Chris Columbus

Chris Columbus wrote before he directed, and he wrote well. Out of NYU's film school he sold screenplays for Gremlins, The Goonies and Young Sherlock Holmes in the mid eighties, three films with a shared sensibility: children in real danger, treated seriously, with adults mostly useless. Adventures in Babysitting in 1987 was his directorial debut and carried the same idea.

Then Home Alone made him one of the most commercially reliable directors alive. It is a cartoon with a real child at the centre, and the reason it survives is that Columbus takes the loneliness as seriously as the paint cans. Mrs. Doubtfire did something similar with a divorce, letting Robin Williams improvise inside a structure that stayed sad underneath the latex.

The Harry Potter films are his largest legacy and his most criticised work. Directing the first two, he built the visual grammar the whole series ran on, cast children who could carry eight films, and stayed close enough to the books that later directors had something to push against. Those films are warm and slow, and both qualities were choices.

The decades since have been uneven. Bicentennial Man, Rent, Percy Jackson and Pixels all struggled to find a tone, and the recent work has drifted toward comfortable studio assignments. His gift was never visual invention. It was knowing precisely how much sentiment an audience will accept before it starts to resist.