The movie highlights of the year

Aubrey Malone hails a pitch perfect work

Aubrey Malone warms to an icy adventure

Saving Mr Banks (PG)   Mary Poppins remains one of the most loved (and popular) Walt Disney films of all time. It was also one of the first to combine animation with real characters, not Who Framed Roger Rabbit, as many people believe. Not much is known about P.L. Travers, the writer of the book on…

Parkland (12A)   For many people, John F. Kennedy’s assassination 50 years ago was a kind of pre-9/11 experience, an iconic moment. The famous question, “Where were you when JFK was shot?” subsequently became associated with other figures like Elvis and Princess Diana etc., but he was the first. The four dark days of his death…

Documentary may not be the most popular genre, but done well can have quite an impact. Powerfuland well-made as it was, it’s hard to see what effect The Disappearedwill have (RTÉ 1 Monday, BBC 4 Tuesday, last week). Darragh MacIntyre certainly re-opened the controversy about the people were ‘disappeared’ in Northern Ireland in the 1970s,…

 Thor: The Dark World (12A)There’s no gainsaying the visual splendour of would-be epics like this, even if they tend to resemble little more than sophisticated video games betimes, but the makers rarely seem to bother inserting any subtleties in the plotlines or characterisations, as if the kind of people who go to films like this…

Unmoved by a bittersweet drama

Aubrey Malone enjoys a tense sea-bound thriller

A film too slick for its own good, writes Aubrey Malone