As Julia Louis-Dreyfus tackles the death of her on-screen daughter in recent fantastical drama Tuesday, Guardian writers look back at the death scenes that ruined them

Major spoilers ahead

“Have you seen death in your bed?” bellows Julianne Moore’s unfaithful gold digger, wracked with guilt and hurtling toward a full breakdown as the husband she’s never appreciated draws his final breaths. The cold, horrifying fact of mortality covers Paul Thomas Anderson’s skyscraping Magnolia, the first film he made after watching his own father succumb to cancer, an experience he channeled into the plot strand concerning Jason Robards’ ailing Earl. As he withers away in his Los Angeles mansion, sifting through a lifetime of regret, his mistakes return to him in the form of the virulent misogynist son stunted by his dad’s neglect. Tom Cruise delivers the best acting of his entire life as the long-estranged Frank in their confrontation, his open-wound emotionality a leveling gesture of naked vulnerability from Anderson, but Robards matches him with crumbling-statue Shakespearean gravitas that gives way to a cowed, fearful smallness in the face of eternity. Infirm during the shoot, he’d pass away one year after the film came to theaters – along with Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ricky Jay, another one of the ghosts haunting this heaving outpouring of grief. Charles Bramesco

In a year of major releases from stars, the British singer has managed to come out on top with Brat: a catchy, internet-consuming album that captures a particular moment

How famous is Charli XCX? Even Charli XCX isn’t sure. “I’m famous but not quite / but I’m perfect for the background” she sings on I might say something stupid, the single slow-ish track off her new album, Brat. She’s not wrong; a good portion of the public knows the British singer, if they know her at all, for a top 10 hit from more than 10 years ago. But to a community of largely women, LGBTQ+ people and music critics, she is the biggest pop star in the world, the one everyone’s obsessed with – a persona Charli has leaned into with uncompromising, deadpan bravado: “It’s OK to just admit that you’re jealous of me,” she taunts on Von Dutch, the lead single off an album whose meme-generating cover is literally green with envy. On the deliriously catchy 360, she sings: “360, when you’re in the mirror, you’re just looking at me”, which references internet “it girls” such as Julia Fox – “I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia.”

And this week, at least online, she’s right. Brat is one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the year, now one of the top 20 all time on the site Metacritic (score: 95); her sold-out show/rave in Brooklyn this week drew such online fixations as Julia Fox, Lorde, Matty Healy and his new model fiancee Gabbriette, with tickets reselling for $10,000; many have pointed out that fellow pop artists Camila Cabello and Katy Perry are jacking her sound and lo-fi style, evidence of what Vox’s Rebecca Jennings called the “broader XCXification of culture”. A sickly, striking shade of Brat green spread on social media. The 15-track album of nearly straight club bangers, which contains not a single radio nor CVS-friendly track, is slated to debut at No 4 on the Billboard Hot 200 – by far Charli’s most commercially successful album to date, doing similar numbers to the relatively much more streamed (and doctor’s office friendly) Dua Lipa.

Six years in the making, jaw-dropping new film The Grab shows a secret scramble by governments and private firms to buy up global resources

In 2013, the US food conglomerate Smithfield Foods – the country’s largest pork producer and maker of the famous holiday ham – was sold to a Hong Kong-based company called WH Group in a deal worth $7.1bn. It was the largest ever Chinese acquisition of an American company; virtually overnight, WH Group, formerly called Shuanghui International, gained ownership of nearly one in four American pigs. Such a huge business deal did not go unnoticed; news coverage and an eventual congressional hearing questioned the sale with a mix of good, old-fashioned American xenophobia and reasonable concern for the nation’s food supply. But in the eyes of most people, and certainly most American consumers, the Smithfield Foods sale remained just that: a one-off business deal, if they were aware of it at all.

For Nate Halverson, a journalist with the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) out of Emeryville, California, the Smithfield deal was the first point in a much wider and concerning pattern – though the company’s CEO, Larry Pope, assured Congress that the Chinese government was not behind WH Group’s purchase, Halverson found evidence to the contrary on a reporting trip to the company’s headquarters: a secret document, marked not for distribution in the United States, detailing every dollar of the deal, and the state-run Bank of China’s “social responsibility” in backing it for “national strategy”.