Jonathan Frakes returns as director for the 1998 ninth Star Trek episode, the third movie featuring the Next Generation characters. It is a very pleasantly entertaining episode, a notch up from Frakes’s previous movie, Star Trek: First Contact (1996).

Patrick Stewart again brings the weight of his acting authority to the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, in another proficient, pacy and painless adventure. This time it’s Picard and the crew of the Starship Enterprise E to the rescue as an alien race, the Son’a, led by Adhar Ru’afo (F Murray Abraham, enjoying himself), attack the peaceful, paradisal Bak’u planet.

Frakes also plays Commander Riker and the movie also co-stars Brent Spiner (as Data), Michael Dorn, LeVar Burton, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Donna Murphy and Anthony...

Alan J Pakula’s 1974 political paranoia conspiracy thriller film is brilliantly tense, taut and exciting. It’s a scorching nail-biter of a movie. Warren Beatty stars as ambitious reporter Joseph Frady, who investigates a presidential candidate’s murder.

Producer-director Alan J Pakula’s 1974 political-paranoia conspiracy thriller film is brilliantly tense, taut and exciting. It’s a scorching nail-biter of a movie. Warren Beatty stars as ambitious newspaper reporter Joseph Frady, who is prompted to set out to investigate the murder of a presidential candidate.

His investigation turns out to be life endangering as it leads him on the trail to an obscure and enigmatic organization called the Parallax Corporation, whose primary hidden agenda turns out to be political assassination.

Paul...

Paul Newman enjoys one of his most memorable and iconic cool roles as Cool Hand Luke in director Stuart Rosenberg’s tough, haunting and richly enjoyable 1967 prison movie classic.

Gutsy prisoner Luke Jackson works on the chain gang in the American Deep South but he refuses to be broken by the unforgiving, cruel system and the heavy hand of authority. He keeps escaping and being recaptured, turning himself into an icon for the cons, who admire him. But the camp staff works to crush Luke…

Newman is stupendous in one of his best performances and he was Oscar nominated for the fourth time, but it was George Kennedy who won a best supporting actor Oscar in a memorable portrayal of nastiness as a bullying prisoner called Dragline, whose boss role on the chain gang is threatened by Newman’s ...

Director Dick Richards just caught Robert Mitchum, aged 58, while he was still in his world-weary prime in 1975 to play classic private eye Philip Marlowe in this enjoyable, taut and atmospheric remake of Raymond Chandler’s brilliant hardboiled thriller Farewell, My Lovely.

The 1975 Farewell, My Lovely is the third movie of the novel, after George Sanders’s original version as The Falcon Takes Over in 1942 and Dick Powell’s classic version in 1944, Farewell, My Lovely, aka Murder, My Sweet.

Satisfyingly, David Zelag Goodman’s screenplay follows Chandler’s plot quite closely this time as Marlowe tries to locate the long-missing Velma, a former dancer at a seedy nightclub and the old girlfriend of Moose Malloy (Jack O’Halloran), a petty criminal newly out of jail now searching for h...

In his second, and it turned out sadly last, outing as a no-nonsense James Bond after The Living Daylights, Timothy Dalton looks entirely comfortable and settled in the role in the 18th Bond movie from 1989. Dalton staked his claim as the ideal screen embodiment of Ian Fleming’s hard-hitting super-agent. But, somehow, he was never the most popular Bond, though he certainly has a cool charisma.

The brutal-minded screenplay by regular series writer Richard Maibaum and producer Michael G Wilson sees 007 gunning after South American drug baron uber-villain Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi) after he leaves Bond’s buddy Felix Leiter (David Hedison) nearly dead. MI6 thinks Sanchez isn’t their problem and strips Bond of his licence to kill.

With the help one of Leiter’s friends, the independently m...