Damon Smith

AT the age of nine, I became a disciple of George Lucas's epic sci-fi saga.

WRITER-DIRECTOR Rian Johnson returns to the detective genre, which served him well for his award-winning 2005 debut feature Brick, to pay loving tribute to Agatha Christie with a tongue-in-cheek country house whodunnit.

ACCORDING to lovable snowman Olaf (voiced by Josh Gad), who is a permafrosted font of wisdom about the natural world, water has memory.

IN the opening scene of director Martin Scorsese’s blood-soaked 1990 thriller Goodfellas, Ray Liotta’s low-level mobster waxes lyrical in voiceover about the irresistible allure of a life of crime.

A YOUNG boy pedalling his tricycle over wooden floors laid with hexagonal patterned carpet, twin girls dressed in matching sky blue party dresses tied with white bows at the waist, a tidal wave of blood cascading out of ornate elevator doors, an axe-wielding father chasing his terrified young son around a floodlit, snow-laden maze.

LOVE conquers fear and intolerance twice upon a time in director Joachim Ronning’s fantastical sequel based on characters from Disney’s 1959 animation Sleeping Beauty and Charles Perrault’s fairytale La Belle Au Bois Dormant.

IN an age of garish excess when cinema audiences demand more entertainment for their money, two Will Smiths in Ang Lee’s action thriller must surely be better than one?

THE Joker’s wild and plagued with a neurological condition which compels him to burst into fits of maniacal giggling in director Todd Phillips’s profoundly disturbing character study.

TOWARDS the dewy-eyed conclusion of Downton Abbey, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) considers bidding a hearty cheerio to her ancestral home.

IN January 2006, Oprah Winfrey memorably invited author James Frey on to her daytime TV talk show to publicly castigate him about the veracity of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces.