Tyler Perry

Tyler Perry built his own industry. Madea, the tough elderly woman he writes, directs and plays himself, first appeared on stage in a Chicago production of I Can Do Bad All by Myself in 1999, and the touring plays that followed came with an audience already attached. He converted that audience into films, and the films have not stopped since: the Madea pictures, the Why Did I Get Married films, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Acrimony, Temptation, A Fall from Grace. He also plays Madea's brother Joe and her nephew Brian, often in the same scene.

The work is unfashionable on purpose. It is fast, cheap by studio standards, openly moralistic, rooted in church and family melodrama, and made for people who were not being served by anyone else. Critics have never been the constituency and he has never pretended otherwise. When the plays are simply filmed, the seams show; when the melodrama commits without apology, as in the Why Did I Get Married films, it is far better than its reputation.

The odd thing is that his best acting happens in other directors' films. Tanner Bolt in Gone Girl is a genuinely fine performance, a celebrity lawyer having an excellent time in a film where nobody else is. Vice, Don't Look Up, Those Who Wish Me Dead and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows all use him as a professional supporting actor rather than a brand, and he is good in every one. The recent directing, A Jazzman's Blues, The Six Triple Eight and Straw, is his attempt at something more ambitious.