I will give an overview on some regularity estimates for functionals/PDE with general growth with respect to the gradient variable. The method here cannot rely on blow up procedures and homogeneity, as it usually happens in the power case. Furthermore, it is flexible enough to treat in a unified way the degenerate (when $p>2$) or singular (when $p<2$) behaviour. Starting from the Uhlenbeck case for elliptic systems, I will consider nonautonomous functionals for which only partial regularity results are possible. Furthermore, I will present some recent results obtained with Jihoon Ok and Giovanni Scilla concerning the parabolic case.