"These are a few terms that get thrown around a lot but what are the specific connotative meanings behind them? Here's how I would basically break it down:
A "remake" is taking basically the exact same story and doing it again with changes. Such examples of this would include Rob Zombie's Halloween, Gus Van Sant's Psycho, and the 1995 version of Sabrina with Harrison Ford & Julia Ormond.
A "reimagining" is looser. It takes a similar premise as the original but does it in a very different way. Examples of this would include Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, Death Race with Jason Statham, and Ronald D. Moore's Battlestar Galactica. (I'm also tempted to put the new Conan the Barbarian movie here but it doesn't quite feel the same. It's almost not a "re-" anything because it feels so unconcerned with any previous Conan productions.)
A "reboot" only comes into play when you're dealing with an ongoing series that doesn't want to acknowledge any of its previous incarnations for whatever reason. The Amazing Spider-Man, Batman Begins, & Casino Royale are the best examples I can think of for this.
There are also other, lesser levels of reboots where a movie will have some newness but also some attachment to the previous continuity, like Superman Returns. There are occasionally "agnostic" movies like TMNT (which even strategically places a crack in the ooze cannister so that we can't tell whether it's from "TCRI" or "TGRI") and Terminator Salvation (which is presumably a follow-up to Terminator 3 but might also be in some way a successor to The Sarah Connor Chronicles). People will argue about how exactly X-Men: First Class fits into the continuity of the previous X-Men movies. And then there's the very rare animal of the 2009 Star Trek movie, which is set in a new timeline but it is a new timeline specifically created from some of the characters time travelling and changing history.
Then there's the "revival," which is just a straight up continuation of the old thing but done in a way that is specifically designed to appeal to new people that never saw the old thing. The new Doctor Who falls into this category, as do the new versions of 90210, Knight Rider, & Melrose Place. (I would also count the 2002 version of The Twilight Zone, although The Twilight Zone is an anthology series so it doesn't really have a continuity to adhere to anyway. They did do a direct sequel to the old episode "It's a Good Life" called "It's Still a Good Life." But they also did remakes of the classic episodes "Eye of the Beholder" & "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.")
How would you define these sometimes nebulous terms"~The Borgified Corpse
http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=146941
I hope that helps. Re-imagining is the same as rebirth by the way.