Celebrity Takes Delivery of the Flora

Celebrity Cruises has taken delivery of its 100-guest Celebrity Flora, which is now preparing for her Atlantic crossing to the Galapagos, where she will be based year-round.

Marking the occasion, Royal Caribbean Cruises Chairman and CEO Richard D. Fain hosted a ceremony aboard Celebrity Flora, while docked in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Company and shipyard executives were also in attendance, plus more than 70 crew members, many of whom are Ecuadorian natives.

"The delivery of Celebrity Flora is a momentous occasion," said Fain. "Designing a new ship specifically for the Galapagos Islands was an exciting challenge and we think Celebrity Flora succeeded beautifully. It is of course luxurious – but it's also the most energy-efficient ship of its kind in the region, which further demonstrates our commitment to sustainability and protecting the vital ecosystem of this unique place."

"More than two years of planning, collaboration and construction have led to this very exciting moment," said Lisa Lutoff-Perlo, President and CEO, Celebrity Cruises. "Thanks to the hard work of hundreds of architects, artisans, engineers and more, we're one step closer to the first-ever sailing of the beautiful Celebrity Flora, which will forever change the way guests experience the Galapagos. Travelers will soon be able to step on board our stunning 100-guest mega yacht with the largest and most luxurious all-suite accommodations in the Galapagos Islands."

The ship was built by De Hoop in the Netherlands.

The new ship will feature Celebrity's signature outward-facing design concept, giving guests 360-degree views of the islands, and all-suite accommodations – including a 50 percent Sky Suites with Infinite Veranda – with service provided by personal attendants, the company said.

Unique to Celebrity Flora are the first-ever glamping experience at sea, new dining venues, an open-air stargazing platform, expert-led ecological seminars, and custom-designed Novurania yacht tenders, which create a seamless sea-to-shore experience.

Another Lexus makes it as a movie star

Quite recently it was the company's flagship LC500 coupe that starred in the blockbuster sci-fi fantasy film Black Panther.

Now it seems the movie bug has had a firm bite on Lexus as the RC F junior coupe is set for its silver screen debut in Men In Black: International. In this new adventure of the successful franchise, they tackle their biggest, most global threat to date: a mole in the Men in Black organisation.

The film is directed by F Gary Gray and stars Emma Thompson and Liam Neeson. The executive producer is the legendary Steven Spielberg.

The Lexus RC F has a prominent role in the film as the official company cars of Men in Black agents. The Lexus RX Hybrid and Lexus LX SUVs are also featured in scenes with alien encounters.

"We've added some advanced capabilities to the RC F to assist the agents, creating a truly one-of-a-kind alien-fighting machine," said Lisa Materazzo, vice- president of Lexus marketing. "We can't wait for moviegoers to see the RC F as they've never seen it before."

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.