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Andrew counts down some of the best roles of Sean Bean's career, from the ones you'll know to the ones you probably won't...

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Sean Bean.

Love him, fear him, smell him: the man breathes fire. And acting.

But what is Sean Bean? Well, adhering to a skeptical epistemology, we simply don't know, but for the purposes of this article he's the bloke who played Errol Partridge in Equilibrium, still to this day his defining role in Equilibrium.

While everyone at Den of Geek loves Equilibrium slightly more than they love each other, Sean Bean is only in it but for a moment. Unfortunately he mistakenly believes that holding up a book in front of his face will stop a bullet, when all he had to do to stop Christian Bale from shooting him was impersonate a puppy. Really, it's hard to argue that the film wouldn't be considerably...

The last word on Channel 4's Benefits Street should go not to a chaotic studio debate but to the people who live there

Benefits Street: The Last Word (C4) | 4Od

Benefits Britain: The Debate (C4) | 4Od

Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry (BBC4) | iPlayer

True Detective (Sky Atlantic) | Sky Go

This winter has seen two deluges. First, the never-ending rain and then the ceaseless torrent of words about Benefits Street. Although the series finished almost two weeks ago, the controversy has hardly subsided. Last week there was the optimistically titled Benefits Street: The Last Word, followed, as if to confirm the emptiness of that claim, by Benefits Britain: The Debate.

Channel 4's six-part documentary has been so divisive that, forget the show, people are still arguing over its name. The use of the word "benefits", say many commentators, has "demonised" those on benefits. I'm not sure...

Slavoj Žižek, much like Jonathan Meades, evokes your favourite university lecturer: he's peculiar, provocative, knowledgeable and funny. Not many academics would start their dissection on Hollywood and Western ideology with John Carpenter's hoary horror They Live, which he describes as a “masterpiece”. Other films under into his skewed microscope are The Sound of Music, Taxi Driver (where Žižek holds court from Travis Bickle's bed) and, best of all, his hatchet job on Titanic. His conclusion seems to be “freedom hurts”.

It's been called the 'dustbin of London' and the 'armpit of the world' – but there are efforts afoot, on TV and in the country's art galleries, to redeem Essex's reputation

We need to talk about Essex. Surely no county has been so systematically defined and reduced. Simon Heffer's now-infamous Daily Telegraph editorial published in 1990 named the vomiting Thatcherites he encountered at Liverpool Street station as examples of "Essex Man". At around the same time, Chigwell provided the setting for the upwardly mobile prison widows in Birds of a Feather. More recently, of course, there has been Buckhurst Hill and Brentwood's "structured reality" pantomime, The Only Way is Essex. And while Channel 4's Educating Essex, filmed in Harlow, was funny and sensitive, its title seemed to imply that to teach an Essex kid anything was a novel idea.

The fact that Essex is maligned is hardly news. "It has...

The following is an introduction to a new edition of Anthony Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange" [W.W. Norton, $24.95] written by Andrew Biswell. The piece sheds light on the enduring legacy of the novel, and the various dystopian works that influenced Burgess's writing. Biswell also discusses Burgess's (often clever) responses to the novel's adaptation, and ideas for adaptations that never came to fruition:

In 1994, less than a year after Anthony Burgess had died at the age of seventy-six, BBC Scotland commissioned the novelist William Boyd to write a radio play in celebration of his life and work. This was broadcast during the Edinburgh Festival on 21 August 1994, along with a concert performance of Burgess’s music and a recording of his Glasgow Overture. The programme was called "An Airful of Burgess," with the actor John Sessions playing the parts of both Burgess and his fictional alter ego, the poet F. X. Enderby. On the same day,...

We know who won our Twitpitch Challenge. But what does the poster look like?

You are Hollywood's top movie mogul. Infinite cash is at your disposal. Ditto stars – even the dead ones don't dare refuse your casting call. Now: what film would you most want to make? That's the question we asked readers for our Twitpitch Challenge as part of the Guardian and Observer's Film Season. We invited you to pitch your dream film, were death and cash and genre no obstacle, in 140 characters or less.

Our panel, including Jonathan Meades, Richard Eyre and Frank Cottrell Boyce, chose their favourites. And here we present thereddress's poster for the winning entry -@johnbodkinadams's "To the Manor Bourne: Jason Bourne retires to the countryside. With violent consequences". Note Penelope Keith, fleeing on the right, plus Timothy Spall on the left - the casting choice of judge Meades, who extrapolated the plot. "There's...

All this week we've been asking you to tell us, in 140 characters or less, what your dream film would be. You replied in your hundreds; but for which pitch did our judges – Jonathan Meades, Frank Cottrell Boyce and Richard Eyre – choose to have a poster drawn and published in the Guide?

Brian Blessed was a recurrent theme; so was Leonard Cohen. Space featured heavily as a location; the rise in 3D was well represented. The dizzying breadth of ambition of some of the films you dreamed up is truly startling.

One of our judges, Frank Cottrell Boyce, said: "I was expecting this to be mostly amusing casting and direction ideas ("Schwarzenegger is Bach") but was amazed and overexcited to find some ideas on this list that I really would like to see filmed." Indeed, should @jahaniman's Quiet! ("An American aid worker and an Irish boxer enter a monastery but find...

If budget, death and genre were no object, what would be your dream film? Let us know in 140 characters and a poster for it could feature in the Guide

As part of the Guardian and Observer 2010 Film Season, we're asking you not just to think about the films that have already been made (and name them), the people who make them, and how we should cover them. We're also keen to know what films you'd like to see that will never get past the pitch.

If you could employ anyone in the world – living or dead – to be involved, fuse any combination of genres, use anything you fancied on the soundtrack, what movie might you come up with? Might you like to, for instance, remake Thelma and Louise with Greta Garbo and Lindsay Lohan, Charles Laughton cameoing in the Brad Pitt role, Fassbinder in the director's chair, and set it entirely in space?...