“Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.”

Tom Hooper was no stranger to the world of directing when his last film The King’s Speech exploded onto screens at the tail end of 2010, reaping the lion’s share of awards including an Oscar for Best Director. Like so many directors that go from relative obscurity to unanimous acclaim, his next film was going to be bigger and showier in an attempt to show that his excellent work on The King’s Speech was no fluke.

For his follow-up, he chose the biggest and showiest project imaginable: the epic of all epic musicals, Les Miserables.

Did the gamble pay off? Read on to find out…

“Tell me, are you having a boy or are you having an abortion?”

Sacha Baron Cohen has carved out a niche for himself in his marriage of social taboos with uncomfortable comedy. It worked like gangbusters on his brilliant television show Da Ali G Show, and has worked to varying degrees in his four feature films, Ali G Indahouse, Borat, Bruno and now, The Dictator. Where his first feature failed by taking one of the characters from his show and putting him in a fictional narrative, he stuck to what he does best with his next two features, putting real people in uncomfortable situations, having to talk to someone they normally wouldn’t associate with.

When it was first announced, The Dictator was said to be an adaptation of Saddam Hussein’s novel Zabibah and the King, but Baron Cohen and frequent collaborator/director Larry Charles have jettisoned most of that material and gone for something a little more comfortable.