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