Everyone loves a villain – more fun to play, watch and steal quotes from than any floppy-haired namby-pamby good guy, and usually prettier to boot. It’s such a shame they always seem to end up getting shot/stabbed/thrown off buildings/drowned/burnt by hot doorknobs (damn you, Kevin McCallister), so we thought we’d round up some of our favourites for a Who’s Who of all the bad guys that really should have won.

Home Alone star: not a kid any more

At the invitation of the Swedenborg Society, Best For Film is publishing a special series of reviews to follow its ‘Images of the Afterlife in Cinema’ film season, which will be exploring life, death and everything in between. This week it’s the turn of Adrian Lyne’s harrowing supernatural classic Jacob’s Ladder. Hold onto your sanity…

Over the years we’ve seen plenty of comics turned into films, which normally entails lifting the characters and plot and leaving everything comic-specific behind. Fair enough. But what about a comic that’s turned into a bigger, brighter, flashier comic with, like, Michael Cera and moving bits? Edgar Wright’s extraordinary film is more fun than waking up and discovering you’re Mario.

Hollywood’s bent for all things cheesy is perhaps best embodied in that most haunting of spectres, the child actor. From their cutesy giggles to their moronic lisps, we count down the five most irritating mugs ever to grace the screen at the tender age of precocious.