Blu-ray

Stanley Kubrick only made 13 feature films over the course of 46 years, but they remain 13 of the most influential and enjoyable flicks in the history of American cinema.

Midway into his five-year mission for the Federation, Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) is suffering from a serious case of space ennui and is thinking about jacking it all in. However, Kirk's long-term plans are put on hold when the Enterprise is sent to an uncharted nebula on a rescue mission, which turns into an ambush by an alien horde led by the fierce Krall (Idris Elba). With their ship destroyed and the crew scattered across an alien world, it looks like Kirk and chums have their work cut out if they want to stop Krall's nefarious plans.

One of the biggest disappointments of Disney's buy-out of Lucasfilm came with the cancellation of the excellent Clone Wars cartoon. Thankfully, rather than wave goodbye to exec producer Dave Filoni and the animation team he put together, Disney enlisted them to create a new animated series designed to mine the extended gap between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope.

George Lucas' space opera is arguably the defining event in modern cinema - one that reshaped Hollywood the films it produces. As such, it's pretty much unthinkable that anybody visiting this website isn't already incredibly familiar with the films (albeit, maybe not the fan-baiting, re-tweaked versions Lucas has prepared for this release). As such, it seems like there's very little point in going over them in any great depth. So let's quickly breeze through this bit, before getting stuck into the really juicy stuff about this Blu-ray boxset...

Thirty years have passed since the fall of the Empire and the galaxy is in turmoil once again. Luke Skywalker has disappeared and a new threat calling itself the First Order has risen from the ashes of the Empire, bringing with it a new world-destroying super-weapon. Meanwhile, on the desolate desert planet of Jakku, a spirited young scavenger called Rey (Daisy Ridley) befriends a cute little droid and ends up on the run with former Stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega).

Noel Clarke stars in this British genre flick about a group of Londoners being stalked around a 24-hour storage facility by an otherworldy monster. The fact that Clarke also co-wrote it means that he should take a large part of the blame for how derivative it is in its attempts to ape Alien – albeit in a more mundane setting, with less believable characters and a crap monster. The clarity of the Blu-ray's AVC 1.85:1 1080p encode only emphasizes how cheap the film looks, although the DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix manages to give it a slightly better impression of scale. Extras are generous, if hardly enlightening.