I've always been more of a Star Wars fan than a Star Trek fan, but I've enjoyed much of the original series, and a number of the films with the original series cast. But based on its reputation, I had never sat down to watch  Star Trek: The Motion Picture in its entirety. Oddly enough, as a fan of Jerry Goldsmith's wonderful score (which forever redefined the Star Trek theme), I had sat through the opening overture a dozen times or more through the years on different formats. When a Director's Edition was released on DVD in 2000, I picked it up thinking that I would finally sit down to watch it. But I never got around to it. So my patience worked in my favor, as 22 years later, the Director's Edition was remastered for 4K with a Dolby Atmos soundtrack.  While no amount of revisionism was going to make this more entertaining than  Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan , it does feel like a film that was trying to appeal to the fans of the original series. But in a post...

We officially close out this series with David Fincher's Zodiac . He assembled quite a cast to tell the story of the serial killer who haunted the Bay Area for several years from the late 60s to early 70s. I recall reading Robert Graysmith's book (on which the film is based) when I worked at the bookstore back in the late 80s, but had forgotten most of the details of the case since then. What I did know was that the case inspired Scorpio, the killer Clint Eastwood took out in the original Dirty Harry  (1971). Jake Gyllenhall plays Robert Graysmith, who was an editorial cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. Robert Downey Jr. plays Paul Avery, a writer at the Chronicle . And Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards play SF PD Inspectors Dave Toschi and Bill Armstrong. (Inspector Toschi was also the inspiration for Steve McQueen's Frank Bullitt in 1968.) Other notable performers include Brian Cox as Melvin Belli, Dermot Mulroney, Chloë Sevigny, Elias Koteas, Adam Go...

One of the greatest things about this series has been the opportunity to make time for classic films that we've had in the library for years, and have never gotten around to watching. Akira Kurosawa's  Yojimbo is one such film. I've long been a fan of Toshiro Mifune (who we saw most recently in our screening of Steven Spielberg's 1941 ), and A Fistful of Dollars — Sergio Leone's take on the film with Clint Eastwood in the lead role. Earlier in this series, we watched Walter Hill's lesser adaptation, Last Man Standing , starring Bruce Willis. While the Eastwood film will always hold a special place in my heart as the first version of the story I experienced, Akira Kurosawa's original film is a close second.  The basic story is of a lone samurai, Sanjuro, who arrives in a small town and sets out to play two warring factions off one another as a bodyguard (the translation of the title — yojimbo ). Now, there's something about Eastwood gunning down bad guy...