Author: D. Eric Franks

Find out how film composers like Korngold, Steiner, and Williams transformed movie music into the modern era’s most popular form of classical composition.

We’re all self-centered. We have no choice. For creative types, this natural and unavoidable self-centric impulse can result in painters creating self-portraits, writers including themselves in novels, and in movies we find movies made about making movies: Meta Movies!

Endorsing scary movies for kids is impossible. What is or isn’t scary for a particular kid is impossible to predict and some movies you wouldn’t think are scary at all can still result in your child having nightmares and wanting to sleep with you after watching them.

Avast me maties! It’s Talk Like a Pirate Day (TLAPD) once again on September 19th! Since 1995, this global holiday is about strapping on your buckler and hoisting the colors in the endless quest for a little booty. How can you participate? We’ve curated a fine share of movies to watch so you can be ready for your office meeting at four bells.

This is the season finale and it’s a mess. The writers try to tie a bunch of threads together from a season that didn’t have a lot of threads. The first 10 minutes are confusing and chaotic and then they introduce a new planet-killing  villain: Evil. I’m not kidding. Evil.

Terrarium channels the spirit of classic Trek with a grittier twist, pairing a human and a Gorn in an unlikely survival story. It expands the Gorn arc with intriguing parallels, though the ending leaves some questions unresolved.

Right from the title, Four-and-a-Half Vulcans, we know this is a gimmick episode. Just go with it.

We love to put movies into neat little boxes—sci-fi, horror, romcom—but sometimes those boxes don’t really fit. Alien is just as much a haunted house flick as it is a space saga. Blade Runner? Strip away the neon skyline and you’ve got a classic noir detective story. And don’t get us started on Rogue One—it’s basically a heist film in a galaxy far, far away. From Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon reimagining wuxia as a superhero tale to Wrath of Khan playing like a submarine thriller, these films prove that genre isn’t a cage—it’s a playground.

One of the repeated critiques by the modern dudebro is that New Star Trek (NuTrek) has gone “woke.” But Star Trek has always been woke.

“What is Starfleet?” has a framing device that I could tolerate and a reasonable plot, but the changing cameras are disorienting and make no sense.