In his pomp there was no genre or story this director couldn’t turn to gold – despite never being nominated for an Oscar

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• Rob Reiner’s five best films
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Consumption today is driven by the algorithm: “If you liked that, you’ll love this …” But Rob Reiner was a film-maker who beat the algorithm in the days before there was even one to beat. He was impossible to predict, at least during his golden years. How could one man make the most inspired mockumentary of all time, a handful of zinging romcoms, a coming-of-age yarn, a knowing fairytale comedy, a gruesome yet screamingly camp thriller and a hokey-but-fun courtroom drama? Well, he did – and all in the first decade of his directing career.

US audiences loved him first as an actor: he was the liberal son-in-law known as Meathead in nearly 200 episodes of the late-1970s sitcom All in the Family, based on the UK favourite Till Death Us Do Part. He remained in front of the camera for his 1984 directorial debut This Is Spinal Tap, which chronicled an entire band of meatheads. In fact, his face is the very first thing we see: he plays the ingratiating documentary-maker Marty DiBergi, an affectionate parody of Martin Scorsese as glimpsed in the off-stage scenes of The Last Waltz, his concert film about the Band. Spinal Tap’s chief target, though, was the speed with which fame can turn you dumb – or make idiots believe themselves to be geniuses. The heavy metal band, played by Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer, put it best: “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.”

After years as Hollywood’s romcom darling, Hudson is putting music at the centre of her career – and after her show-stealing turn in Song Sung Blue, the Oscar buzz is growing

The first voice I hear when I enter the hotel room to meet Kate Hudson belongs to her 21-year-old son, Ryder, who speaks from the end of a phone: “Love you, Mum!”

Doesn’t everyone? You don’t have to be related to Hudson to consider her a joyous proposition – a great performer who hasn’t yet made a great film. It was a quarter-century ago in Almost Famous, her breakthrough picture, that she first proved she could hoist a movie out of the doldrums while making the task appear as effortless as blow-drying her hair. Without her performance as Penny Lane, the rock’n’roll muse who describes herself as a “band-aid” rather than a groupie, Cameron Crowe’s dopey valentine to the 1970s of his youth would have been Almost Forgettable.

After Quentin Tarantino’s unfavourable comments about the actor’s performance in films including There Will Be Blood, we run through the roles that show just how potent he really is

This disquieting narrative debut from the British director James Marsh (The Theory of Everything) is a kind of minor Cape Fear. Gael García Bernal plays a sociopathic outsider threatening the apparently perfect life of his long-lost preacher father (William Hurt). In what now looks like a dry run for There Will Be Blood, Dano is the earnest son campaigning for creationism to be taught at school, and sideswiped by the emergence of his sinister half-brother. Variety labelled the film “noxious”. It’s undoubtedly nasty, but Dano helps to lend it a pulse.