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What do film directors Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Agnès Varda, Robert Wise, Fred Zinnemann, Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Roman Polanski, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, Louis Malle, Richard Linklater, Tom Tykwer, Alexander Sokurov, Paul Greengrass, Song Il-Gon, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro Iñárritu have in common? More specifically, what type of film have they directed, setting them apart from fewer than 50 of their filmmaking peers? Sorry, “comedy” or “drama” isn’t right. If you’ve looked at this article’s headline, you’ve probably already guessed that the answer is that they’ve all made “real-time” films, or films that seemed to take about as long as their running time.

The real-time film has long been a sub-genre without much critical attention, but the time of the real-time film has come. Cuarón’s Gravity (2013), which was shot and edited so as to seem like a real-time film, floated away with the most 2014 Oscars,...

Not even John Williams -- who seems to have his signature on just about anything made in Hollywood -- can stand up to him. Yet, you may have never heard of Fred Steiner before. Steiner, who died Thursday in Mexico at age 88, has 77 titles to his name as a member of a music department, 66 titles as a composer and 14 soundtracks, according to Internet Movie Database. It's a career that started all the way back in 1949 in the series "Man Against Crime," and culminating in incidental music lifted from his original "Star Trek" work in the "Star Trek: Phase II" fan productions through this year. In fact, his genre work is extremely extensive. "Twilight Zone," "Lost in Space," "Star Trek," "Amazing Stories," "Star Trek: The Next Generation," "Star Trek: The Motion Picture," and "Stars Wars: ...