The tally of Charles Dickens’s biographers grows ever closer to 100. The English language’s most celebrated novelist repays repeated study, of course, because both his life and his work are so remarkably copious: the novels, the journals, the letters, the readings; the charitable works, the endless walks; the awful childhood, the army of children, the abruptly terminated marriage, the puzzling relationship with two sisters-in-law, the long and clandestine affair.

The news that Philip Seymour Hoffman has died at the age of only 46 robs cinema of - almost unarguably - the greatest screen actor of the age, and certainly its outstanding character actor. Where once there was Charles Laughton, or Ernest Borgnine, for the past two decades there has been Philip Seymour Hoffman. They are all great film actors whom fate has fashioned in doughy clumps of misshapen flesh. The matinee idols got the looks and the girls: the character actors got the meatiest roles and the longevity.

The careers of writer Hanif Kureishi and director Roger Michell are indelibly linked, with a collaboration that has now lasted 20 years. In 1993 Michell, then an accomplished theatre director who was relatively new to the camera, directed Kureishi’s adaptation of his novel The Buddha of Suburbia for the BBC, with great success.

Schoolchildren drowning under a frozen lake in their crashed bus is the image most people still associate with Atom Egoyan. The Sweet Hereafter (1997), which pivots on that scene (the ill-fated bus is pictured below), gained him Oscar nominations as director and screenwriter, and reinforced the breakthrough made by Exotica (1994), in which a man harbouring an awful secret you dread being revealed keeps coming back to a strip-club’s schoolgirl-costumed dancer.

Woody Allen once joked that he would prefer to achieve immortality not through his work but through not dying. He is now 77 and the inevitable is a lot nearer than it was when he first realised, aged five, that this doesn’t go on forever. Fear of death has powered the furious productivity that in the early days yielded jokes by the yard, then the films appearing year upon year. In the interim the public image has calcified: the master comedian who would prefer to be a tragedian, the world-class worrier, the clarinet-tooting workaholic. But is that the real Woody Allen?

Few heroes of cult genre television ever manage the transition into mainstream financial success – although JJ Abrams hasn't been doing too badly for himself – and for many years Joss Whedon's deified status among fans of his various lovingly crafted, emotionally rich series was not reflected by broader recognition. 

“If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin and say, ‘When you’re ready.’” The words belong to Jason Taylor, the stammering 13-year-old poet protagonist of David Mitchell's novel Black Swan Green. But they will do for any artist presenting fresh work. Mitchell is going through an extracurricular phase of presenting fresh work to a different kind of audience. The most widely read of his four novels – Cloud Atlas – was released as a star-spangled film earlier this year.

François Ozon is one of France’s most mercurial directors, his country’s equivalent, in some respects, to our own Michael Winterbottom – prolific, and constantly on the move between genres. He’s made a musical (8 Women), a marital drama (5x2), a murder mystery (Swimming Pool), a period melodrama (Angel), political satire (Potiche) and a poignant drama about a young man coping with his imminent death (Time to Leave), among others.

When Matteo Garrone’s sixth film Gomorrah won the 2008 Grand Prix at Cannes, it announced Italian cinema’s resurrection to the world. When his follow-up, Reality, won the 2012 Grand Prix, opinion was more divided.

The generation of alternative comedians who emerged around 30 years ago have long since elbowed their predecessors into the long grass and themselves become the establishment. Of no performer can that be said with more certainty than Rowan Atkinson. His rubbery physiognomy is instantly recognisable to billions, which is why he – or rather Mr Bean - was granted pride of place at the Opening Ceremony as guest artist with Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra.