From Alan Rickman’s delicious delivery to Daniel Day-Lewis’s ferocious presence, the actors we remember make bold choices. So why does so much screen acting now feel so restrained and are we mistaking doing less for doing it better?

Asteroids, earthquakes, tidal waves, killer storms and the occasional end of civilisation. From 2012 to The Day After Tomorrow, these are 20 disaster films that prove watching everything go spectacularly wrong can be extremely entertaining.

Good clothes, old things, peculiar habits and the persuasive case for becoming a little more eccentric. The gentlemen reminds us that the coolest people rarely look as if they’re trying.

Films used to be filled with people who appeared for thirty seconds, delivered one magnificent line and disappeared forever. They weren’t stars, but they gave films humour, texture and a life beyond the plot. So where did all the great bit-part actors go?

In The Return, director Urberto Pasolini offers a haunting and cerebral adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey one that eschews spectacle in favour of something far more rare: emotional truth. This is not a film of soaring CGI or stylised battles; it is a story about people about grief, longing, and the quiet resilience of the human spirit.

Steven Zaillian's Ripley is extraordinarily beautiful, but its greater achievement is something rarer: it has a point of view. In an age of coverage, here is a director willing to decide exactly what we should see and what we should not.