When I was a kid and first saw the two-part episode of Star Trek (the original series) called “The Menagerie”, it made a major impression on me. There is a certain weightiness to the story about Spock’s mutiny to give some semblance of a life to his crippled former Captain, Christopher Pike. Gene Roddenberry wrote the episode when Star Trek was falling behind on original scripts in the first season and he found a way to incorporate the footage from Star Trek’s original pilot, “The Cage”. Here we see for the first time the depth of affection and self-sacrifice in Spock normally hidden behind his cool Vulcan exterior. It is fascinating to see how much the effects evolved in between the filming of “The Cage” in 1964 and “The Menagerie” just two years later. Spock is the only character to have survived from that first pilot to the ultimate Star Trek series, though the Spock of “The Cage” is almost unrecognizable. Grinning goofily at the sight of quivering plants on Talos IV and barking reports on the bridge of the Enterprise like someone who is overly emotional, rather than the converse, the early Spock bears little resemblance to the character who anchored Star Trek. Pike is moody and reflective in comparison to the upbeat and impulsive Kirk. The second and successful pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, is better than “The Cage”, but the meta-story created by Roddenberry in “The Menagerie” makes for a seminal episode in the collective works of Star Trek.

The original series has been digitally remastered in High Definition, and exterior effects shots have been replaced with new computer generated images. Overall it is brighter and more detailed than we’ve seen Star Trek before. My only technical complaint is that the remastered sound is piercingly shrill. In this special showing in a movie theater, that was only exacerbated.

You know those big, friendly, and relatively uncomplicated families that have annual reunions in Mom and Dad’s spacious, rustic house, where everyone comes whether they want to or not and end up enjoying themselves regardless of the family turmoil of the moment? Me neither, but they’re a great set-up for some kind of subset of romantic comedies. Family Reunion Comedies, perhaps? Dan in Real Life is better than some in this genre, thanks in large part to Steve Carrell’s humorous but heartfelt turn as Dan, a widower with three daughters who meets the perfect woman (Anne-Marie, played by Juliette Binoche) only to find out that she’s his brother’s new girlfriend. While this movie may be following a recipe for cuteness, it is, actually, cute.

Lars (Ryan Gosling) retreats from human contact and interaction. He lives in the garage of his dead parents’ house now occupied by his older brother Gus and his wife Karin (Emily Mortimer), goes to work in a cubicle where a friendly nerdy woman flirts with him to no avail, and studiously avoids people at all costs. Then, in the gimmick of this awkward-loner movie, he orders a custom-made life-size sex doll, names her Bianca, and proudly introduces her around as his girlfriend. He has (one-sided) conversations with her and wheels her around in a wheelchair because of her poor health. Advised by Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson), the doctor in the small isolated town in the northern midwest, to play along with Lars’s delusion, the rest of the town shows remarkably consistent patience. He takes her to church and social gathering and not once does anyone crack wise about his artificial companion. At least not to his face. There are some laughs associated with this make-believe, and Ryan Gosling does a good job at portraying an honestly tormented man with a child inside still haunted by childhood abandonment issues. But even at a relatively slim hour and three-quarters, I found my patience with Lars was less generous than that of his town. They play along with such gusto and emotional investment that it’s almost as if they’re delusional as well. At some point, as Lars inevitably begins to let go of Bianca, I couldn’t help wondering if they were going to have to keep this charade up for the rest of their lives. Would Lars at some point look back and joke about the time he was in love with a doll?

Michael Clayton is one of that rare breed of movies that is not easily classified into genre and not easily summarized in a thirty-second preview. Part of the fun of the movie is the gradual unfolding of the plot and, in fact, the gradual realization of what the story of the movie really is. George Clooney plays the title character, a self-styled “janitor” at a high-powered New York law firm. A former litigator, Clayton has found his niche as a fix-it man, the guy you call in the middle of the night when a wealthy client of the firm has committed a hit-and-run, or, at the heart of this movie, the guy you send to bring your top litigator back under control after he goes brilliantly and publicly berserk. But though Clayton excels at making problems for his firm disappear, he has a number of problems looming in his personal life that hang over him like a cloud. Clooney gives a convincing performance, his face showing the cumulative weight of the problems of others he must routinely deal with. Tom Wilkinson is brilliant as the top litigator for Clooney’s firm who is representing UNorth, a multinational agricultural conglomerate that is being sued (think Erin Brockovitch). Tilda Swinton is chilling as the ambitious chief counsel for UNorth who seems to live her life on a knife edge between the corporate stratosphere and complete catastrophe. Tony Gilroy (the “Bourne” movies) wrote and directed this movie with a somber pallet of gray winter city colors, making the atmosphere as oppressive as the corporate world. It’s a tense, fascinating, and very well-acted movie where almost all the characters are under extreme duress of one form or another. If it’s about any one thing, it is about how these characters respond to pressures they are under.

Frank Oz directed this light British farce that throws a cranky old uncle in a wheelchair, a pompous lazy brother, a hypochondriac, and a gay little person into what should be a quiet family funeral. Some home-brewed hallucinogenic drugs and potty humor (my favorite!) are thrown in for good measure. The mix is generally successful, producing many laughs and one or two very funny scenes, as the responsible middle-aged son of the deceased struggles to maintain decorum as things break down at their country house.

I wasn’t sure how this movie could do anything that hadn’t already been done by the excellent movie, For All Mankind (1989), which also chronicles the Apollo Moon missions exclusively using NASA footage and the voices of the astronauts who flew them. In the Shadow of the Moon does bring a new and valuable perspective to those missions and their effect on the world. Unlike For All Mankind, here we see the astronauts today and here their thoughts as they look back almost 4 decades on their historic voyages. They are thoughtful, personable, and interesting. The most poignant moment is hearing Michael Collins, the Command Module pilot of Apollo 11 (who orbited, but did not land on, the Moon), recall the worldwide sense of unity and accomplishment after their mission. People from all nations took pride in an accomplishment of the human species. He notes wryly that that sentiment was ephemeral.