How a stray puppy rescued from a dump became a movie star

We've all heard the cliched stories of an actor's struggles before a career breakthrough: living hand to mouth, waiting tables, temping, couch-surfing and generally scraping by before landing that major role.

The star of A Dog's Way Home has a hard-luck tale to top them all. Before her big break, she was living in a landfill, rummaging through garbage for her next meal.

Meet Shelby, the tan-and-black mutt who portrays Bella, occupying the screen, often solo, for much of the film's 97 minutes – and whose trash-to-riches saga could itself be a gripping cinematic yarn.

Shelby's big break came in April 2017, when animal control officer Megan Buhler was driving in Cheatham County, Tennessee, a rural area about 25 miles from Nashville. Out on an unrelated call, Buhler spotted and approached what she recalled was a noticeably skittish dog emerging from the dump.

As messy as your life can be, there has to be a window you can escape through

young man walks into a bar and meets Sam Shepard, Christopher Walken and Al Pacino. The man is Tim Roth. The year is 1990, and the actor is in New York to film Jumpin' at the Boneyard, a bleak movie about drug abuse. Roth, who planned to nurse a quiet beer while watching American football, found himself in conversation with Walken and Shepard. "I thought: ‘What the fuck have I walked into?'" he says. "It was purely by chance." By the time he left, Shepard had promised to write him a part in his next play. It was not the first time Roth had been in the right place at the right time, and it wouldn't be the last.

This unlikely encounter took place at a propitious time, just as Roth was starring as Van Gogh in Robert Altman's Vincent & Theo, and shortly before his comic double act with Gary Oldman in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead hit the festival circuit. Writing in the New Yorker, Pauline Kael described Roth's acting as "a form of kinetic discharge". After a decade in which the film industry had largely curdled into a hit machine of bland studio blockbusters, independent film was stirring into life and craft was back in vogue.

Due back in London after filming, Roth instead chose to go prospecting in LA, expecting "to get swiftly kicked out the door". Like his encounter in a Manhattan bar, serendipity intervened. Its name was Quentin Tarantino, the movie was Reservoir Dogs, and it changed everything.

"He came back to my flat after a night in a bar, and we read every scene with all the characters, had a great time – and he gave me the job," says Roth. "I was very fucking lucky. I got given a window, and I jumped." When Shepard, good as his word, called back with a part in his next Broadway play, it was too late. "I couldn't do it," Roth says. "I always regret I lost that opportunity."

Dubs dominate again at ladies football All Stars

All-Ireland senior champions Dublin have been honoured with seven representatives on the 2018 TG4 All Star team.

Dublin's haul is an all-time best on an All Star team selection – as the 2010 and 2016 selections each contained six Sky Blues.

The selection was revealed on Saturday night at the annual TG4 All Star awards banquet, in association with Lidl, at the Citywest Hotel.

Captain Sinéad Aherne received a seventh All Star award, and her third in a row, and there was a sixth in seven years for right-half-back Sinéad Goldrick, who will line out for Foxrock-Cabinteely in next Saturday's All-Ireland Senior Club Final against Mourneabbey.


It's the second year in a row that a set of sisters was named on the All Star selection, as the Hegartys from Donegal, Ciara and Niamh, were listed on the 2017 team.

Aherne and Goldrick are joined on the 2018 list by Dublin team-mates Ciara Trant, Siobhán McGrath, Lauren Magee, Noelle Healy and Lyndsey Davey.

Trant wins an All Star for a second successive year, while McGrath picks up her first gong since 2010.

Midfielder Magee is one of five first-time recipients, 2017 Senior Players' Player of the Year Healy wins her fourth All Star award, and a third in a row, while Davey is also honoured for the fourth time.

Trant, Healy, Aherne and Cork's Emma Spillane are the only survivors from the 2017 selection, as TG4 All-Ireland Finalists Cork picked up four awards in total.

Ciara, now a four-time winner, and Doireann O'Sullivan, who collected her first, are joined on the team by Spillane and another first-time recipient, Róisín Phelan, who's named at full-back.

Spillane received an award at right corner back in 2017 but this time she earns the left-half-back slot.

The remainder of the team is made up of players from Donegal, Galway, Kerry and Tyrone.

Donegal's Treasa Doherty earns her first All Star at right corner back, while Sinéad Burke from Galway is also named for the first time on an All Star team at left corner back.

where to find the best horror films

It's been a long time since I last checked in on Shudder, the £4-a-month streaming service dedicated to horror, suspense and the generally creepy. Much as I enjoy the odd fright night, there is no genre to which I subscribe quite so literally. But with the nights drawing in and the burning scent of Halloween on the cooling breeze, it seemed an apt time to return. We're never likelier to chain-watch horror films than in October, and Shudder certainly makes a breeze out of spooky seasonal playlisting.

I returned to find it a little beefier than I remembered, with its menu of films and series healthily expanded and the addition of Shudder TV – multiple channels of pre-selected programming for that rarest of geeks, the undiscriminating genre obsessive. I sampled the free-to-stream channel, which can be watched by non-subscribers, to find Shrew's Nest playing. Juan Fernando Andrés and Esteban Roel's enjoyably ripe Spanish gothic piece is a lively choice, and there's no arguing with the value, though I suspect most horrorheads would rather pick their tasty poison.

The selection, after all, is more diverse than you might expect, covering the art-trash spectrum rather nicely. Traditionalists of varying gore capacities can access Tobe Hooper's original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in its slick 40th-anniversary restoration, Mario Bava's sticky-stylish giallo classic Blood and Black Lace or, more cosily, Ealing Studios' elegantly shivery anthology Dead of Night.

More modern tastes predominate, particularly when it comes to the service's sidebar of exclusive acquisitions. Here's the place to find, if you dare, Emiliano Rocha Minter's We Are the Flesh, a stunningly extreme incest-and-cannibalism exercise; Lake Bodom, a smart, self-reflexive Finnish spin on the old-school slasher flick that doesn't forget to tuck a few good sharp scares in amid the winks; or Anna Biller's gorgeously retro-styled occult fantasia The Love Witch. Shudder's genre remit is pleasingly catholic: arthouse titles such as Lucile Hadžihalilović's head-scrambling, nightmare-igniting vision Evolution, or Mother, Bong Joon-ho's thrillingly derailed blend of icy noir and high melodrama, aren't obvious Halloween-marathon fodder, but they'll leave your nerves suitably disarranged.

And on the series side, a month's subscription is worth it if only to belatedly discover, as I did, Beyond the Walls, a delicious French-Belgian miniseries that takes an old-as-the-hills haunted-house premise and probes every cobwebbed corner of it. Led with steely conviction by the excellent Veerle Baetens and ravishingly designed throughout, it's a treat for those who prefer a mounting wall of eeriness to violently bone-crunching terror.

Elle Fanning Elevates Max Minghella's Solid Directorial Debut

Max Minghella's directorial debut Teen Spirit totally won me over. It's one of those movies I hadn't planned to see in Toronto. One of those movies you see because it fits your schedule, and you just hope for the best. In this case, I was pleasantly surprised by this scrappy tale of a shy teen who sets out to realize her dream of becoming a pop star with help from a very unlikely source. It's a conventional underdog story as far as it goes, but it's handled quite well by Minghella and his leading lady, Elle Fanning.

Decidedly unimpressed with the wild-haired, world-weary old man, she doesn't think much of the interaction until it comes time for her audition for Teen Spirit, a British singing competition that requires the permission of an adult guardian. In a bind, Violet turns to Vlad and he agrees to become her chaperone/manager/unlikely mentor — for a staggering 50 percent! If you know anything about showbiz, you'd know that isn't a great deal for Violet, but at least it changes in time once the girl's mother finds out about their unusual arrangement. Vlad doesn't put up too much of a fight, as you come to discover that it's not really about money for him, but rather, a second chance to do things right. He may have squandered his potential and become content to drink his days away at the pub, but he also sees potential in Violet and finds renewed purpose in taking the reins of her career and coaching her technique. And off she goes on a true underdog story that will offer her temptation at every turn. Minghella effectively uses montage to whisk us through the early stages of the competition, but you've seen this story before, so you know it'll all come down to 'the finals' — though there are some pleasant surprises along the way.

Of course, the following isn't one of them, for assuredly when you enter one of these competitions, the idea is that you're kind of making a deal with the devil. In this case, Violet ends up being offered a recording contract prior to the final competition. If she loses, it doesn't really matter, because she'll still get to make an album. But if she wins, and other record labels come calling with more attractive offers, then she's stuck with the original deal… if she signs it. There's a catch, of course. The proverbial Devil, in this case, the Teen Spirit producers as embodied by a well-cast Rebecca Hall, want Violet to cut Vlad out of the deal. So not only does the competition test her talent, it tests her integrity as well. She wouldn't have made it this far without the crazy old coot, but does she really need him now that she has, to some extent, made it? It's an offer she shouldn't refuse, but whether she does or not is another question entirely.

Troye Sivan Is the Perfect Pop Star for 2018

Troye Sivan, global pop star, shows up to his photo shoot alone. No manager. No assistant. No glam squad. Just a slight 23-year-old with wide blue eyes, artfully floppy bleached-blond hair and a voice that has captured the hearts of a millions-strong fandom, spread out everywhere from his hometown in Australia to his adopted home in Los Angeles. When Sivan stretches out his hand to introduce himself, he says his name earnestly: He's Troye. He'd like you to know about him. He'd like you to like him, and his music; his new album Bloom is out Aug. 31. But more than anything, he'd like to be there for you.

"I just want to provide for a young audience what I felt was lacking when I was a kid," he says, "which was representation of someone living their life." When Sivan talks about representation, he's talking about representation for someone like him: queer, sensitive, thoughtful.


Sivan is different from many of the stars who have come before. But for him, that's an asset, not an impediment. His music–delicate dance-pop that has notched hundreds of millions of streams, a Saturday Night Live appearance and one big Top 40 hit ("Youth")–has already won him fans like Bloom collaborator Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift, who brought him onstage during a recent stadium tour date. Maybe it's because Sivan is more than just your average pop star. He built a platform as a digital influencer first, building connections with fans who related to his unapologetically queer identity, then used his Internet following to buoy him to stardom as a bona fide artist. And it's working: Bloom marks a major artistic achievement, evoking influences from the Velvet Underground to Simon & Garfunkel, all wrapped up in a sleek pop package.