The Movie Quiz: Who did not direct a film that shared its name with a David Bowie song?
Who is not Austrian?
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Michael Haneke
Christoph Waltz
Werner Herzog
Which Viking is back in action this week?
Hiccup
Sneeze
Burp
Yawn
Who delivers the last line of Some Like it Hot?
Marilyn Monroe
Joe E Brown
Tony Curtis
Jack Lemmon
Who has not directed their daughter in a film?
Francis Ford Coppola
John Huston
Roberto Rossellini
Alfred Hitchcock
Who was never Henry VIII in a feature?
Robert Shaw
Richard Burton
Charles Laughton
Orson Welles
Who did not direct a film that shared its name with a David Bowie song?
Alan Parker
Stephen Frears
Todd Haynes
John Carpenter
Whose life did not generate a winner of the best actor Oscar?
The King of Siam
Commander of the Seventh and Third US armies
The grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II
The author of Down All the Days
Which does not deserve a silver gift this year?
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Jaws
Nashville
The Exorcist
Andrea Arnold directed a film with the same title as another by whom?
John Ford
Clint Eastwood
Howard Hawks
Stanley Kubrick
Who started the run that continued with Stephen Hopkins, Nimród Antal, Shane Black, and Dan Trachtenberg?
John McTiernan
David Fincher
James Cameron
Ridley Scott
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Irish Times
11 hours ago
- Irish Times
Raids and fear cast a large shadow over Club World Cup's big launch
'When Donald Trump came in the laws just changed and it's hard for immigrants now ... you've got a lot of people being deported, people who have been in the United States for two decades. It's not nice, it's not right when someone who hasn't committed a crime has to go back somewhere. 'I just don't respect somebody like [Trump] that deports so many people and hurts so many families ... this country was built on immigrants. Nobody's from here.' It seems unlikely this is the kind of hard political messaging Gianni Infantino was hoping to associate himself with when Fifa booked the New York rapper French Montana as its headline act at Saturday's Club World Cup opening ceremony, a global spectacular taking place against a background of unrest over Trump's immigration and repatriation policies. French Montana moved to New York from Morocco aged 13 and has been outspoken in his support for the rights of undocumented US immigrants, although his place on the political spectrum has been muddied a little this year by an unexpected appearance on the Lara Trump track No Days Off. READ MORE His comments in interviews in 2019 and 2018, and his presence at the centre of Fifa's publicity for the launch night of its $1 billion show, will provide a deeply uncomfortable reminder of the perils of fawning over divisive political leaders. Infantino has spent the past year energetically cosying up to the US president, attending his inauguration in a state of high excitement and even delaying Fifa's annual meeting in order to follow Trump around a little longer on his visit to Qatar. French Montana is at least in tune with the Fifa zeitgeist. Already this week the news that officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will be part of the security operation for Saturday's game between Al Ahly and Inter Miami has sparked widespread disquiet. A year out from the World Cup that the US is sharing with Canada and Mexico, there is concern not only that supporters may stay away over fear of document checks and status wrangles, but that Fifa's showpiece men's club event is in danger of being piggybacked on as a political event by the Trump administration. Members of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and Enforcement and Removal Operations (Ero), assisted by the FBI and other federal agencies perform an arrest in Miami on May 28th. Photograph: Todd Heisler/The New York Times CBP has been openly promoting its role at Fifa's tournament for the past few months under the hashtag #CBPxFIFA. This came to a head this week as it ended up deleting a Facebook post that stated its agents would be 'suited and booted and ready to provide security for the first round of games'. The Department of Homeland Security has confirmed that Ice and CBP officers will be present at Club World Cup fixtures, saying: 'All non-American citizens need to carry proof of their legal status.' This is not without recent precedent. CBP often operates at big sporting events, including February's Super Bowl in New Orleans. But it isn't hard to see how this might be interpreted as containing an element of threat. Ice officers are being escorted around Los Angeles by the US national guard, a hugely controversial move that has contributed to the current unrest in the city. CBP has also declined so far to address the reasons for the removal of its post about Fifa's grand jamboree, which fuelled fears the event may be rolled into the aggressive enforcement of Trump's immigration policy. A glance at CBP's X feed makes plain this is by no means a politically neutral entity. One post reads: 'The alarming riots in L.A. which have put hundreds of law enforcement officers at risk, are precisely why the Big Beautiful Bill is so important.' Another states: 'While rioters wave foreign flags and burn ours, our officers will always raise the stars and stripes with pride.' Approving references to Trump's policies are intercut with remarks about 'lies' from 'the mainstream media and sanctuary politicians'. Questions will naturally be asked about whether this constitutes an appropriate hashtag partner for football's apolitical governing body. Infantino was asked this week about the presence of immigration agencies at Fifa's launch party. His answer was characteristically vague, focusing instead on security issues. But there is concern on that front in Miami, fuelled by the chaos of the Copa América final between Argentina and Colombia at the same venue last year, which led to arrests, barriers rushed and a one-hour kick-off delay. Fifa president Gianni Infantino gives US president Donald Trump a football to autograph during a signing ceremony after a state dinner with Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani in Doha on May 14th. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images The Hard Rock Stadium has warned of 'multiple security and ticket check points', and the Miami Herald has unearthed a police video used as a training tool for the tournament in which a sergeant is heard saying: 'If things go south, we get prepared, we get ready. For civil unrest and unruly fans, this will get us ready for those events.' And Fifa is dipping its toe into some overheated waters here. Only this week the Trump administration explicitly instructed anything up to half a million Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who came legally to the United States under a Biden-era programme to 'leave immediately' if they have yet to make the step from 'parole' to full status. The state of heightened security has affected Fifa's party. On Wednesday a luxury pleasure flotilla chartered by the TV station Telemundo and containing Fifa officials and the Miami-Dade mayor, Daniella Levine Cava, was boarded by CBP officials in Biscayne Bay off the Miami coast. The event, staged to celebrate the approach of the World Cup, was abruptly cancelled. Officials later stated the raid was a routine inspection that uncovered some safety violations. But the mayor has since described the incident as 'deeply troubling' and told local media: 'Ensuring that all community members feel safe and included is crucial to maintaining our county's reputation as a welcoming destination for both residents and visitors.' Saturday's opening game, which gets under way at 8pm local time (1am in Ireland) is now a source of multiple migraines for Infantino. Trump will be absent, required instead to oversee his own Grand Military Parade in Washington. While this is no doubt a bone-deep personal disappointment for Infantino, it will at least spare him the embarrassment of marrying up his headline act's political statements with the capricious and easily offended commander-in-chief in the seat next to him. The game also coincides with a day of nationwide anti-Trump protests. Styled as the No Kings movement, a warning against the exercise of extreme executive power in the first year of Trump's second term, the protests will elide naturally with unrest over the actions of Ice and CBP. The wider Miami area will stage at least 10 No Kings events, including one half an hour's drive from Infantino's coronational seat at the Hard Rock Stadium, although it is unlikely Republican Miami-Dade will see anything like the scale of unrest in Los Angeles. As one Aventura man put it on Thursday morning: 'This is Florida. We don't truck with that s**t here.' This appears to be the politically sanctioned position. The state governor, Ron DeSantis, speaking on the Rubin Report this week, took the extraordinary step of encouraging members of the public who feel threatened by protests on Club World Cup match day one to drive through the crowds, an apparent extension of Florida's 'Stand Your Ground' law. As DeSantis put it: 'If you drive off and you hit one of these people, that's their fault for impinging on you.' The tagline for the opening night of Fifa's US mission is A New Era Begins. As things stand that new era will kick off against a rolling background of spot-check fear, off-message headline acts and an opening game shadowed by the prospect of governor-approved assault with a motor vehicle a few miles down the road. Over to you, Gianni. – Guardian
Irish Times
16 hours ago
- Irish Times
Escaped Alone review: Four women, catastrophe and the comforts of ordinary chatter
Escaped Alone Everyman, Cork ★★★★☆ It begins innocuously enough: four old women sit in a sunlit garden on plastic chairs, chatting. But something is off. The sky is an unnaturally vivid blue, and the sun – outlined in black like a child's crayon drawing – resembles an eye, glaring down at them. Even the conversation feels disjointed. The women bicker, speculate about TV plots, affirm and contradict each other. The rhythms of their speech are recognisably natural yet pushed just beyond believability: unmoored, associative, faintly surreal. This is Escaped Alone, Caryl Churchill's dark, cracklingly funny play about catastrophe, denial and the comforts of ordinary chatter. Directed by Annabelle Comyn for Hatch Theatre Company , this compact, unsettling production runs to just 50 minutes but sets off some big themes. The women's garden talk unspools loosely, interrupted by sudden tonal shifts as Mrs Jarrett (a spellbinding Anna Healy) steps forward into stormy lighting to deliver visions of the apocalypse. It's never clear whether she's describing an alternate reality or if these horrors have already occurred in the world the women inhabit. Perhaps they are stuck in some psychic limbo, condemned to small-talk as the real world collapses on a loop. READ MORE Churchill's writing in these end-time monologues is admirable in its grotesque intricacy. People are driven underground and trade mushrooms for urine. Some lose sexual desire entirely while others become feral, copulating with anything they encounter. The obese sell slices of themselves until hunger forces them to eat their own rashers. NHS-issued gas masks come with a three-month waiting list, or can be bought privately in a range of fashionable colours. Rivers run backwards. Floods, fires and shape-shifting viruses spread. Written in 2016, the text has some eerily prophetic details. As the play progresses, the boundary between the women's idle talk and Jarrett's dystopias begins to dissolve. The minimalist set becomes increasingly charged. The sky darkens. The tree rattles. The cartoon sun mutates into a black pupil, rolling around a red eye. Personal and planetary crises overlap, intensifying the ambient paranoia. Casual lines echo with menace. 'This time of year the shadow comes up earlier,' one says. Each woman delivers a vivid, tragicomic monologue about her private suffering: Sally (Sorcha Cusack) describes her pathological fear of cats; Vi (Ruth McCabe) confesses to stabbing her abusive husband; Lena (Deirdre Monaghan) speaks of a growing silence overtaking her thoughts. And yet, amid the doom, there is laughter. The women genuinely enjoy one another's company. They're funny. They've seen a lot. They even have a little boogie. Comyn's restrained, intelligent direction allows Churchill's extraordinary script to take centre stage. The performances are sharp and tightly controlled, the design minimal but suggestive. The fragmented, intensely poetic script shows its debt to the modernists (particularly Samuel Beckett and his dementia dramas), but its anxious atmosphere feels uniquely contemporary. Intersecting crises mount and grow out of control; horrors fester and mutate in the imagination. Yet the play is not nihilistic. Even at the end of the world, Churchill suggests, there may still be a garden somewhere where women sit, and talk, and keep each other company. Escaped Alone is at the Everyman , as part of Cork Midsummer Festival , until Saturday, June 14th, then at Project Arts Centre , Dublin, from Friday, June 20th, until Saturday, June 28th, with a preview on Thursday, June 19th
Irish Times
21 hours ago
- Irish Times
Caravaggio: The ‘boozing, whoring, brawling and bisexual bad boy of baroque'
Caravaggio 's early paintings are an incitement to pleasure. Beautiful, scantily clad boys prepare a concert for their – and Caravaggio's – patron, Francesco Cardinal Maria del Monte, in The Musicians. The ageing Joseph holds up music for an angel violinist in the pastoral Rest on the Flight to Egypt. Bacchus lures the viewer with a chalice of wine. Beware, though. All is vanity. The Fortune Teller steals a young man's ring as she flirts with him. There's a worm in the apple in Basket of Fruit, and leaves are withered or eaten by insects. The Boy Bitten by a Lizard recoils in pain as the reptile sinks its sharp teeth into his finger. Sick Bacchus shows an ashen-faced Caravaggio, making a mockery of his own Bacchus painting. The exquisitely beautiful, buxom virgins and saints of numerous paintings were prostitutes in real life. Caravaggio's paintings grow darker and more violent as his short life progresses. The pale and alluring John the Baptist who posed naked, wrapped in theatrical red cloth, must inevitably be beheaded. Fillide Melandroni, the courtesan who posed as St Catherine of Alexandria, Judith and Mary Magdalene – and who was probably one of Caravaggio's lovers – wrinkles her brow with disgust and determination as she slices through Holofernes' neck. Blood gushes from the wound, and we see horror in the eyes of the dying Assyrian general. READ MORE Caravaggio: The Musicians. Photograph: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence Caravaggio: The Fortune Teller. Photograph: Capitoline Museums, Rome Caravaggio: Sick Bacchus Photograph: Mauro Coen/© Galleria Borghese The Renaissance was over, and Caravaggio refused to live in the shadow of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. He threw out all sense of decorum to create a pictorial revolution characterised by 'stark realism, dramatic lighting and unparalleled emotional depth', says Thomas Clement Salomon, the director of Italy's National Gallery at the Palazzo Barberini, in Rome. Salomon has co-curated Caravaggio 2025 at the Barberini, where most of these paintings can be seen. The exhibition was scheduled to close on July 6th, but he hopes to extend it by at least two weeks and remain open until midnight some nights to accommodate unprecedented crowds. The Barberini is showing 24 paintings, more than a third of the approximately 65 known works by the artist. Nine are from foreign lenders. Salomon convinced the anonymous Florentine owners of Portrait of Maffeo Barberini to lend the rare painting, which had never been shown, by arguing that the public had a right to see it. He hopes they can now be convinced to sell it to the museum. Caravaggio: Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness. Photograph: Nelson-Atkins Digital Production and Preservation Caravaggio: St Catherine of Alexandria. Photograph: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid Caravaggio: Portrait of Maffeo Barberini The Palazzo Barberini sold more than 350,000 entry tickets in the first two months of the show, a record. Caravaggio, born Michelangelo Merisi in Milan in September 1571, is a superstar. The success of the exhibition follows a long-term trend that has seen endless queues and packed museums. Painters have become part of our fascination with celebrity. The French writer André Malraux was perhaps right when he predicted that art would become the new religion. 'Isn't it great that people want to look at and enjoy these masterpieces?' says Caroline Campbell , the director of the National Gallery of Ireland , who visited Rome to see the NGI's Taking of Christ at the Barberini. 'I hope that an exhibition like this will encourage people to look not only at Caravaggio but also at other wonderful baroque artists.' [ How The Taking of Christ found its way to Ireland ] Fifteen more Caravaggios can be seen in museums and churches elsewhere in Rome. They include the artist's first important commission: three paintings recounting the life of St Matthew, at the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi; The Virgin of the Pilgrims, at the Basilica of Sant'Agostino; the enchanting, above-mentioned Rest on the Flight to Egypt, at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj ; and Boy with a Basket of Fruit and Madonna of the Palafrenieri, at the Galleria Borghese . The Casino Boncompagni Ludovisi has a ceiling fresco where Caravaggio painted himself, nude, as Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto, with a surprising view from below of the painter's genitalia. The cult of Caravaggio has been fanned by his reputation as the boozing, whoring, brawling and bisexual 'bad boy of baroque'. But ultimately it is the paintings that attract the public, Campbell says. 'Crowds form outside Roman churches before they open in the morning. People gravitate to the Caravaggios and dwell for a long time on each painting. You can't just walk away from these pictures.' Caravaggio had a talent for capturing what the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called 'the decisive moment'. In The Taking of Christ, Christ and Judas are locked in a fatal embrace of love and betrayal, seconds before or after the kiss. We see Matthew at the precise moment when Christ points to him, ordering in a beam of light: 'Follow me.' The startled tax collector points at his own chest, asking incredulously, 'Me?' The painting was the late Pope Francis 's favourite. Caravaggio: The Taking of Christ. Photograph: Fine Art/Bridgeman/National Gallery of Ireland Caravaggio: The Conversion of the Magdalene. Photograph: Detroit Institute of Arts/Bridgeman Images Melandroni, the model for Mary Magdalene, was, like the biblical saint, a woman of easy virtue. Richly dressed in early-17th-century costume, she appears suspended in time, at the moment when Christ's love, symbolised by the white flower at her bosom, enters her heart. Saul lies on the ground, almost trampled by his horse and blinded by divine light, at the very instant he becomes Paul the Apostle. The bestial torturers in The Flagellation of Christ are about to present the Son of God to the baying crowd with the words 'Ecce homo'. A wistful David holds Goliath's head by the hair as he enters King Saul's tent to display the trophy. The self-portraits Caravaggio inserted in his works, often in an unflattering way, were a way of saying, 'I, Caravaggio, made this painting.' David with the Head of Goliath is a double portrait of Caravaggio as the screaming giant and his companion and apprentice, known as Cecco del Caravaggio, as the young David. Richard Symonds, an English visitor to Rome around 1650, recorded being told that the erotic cupid of Caravaggio's Amor Vincit Omnia bore 'ye body and face' of the painter's 'own boy or servant that laid with him'. In 2001 the art historian Gianni Papi identified Cecco as Francesco Boneri, a Lombard artist who accompanied Caravaggio for the last decade of his life. Because the paintings are organised in chronological order in the Barberini exhibition, we see Cecco pass from preadolescence to young adulthood. 'Homosexuality was a mortal sin, but it was tolerated,' the historian Stefano D'Amico, of Texas Tech University, says. 'Most men had affairs, often with very young boys.' Documents from the baroque period indicate that Caravaggio had affairs with both men and women. Caravaggio: Conversion of St Paul. Photograph: Foto Scala, Firenze Caravaggio: The Flagellation of Christ Photograph: Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples Caravaggio: David with the Head of Goliath. Photograph: Mauro Coen/© Galleria Borghese When Caravaggio arrived in Rome at the end of the 16th century 'it was the cultural capital not only of the Italian peninsula but of the western world, like Paris in the 19th century or New York in the 20th,' Salomon says. Aristocrats and prelates undertook the baroque building binge that endowed the city with its present architecture. But Rome was also a place of huge income disparity, where the rich lived in well-guarded palaces and violent gangs roamed the streets. 'Romans survived on a diet of bread and wine. Shoes were a luxury,' D'Amico says. 'Prostitution was a substantial part of the urban economy. Murder was not uncommon.' In May 1610 Caravaggio killed a man called Ranuccio Tomassoni with a sword. The fight may have been over a tennis game, an unpaid debt owed by Caravaggio or the men's rivalry for Melandroni's affections. The British art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon interprets the fact that Caravaggio severed Tomassoni's femoral artery as evidence that he may have attempted to castrate a romantic rival. Caravaggio was convicted in absentia of murder and spent the last four years of his life on the run. He painted on an estate belonging to his protectors, the Colonna family, in Naples, Sicily and Malta. A bounty was offered for anyone who could produce his severed head, a possible explanation for his obsession with decapitation. Caravaggio's life, like his distinctive chiaroscuro style, was made of dramatic contrasts of light and dark. He was attempting to return to Rome when he died of uncertain causes on a beach 150km north of the city, in July 1610, at the age of 38. Caravaggio went out of fashion for 200 years, because of his dissolute life, because people didn't like the darkness of his paintings. Since he was rehabilitated in the 20th century, in Italy by Roberto Longhi and in Britain and Ireland by Denis Mahon , of the Guinness family, lost Caravaggios have been discovered at regular intervals. 'There was an Italian book entitled Caravaggio's Mother Is Always Pregnant, because you hear about 'Caravaggio, Caravaggio, Caravaggio',' Salomon says. 'But it's almost never Caravaggio – once every five or 10 years, if you're lucky.' Authentication is an extremely complicated matter, he says, involving consensus among art historians and scientific analysis. Lost Caravaggios include a nativity stolen by the Sicilian Mafia in 1969 and a crucifixion of St Peter believed to have gone to Spain in the 17th century. 'We know he did a lot of portraits, but we have only four or five,' Salomon says. 'He trained in Milan before he went to Rome in the early 1590s, but we have no paintings from that period. I am sure we will have great surprises about new paintings by Caravaggio, because there are so many missing.' [ The man who found a Caravaggio in Dublin Opens in new window ] Caravaggio 2025 is at Palazzo Barberini , in Rome, until July 6th
