Star Trek: The Next Generation: "Redemption"

It is 17 June 1991, and time for the Season 4 finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The Enterprise heads to the Klingon homeworld so that Picard (Patrick Stewart) may fulfil his duties as the Arbiter of Succession and appoint a new Chancellor to the Klingon High Council. When the sisters of Duras reveal he had a son, who lays claim to the Chancellorship, the Empire slides perilously close to civil war - and Worf (Michael Dorn) may finally have the chance to have his discommendation eliminated.

Two seasons of slow-building political intrigue comes to a head in "Redemption". Since Season 3 we have watched the Klingons march inexorably closer to civil war, and the Romulans drive the conflict from behind the scenes. The conflict between Worf and the Duras family has developed and intensified, and Worf's choice to accept discommendation rather than reveal Duras' father's treachery has weighed heavily on him through many episodes. Now it all ties up into a climax: the Duras family, the new Chancellor Gowron (Robert O'Reilly), Picard's discomfort at being so closely involved in Klingon affairs of state, the Romulan plot, and Worf's choice between life as a Starfleet officer or a Klingon warrior - it all clashes together here. This is a sensational end to the season.

Tomorrowland (2015)

Creativity is a funny thing. You can be one of the most immensely talented artists in your field, but you are not likely to perfect your art every single time. Some works will be better than others, some will fail to quite capture what you were hoping to achieve. A few may even be embarrassing and unmitigated disasters. That includes film directors. Steven Spielberg may have directed Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. and Jaws, but he also directed 1941 and The Terminal. Francis Ford Coppola might have given the world The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, but he also directed Jack.

Brad Bird is a sensational director. He kicked off his career in animation, impressing audiences with The Incredibles and Ratatouille, and particularly with his 1999 masterpiece The Iron Giant. A few years back he proved he could direct live-action as well by helming the excellent action sequel Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Sadly in 2015 this winning streak broke, and as Spielberg has 1941 and Coppola has Jack, so Brad Bird has Tomorrowland.

Roger Waters: The Wall (2015)

We must surely all agree that Pink Floyd's concept album The Wall is one of the best popular music records of all time. Released in 1979 it became a massive international hit, and led to the production of Alan Parker's 1982 film adaptation starring Bob Geldof. In 1990, and after he had acrimoniously quit the band, the album's chief architect Roger Waters staged a live rendition on the site of the Berlin Wall. Between 2010 and 2013 he toured the album around the world in a massive live spectacular featuring digital imagery and animation, pyrotechnics and a massive life-size wall constructed between the performers and the audience over the course of the concert. The original album remains the third highest-selling album of all time in the USA. The international concert tour became the highest-grossing musical tour by a solo artist.

Never to let the idea lie fallow, Waters now extends The Wall again with the concert feature Roger Waters: The Wall. Co-directed with Sean Evans, it reproduces the exceptional live show for a movie-going audience. It intersperses the music with a striking and stylised sort of autobiographical art film, one that gently digs into the inspirations and the experiences that led to The Wall's creation.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: "In Theory"

It's 3 June 1991 and time for another episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

While the Enterprise explores a nebula packed with dark matter, Data (Brent Spiner) explores his potential for romance by dating one of the Enterprise's security officers.

"In Theory" is one of those Star Trek episodes that works on paper, but that fails in its execution. The basic concept feels like one of the most obvious log lines imaginable: the emotionless Commander Data, as part of his ongoing attempt to understand humanity, tries having a romantic relationship. Certainly there is a lot of potential in the idea. It falls down thanks to a B-plot that doesn't connect at all with the main storyline, a few really cringe-worthy scenes of Data trying to be seductive and failing, and a guest character who comes across as fairly unlikeable due to the manner in which she is written.

San Andreas (2015)

On the day when his skills are needed the most, a Los Angeles fire and rescue worker (Dwayne Johnson) engages in gross dereliction of duty and commits multiple vehicular thefts in order to rescue his daughter at the expense of countless innocent lives.

It would be dishonest to claim in any way that San Andreas, a 2015 disaster film directed by Brad Peyton, is a good movie. On the other hand it would also be dishonest were I to claim I did not have any fun watching it. The truth is that San Andreas is a marvellous confection of visual effects-based eye candy and genre stereotypes, packed with plenty of explosions and collapsing buildings but also so poorly written and thought-out it will make your hair stand on end.

Let us be honest, however: nobody watches a film like San Andreas for its screenplay or its acting. These disaster films - Volcano, 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day, whatever - are all in effect the same movie. A group of characters in separate places all try to survive when some sort of natural disaster hits. Some of them live. Many of them die, often in ridiculous situations that provoke derisive laughter more than empathy. Occasionally one of these films will rise above the pack: personally I am quite a big fan of Michael Bay's Armageddon. Occasionally one of these films will try to take its storyline seriously, often with weirdly leaden and self-important results: see Mimi Leder's Deep Impact. For the most part they're just loudly abrasive, almost deliberately bad fun.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: "The Mind's Eye"

It's 27 May 1991, and time for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The Enterprise heads to the Federation-Klingon border, where a local governor claims the Federation is interfering in a Klingon colony uprising. Lieutenant La Forge (LeVar Burton) heads to an artificial intelligence conference on Risa - only to be kidnapped en route by the Romulans.

With "The Mind's Eye" The Next Generation does a Manchurian Candidate pastiche, with La Forge standing in as Raymond Shaw. The episode also picks up what has been a story arc quietly weaved through two seasons now: a long-running Romulan plot to destabilise relations between the United Federation of Planet and the Klingon Empire. A story about a brainwashed assassin, however closely inspired on somebody else's movie, is a good fit for the story arc The Next Generation is telling.

Maggie (2015)

In the aftermath of a nation-wide zombie outbreak, farmer Wade Vogel (Arnold Schwarzenegger) returns home with his daughter Maggie (Abigail Breslin). She has been bitten and infected, and will inevitably transform. Within weeks she will be transferred to a quarantine zone, giving father and daughter scant time to say goodbye and come to terms with what is about to occur.

Maggie is a peculiar zombie film. Coming at what we can only assume is the end of a decade-long spate of zombie narratives, it abandons horror and action in favour of personal drama. This is a quiet, gentle apocalypse, told not within panicky escapes from hordes of the undead but with melancholic introspection and a sense of the inevitable. The film is also peculiar because its star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is not particularly known for small-scale family tragedy. The last time he dealt with a supernatural end of the world we got End of Days. Maggie is a significantly different sort of movie. It is far from faultless, but at the very least it is a fascinating attempt to do something new with a very worn horror trope.

Babylon 5: "Meditations on the Abyss"

It's 27 May 1998, and time for more Babylon 5.

Lennier (Bill Mumy) returns to the station in secret to meet with Delenn (Mira Furlan) and receive a top secret mission: to join a White Star training mission near Centauri space, and use the opportunity to find evidence that it is the Centauri Republic whose attacks are destabilising the Alliance.

It feels like quite a long time since we last saw Lennier, forlorn and alone, abandoning Delenn's service because she was always going to love Sheridan (Bruce Boxleitner) instead, and haunted by the ghost of Morden's claims that he will one day betray the Rangers. He makes a pretty dramatic return here: darker, facially scarred, and a lot more serious and grim than we've ever seen him before. While he is given an important mission at the episode's outset he does not actually fulfil in in this episode. Instead we get to see his experiences on the training vessel: basically a sort of Minbari Top Gun in space.