25 best moon movies ever

With Golden Spike announcing that it'll be flying private missions to the Moon by 2020, we've dug through the archives to bring you our list of the finest moon-related films in existence. So grab your popcorn (or perhaps cheese would be more appropriate) and land one of these on your Blu-ray player.

Moon (2009)

A creepy, gripping space oddity (appropriate given that it’s directed by David Bowie’s son), Moon stars Sam Rockwell as a man contracted to work at a lunar base for three years. Except for friendly robot GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), he’s all alone up there. Or is he?

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Possibly the best-known and most highly-regarded science fiction movie of all time, Kubrick’s masterpiece isn’t specifically about the moon, but it does loom large in the plot as the site of mankind’s discovery of a second black monolith – the first being on Earth and triggering the evolution that led to humanity travelling into space. This monolith, presumably placed there by extraterrestrials, is transmitting a radio signal to Jupiter, and thus sparks off the mission that makes up the bulk of the film.

In the Shadow of the Moon (2007)

A British-made documentary about NASA’s manned missions to the moon, ITSOTM features beautiful archive footage (lovingly restored in high definition) and no commentary – simply letting the images, the footage and interviews with surviving astronauts tell the stories. Neil Armstrong, sadly, declined to take part.

Diamonds are Forever (1971)

A be-wigged Sean Connery’s return as Bond (after George Lazenby briefly assumed the mantle) is riotously campy and silly – few scenes more so than when Bond stumbles across a film set being used for fake moon landing footage, evades the slow-moving “astronauts” and makes off into the Nevada desert in a surprisingly speedy moon buggy.

The First Men in the Moon (2010)

Written by and starring The League of Gentlemen’s Mark Gatiss, this BBC adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel concerns a mission to the moon 60 years before Apollo 11, in which a pair of British oddballs use an anti-gravity substance to fly into space. But when they arrive on the lunar surface, they discover that there’s already something there…