Creating ‘Best of’ DVDs with running times of only three hours for two TV series that ran for 80 and 178 episodes respectively is going to be a thankless task, whichever way you cut it

With four days to the new ‘Star Trek’ movie, we take a look at the first.

I’d like to say something new about ‘Star Trek II’, but I probably ‘’KHAAAAAAAAAAAN’T’’

With time ticking away until JJ Abrams’ ‘Star Trek’ prequel (which we’ve actually seen, yeah, look impressed) we review all ten previous movies.

With time ticking away until JJ Abrams’ ‘Star Trek’ prequel, we look at all ten previous movies in reverse order.

With just weeks until JJ Abrams’ ‘Star Trek’ prequel, we take a quick look at the ten previous movies. In reverse order, naturally.

… they take up most of our time: recent UK TV crime series ‘Whitechapel’, ‘Moses Jones’, and ‘Red Riding’ hit DVD.

With just weeks until JJ Abrams’ ‘Star Trek’ prequel, we take a quick look at the ten previous movies. In reverse order, naturally.

With ten weeks to JJ Abrams’ ‘Star Trek’ prequel, we take a quick look at the ten previous movies. In reverse order, naturally.

With ten weeks to JJ Abrams’ ‘Star Trek’ prequel, we take a quick look at the ten previous movies. In reverse order, naturally.

Mmmm, meaty.

With ten weeks to JJ Abrams’ ‘Star Trek’ prequel, we take a quick look at the ten previous movies. In reverse order, naturally.

There are many things for which Australia is famous in the popular imagination but a brutal and bloody gang culture is not one of them…

100% Milla free.

‘Elite Squad’ isn’t always an easy film to watch…

Support the flailing economy: buy more DVDs! This time: ‘Incredible Hulk’, ‘Pushing Daisies’ and ‘There Will Be Blood’…

A 21st century ‘Wizbit’.

Fantastic in both senses of the word.

A review of this week’s ‘Batman: Gotham Knight’, and a bit about ‘New Frontier’ and ‘Superman: Doomsday’ while we’re at it…

Forty years on from ‘Night of the Living Dead’, writer/director George A Romero has still got it…

‘Black Sheep’ firmly maintains the Kiwi tradition for making the grungiest, funniest and most physically substantial horror movies in the world today…

Start with the sex.

The film series of Capcom’s zombie franchise lurches towards competent film-making.

A different kind of ‘Doctor Who’ story, from the days before the idea of what a ‘Doctor Who’ story was like became so set in stone…

‘Blade Runner’ is easy. It’s faux complex. It’s a film which wears its supposed seriousness on its sleeve, a pouting, grunting adolescent of a motion picture, a movie for people who think that things are inherently more serious when it rains in the dark.

In the US the fourth installment in this bombs and bullets franchise is known as ‘Live Free or Die Hard’, a title which much more aptly sums up its gung-ho bombast and over-the-top exuberance…

Concorde was the great Anglo-French aviation project. It promised, nay delivered, supersonic travel for civilians and took its name from a word meaning ‘agreement’ (albeit with an unnecessary vowel appended to it to make it sound more French).

‘Timelash’ is bad. In fact, it’s quite difficult to appreciate just how jaw-droppingly bad it is unless one is in the process of actually watching the thing.

It’s clear from the opening of ‘The Toybox’, in which bits of East Anglian folklore are re-enacted in Flash animation, that this is a film which is willingly to be defiantly regional…

For me there’s only one annual Xmas ‘must watch’ and it’s the 1984 BBC TV adaptation of former poet laureate John Masefield’s utterly peculiar seasonal children’s novella ‘The Box of Delights’.

The Nightmare Before Christmas’ is a late relic of stop motion animation, an art now almost entirely eradicated by CG animation…

Given that ‘Only Fools and Horses’ has had about three episodes designed to stand as its definitive finale, it’s hard to imagine a time when the BBC wasn’t bothered about giving closure to its sitcoms…

It’s semi-remarkable in itself that a Channel 4 sitcom made it to a third series only two years after the first…

This is the first of 2entertain’s budget-priced ‘Doctor Who’ releases, and it has raised the odd complaint from fans…

‘The Mark of the Rani’ is one of the strongest stories from the mid-eighties (lets say 85 – 87) drought that ‘Doctor Who” suffered.

It may be too much to say that Japanese animation is experiencing a renaissance in the UK at present…

It’s a simple fact that Tove Jansson’s ‘Moomins’ stories are the greatest children’s stories ever written…

Music biopics are the ‘meh’ genre of films consisting, as they do, of a pretty regular formula of humble origins, emerging talent, the ups and downs of fame, a crisis of some sort and then either triumphant resolution or death…

The lower overheads of producing DVDs are creating a world of joy for cineastes and TV-astes, as it becomes more viable for obscure material to get a commercial release…

‘King Kong’ came as a pleasant cinematic surprise in the run up to Christmas. However, much of the movie’s plus points are negated by its transition to small screen…

All credit to 2entertain for coming up with a more sensible selection of old-skool ‘Doctor Who’ to issue whilst the second run of shiny new episodes debuts…

If this is heaven, then I choose hell.

As documentary film-making, ‘Murderball’ is an instance of impeccable timing: a production structured with consummate skill also enjoys sublime luck in terms of the events befalling its protagonists…

A hugely clever and enjoyable spin-off from Joss Whedon’s splendid, but swiftly cancelled, SF Western TV show ‘Firefly’, the movie ‘Serenity’ succeeds in reuniting all of the regular cast and tying up plotlines from the series’ 15 episodes.

Between them these two CDs release into the wild the last episodes of twentieth century ‘Doctor Who’ never made available to the general public in a mass market edition.

‘The Beginning’ is a handy box set which contains the first thirteen episodes of ‘Doctor Who’ plus two separate versions of the series unbroadcast (indeed judged ‘unboradcastable’) pilot episode and assorted extras.

‘The Seeds of Death’ hails from the second half of the 60s, from when ‘Doctor Who’ was genuinely the favourite TV show of the children of the British nation.

1977’s ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’ is one of the most memorable of all ‘Doctor Who’ serials. The six-episode screenplay, by the series most frequent and beloved writer, Robert Holmes, is an accomplished and darkly witty Sherlock Holmes pastiche.

This is neither the best Doctor Who TV story, nor the best Doctor Who DVD package of recent months, but there’s much to enjoy here all the same.

“In sixteen hundred and sixty six London burned like rotten sticks…”