In a future where psychics can predict murders before they happen, a dedicated cop is framed for a crime that hasn’t been committed yet …or is he?

For a decade now, Steven Spielberg has been assuring us he was growing up. Two directing Oscars, one Thalberg Award and a thriving new movie studio later, he may have actually done it with Minority Report, a smart, stylish science fiction thriller in which he finally learns how to fuse his split directing personalities — the serious Spielberg, who has always aspired to greatness and treated the Big Themes, and the entertaining Spielberg, the showman who wants nothing more than to give us our money’s worth, to make us laugh and scream on cue. (more…)

 In 1978, after a decade of corporate hedging in the wake of Star Wars’ incredible box-office success over at Fox, the brass at Paramount Pictures finally greenlighted a big screen version of the Star Trek TV series. In typical Hollywood fashion, they immediately set about doing everything right and wrong at once, sparing no expense to get the original crew back on board (Leonard Nimoy was an especially tough sell, what with his phobia of pointed ears and typecasting), hiring the finest directing talent and visual effects personnel that producer Gene Roddenberry could find, and then committing themselves and everyone connected with the project to a near failure by setting an impossible release date and sticking to it.

The resulting film, Star Trek — The Motion Picture (1979), may have been a box-office smash, insuring that the life of the franchise was renewed, but it was also an artistic mess, a dull, lumbering, pretentious grab-bag only a die-hard Star Trek fan could really love, filled with ponderously long effects shots that seemed to have no narrative point and climaxing in a disappointing, pseudo-cosmic statement about technology and the-meaning-of-life. Like a joke that takes too long to tell, Star Trek — The Motion Picture has always been something to endure with a frozen smile rather than to actually enjoy, and it wasn’t until the next entry, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) that the series regained its adventure footing and became dependable entertainment again.

Most of the problems with that first film have now been rectified in a new double-disc DVD package, a well-made and sometimes beautiful reconstruction of the filmmakers’ original intentions called Star Trek — The Motion Picture: The Director’s Edition.  (more…)