For 20 years or so, hundreds of hours of footage of the Apollo program—“NASA home movies” as writer Terrence Rafferty calls them—languished unseen in the agency’s archives. Then, in 1989, first-time director Al Reinert edited them together to make the truly spectacular documentary For All Mankind, which is being re-issued this week on DVD and Blu-Ray by Criterion.

Even if you’ve seen docs on the space program before, Reinert’s film stands out for its beauty and artistic clarity. It’s pretty much entirely archival footage, with narration provided by a series of audio-only interviews the filmmaker conducted with 13 surviving Apollo astronauts (who are never identified—the soundtrack is as much a collage as the visuals). The subtle soundtrack is by Brian Eno, with Daniel Lanois.

The unadorned simplicity of the filmmaking is a perfect way to frame these truly mind-blowing visuals: shots of the launching pad at takeoff; space walks; astronauts goofing off in zero gravity; the earth receding into the distance as they break orbit and head for the moon; I could go on and on. This is a hypnotic, gorgeous, transcendent movie. The DVD includes commentary by Reinert and Apollo 17 commander Eugene A. Cernan, several docs and an essay by Rafferty.

I’m an unabashed fan of PRI radio show This American Life (and especially its weekly free podcast). But I have to admit I was a bit agnostic when host Ira Glass announced that the show would be producing a TV series, also called This American Life; the beauty of TAL has so much to do with its use of sound and voices. But the TV version, while it could never replace the radio show, is surprisingly great, and season two is out on DVD now. There are six episodes on the disc (including a really memorable one called “John Smith” where the show follows several people with that name at various points in their lives) and commentaries by Glass.