying to draw us in, his ill-conceived Bowie bauble succeeds only in pushing us out.

| Sep 16, 2022

Intentionally overwhelming, “Moonage Daydream” is indulgent and overproduced — which suits its subject.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 16, 2022

Morgen manifests a sensorial invocation of Bowie’s spirit, suited to delight acolytes and nonbelievers alike, for a tribute worthy of his unclassifiable genius.

| Sep 16, 2022

The enthrallment died long before the film's final curtain, and I was left feeling disconnected by Morgen's indulgences.

| Sep 15, 2022

It's an experience first and a documentary second.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 15, 2022