Chris Columbus

An eight-year-old is left behind when his family flies to Paris and defends the house against two burglars with paint tins and a blowtorch, and Home Alone takes his competence entirely seriously. Children are the reliable centre: capable, unsupervised, and more sensible than the adults. A father who has lost custody becomes his own children's nanny in Mrs. Doubtfire. The two Harry Potter films that open the series treat a boarding school of wizards as somewhere warm to be.

Signature

• Resourceful children operating without competent adults.
• Broad physical comedy resolved into sentiment.
• Family reconstituted by the last reel.
• Big commercial storytelling played sincerely.