Dark Shadows
Star Trek: First Contact
Battleship
Galaxy Quest
The Island at the Top of the World
A Troll in Central Park
The Hunger Games
L’Industriale
The Woman in Black
The Innkeepers
Tim Burton gets a rare chance to work with Johnny Depp in Dark Shadows, his new movie based on the 1960s tv show. Depp plays Barnabas Collins, a vampire who spends 200 years in a coffin from the 1770s before being awoken.
By far the best and by far the most successful of the Captain Picard-era Star Trek films, First Contact sees the crew of the Enterprise travelling back in time to stop Bjorn Borg preventing the first contact between mankind and the Vulcans. It’s a good film, with a nice dose of humour, some fine action scenes and Patrick Stewart’s finest performance as Picard. It also marked the return to the franchise (after a two-film absence) of Jerry Goldsmith, for the third of his five Star Trek film scores. Because his work on another film overran, the composer needed someone else to write about a third of the score and he turned to his son Joel, a good film composer in his own right, for those passages.
Directed by visual effects legend Douglas Trumbull (whose spectacular work began when he supervised the effects in 2001), Brainstorm attracted attention on its release in 1983 primarily because one of its leads (Natalie Wood) died in an accident shortly before filming completed. Trumbull had to battle with the studio to get the film completed and released (MGM execs rather scurrilously wanted to cash in on the insurance money from her death and cancel the film). This rather detracted attention from the fact that the high-concept science fiction film is actually pretty good – it revolves around the invention of a device that can record people’s brainwaves and they can play them back for a kind of out-of-body experience.
I remember playing the game Battleship when I was younger. I don’t really remember it featuring an armada of invading Transformer-like aliens, but perhaps my memory’s playing tricks. It’s been so successful that follow-up films have already been greenlit – I am particularly looking forward to Monopoly, in which an armada of invading Transformer-like aliens attempts to take over the world by skilfully buying and selling properties.
A warm-hearted Star Trek spoof, Galaxy Quest sees a group of has-been actors living off the success of their 1980s sci-fi tv show by attending conventions and the like. But when a group of aliens mistakes their tv show for a chronicle of real historical events, they find themselves in all sorts of pickles. It was well-done (better than the real Star Trek films from that time) and featured good performances from its cast, with Alan Rickman in particular in fine form.
Composed by Maurice Jarre Intrada / 2012 / 47:44 They didn’t even make films like this any more back in 1974 – except for this one, of course. The Island at the Top of the World was an attempt by Disney to recapture the magic of their popular 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea adaptation from [...]
Composed by James Horner Milan / 1994 / 50:34 The third entry in the Jack Ryan movie series (and the second and final to feature Harrison Ford as Tom Clancy’s hero), Clear and Present Danger sees Ryan caught up in an illegal US operation against Colombian drug lords. Like the other films in the series, [...]
Composed by James Horner PEG / 1997 / 44:28 Ron Howard’s Cocoon proved to be wildly popular at the box office in 1985, its feelgood story of residents of a retirement home being given back their youthful vigour by aliens being widely embraced by audiences. It brought about unlikely late-career attention to its excellent collection [...]
Composed by Robert Folk Intrada / 2012 / 64:27 Years ahead of its time, Don Bluth and Gary Goldman’s A Troll in Central Park is about a man in New York City who posts inflammatory messages to Internet discussion groups. Audiences weren’t quite ready for such a forward-looking tale, even one featuring the voice talents [...]
Composed by James Newton Howard Universal Republic / 2012 / 43:55 I was surprised by how much I enjoyed The Hunger Games, Gary Ross’s film of the first novel in Suzanne Collins’s very popular trilogy. While the film misses the opportunity of saying anything particularly biting in its portrayal of a future in which a [...]
Composed by Andrea Morricone Emergency Music / 2012 / 51:08 Director Giuliano Montaldo has worked on many occasions with legendary composer Ennio Morricone – their more notable collaborations include Machine Gun McCain, Sacco and Vanzetti and Marco Polo – and they were due to continue their working relationship on the director’s latest film, L’Industriale (aka [...]
Composed by Elmer Bernstein Varèse Sarabande / 1995 / 37:04 After Elmer Bernstein grew tired of being typecast in the somewhat unlikely role of composer-of-choice for Hollywood’s screwball comedies through much of the 1980s, he avoided them at all costs and sought out instead more serious fare, more worthy of his considerable talents. The films’ commercial [...]
Composed by Marco Beltrami Silva Screen / 2012 / 55:28 Based on Susan Hill’s popular novel (also the subject of a popular stage adaptation), The Woman in Black sees Daniel Radcliffe get his most notable non-Potter role to date, playing a lawyer staying in a house in which strange things start happening.
Composed by John Williams Varese Sarabande / 1990 / 36:33 John Badham’s 1979 version of Dracula starred Frank Langella as the eponymous Count and no less than Laurence Olivier as Professor Van Helsing. Langella had spent some time playing the character on Broadway and received a lot of praise for his performance here, though the [...]
Composed by Jeff Grace Screamworks Records / 2012 / 40:32 A haunted hotel movie, The Innkeepers sees a couple of employees trying to delve into the mysteries of a hotel in the final days before it shuts its doors for good. It’s got largely good reviews, most painting it as a solid horror film.