The Star Trek phenomenon is fifty years old this year. If you want to understand the phenomenon, it’s best that you immerse yourself in Star Trek – The Original Series, which ran on TV from 1966 to 1969. Failing that, you should at least familiarize yourself with Star Trek – The Motion Picture Series which played out in six films released over the course of thirteen years from 1979 to 1991. The current iteration that began with Star Trek in 2009 and continued with Star Trek Into Darkness in 2013 and Star Trek Beyond this year is but a pale imitation.

Although I liked the 2009 version of Star Trek quite a bit, I found Star Trek Into Darkness an insulting bore. Star Trek Beyond improves upon that, but is still disappointing considering the quality of the first film in the reboot.

On the plus side, all the actors playing the key members of the crew of the USS Enterprise – Chris Pine as Captain Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Commander Spock, Karl Urban as Doctor McCoy, Zoe Saldana as Lieutenant Uhura, Simon Pegg as Scotty, John Cho as Sulu, and Anton Yelchin as Checkov – have grown into their characters. The screenplay serves them well, but the actors playing other characters are not given much depth. Even the brilliant Idris Elba can’t breathe much life into his arch-villain try as he does with his authoritative delivery.

The film is dedicated to the original Spock, Leonard Nimoy (1931-2015), who lived long and prospered, and the brilliant young actor Anton Yelchin (1989-1916) who died way too soon in a horrific headline-making accident caused by a car malfunction earlier this year.

It’s available on Blu-ray, DVD and the new 4K UHD/3D format.

Much more than the Star Trek reboot, the Captain America reboot is turning out to be quite something.

The Marvel comic character first appeared in a 1944 15-episode Saturday matinee serial and subsequently showed up in an animated TV series in 1966, a pair of TV movies in 1979, and a theatrical feature in 1990. All of them paled next to the current iteration that began with 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger and continued with 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier and this year’s Captain America: Civil War, which is the best one yet.

Captain America: Civil War is the thirteenth film in the profitable Marvel character series, several of which feature Chris Evans’ Captain America in featured roles, the most prominent being 2012’s The Avengers and 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultran.

This time around, the Avengers have split into two factions, with Captain America heading one and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) the other. At heart, though, you know they will all come together in the end. The action sequences run the gamut from exciting to repetitious, but the dramatic scenes are generally light and breezy. Taking sides in the war between the two main protagonists are Black Widow (Scarlett Johanssen), Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Falcon (Anthony Mackie), War Machine (Don Cheadle), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), Vision (Paul Bettany), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), and Spider-Man (Tom Holland). Also in the mix are Emily Vancamp, Daniel Bruhl, William Hurt, Martin Freeman, Marisa Tomei, and many others.

Captain America: Civil War is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

An action film from another era, 1955’s Strategic Air Command, had James Stewart flying planes and June Allyson waiting patiently for him to come home under the direction of Anthony Mann. Both the technology employed in the film and the style of the film itself have long since become outmoded. Perhaps that’s why it has not previously been released on DVD. Finally released on both Blu-ray and standard DVD by Olive films, it begs the question, when are we going to see the U.S. Blu-ray release of the much better Stewart-Allyson-Mann collaboration from the previous year, The Glenn Miller Story?

An early film noir, 1941’s I Wake Up Screaming directed by H. Bruce Humberstone gave us Victor Mature as the main suspect in the murder of Carole Landis. Told in flashbacks, mostly through the interrogation of Mature and Betty Grable as Landis’ sister, the film co-stars Laird Cregar as the detective/villain out to prove the innocent Mature the killer. The film’s one drawback is the incongruous playing of the then-recent Oscar-winning “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz as musical filler throughout.

The Kino Lorber Blu-ray includes Eddie Muller’s commentary from the old DVD.

Two years ago, John Ford’s 1958 film Gideon’s Day made its home video debut as part of TCM’s John Ford: The Columbia Films Collection. Sony had now released the film on Blu-ray under its 1959 U.S. release title, Gideon of Scotland Yard. Jack Hawkins stars as Gideon in Ford’s only British film with Anna Lee as his wife, Anna Massey as his daughter, and John Loder, Frank Lawton, and Andrew Ray among the familiar faces in the supporting cast. It’s a nice little film, but one wonders, however, when Sony is going to release Blu-rays of the two real gems in the Ford at Columbia collection, The Long Gray Line and The Last Hurrah.

More modern crime investigation is employed in the HBO miniseries The Night Of, now out on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Co-written by Richard Price (TV’s The Wire) and Steven Zallian (Schindler’s List) and directed by Zallian, the irony is that although we may have amazing technology at our disposal, the thin line between guilt and innocence still involves hands-on detective work.

Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler) stars as a first generation American of Pakistani extraction who “borrows” his father’s taxi to go to a party in lower Manhattan, but never makes it. Instead he picks up an attractive female passenger, takes her home where she gets him high on drugs and alcohol. He wakes up to find her dead. Instead of calling 911, he panics and runs away and is subsequently arrested on circumstantial evidence. That’s only the first of eight episodes.

Brilliant writing and moving performances from Ahmed, John Turturro, and Amara Karan as his attorneys; Michael Kenneth Williams as a fellow inmate; Bill Camp as a detective; and Jeannie Berlin as the prosecuting attorney make this a must-see.

This week’s new releases include Blu-ray upgrades of The Goodbye Girl and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town which had been previously scheduled to be released last month.