Colin Farrell’s Dublin marathon run raises €774,000 for charity

Actor ran last part of course pushing friend Emma Fogarty who has genetic condition known as butterfly skin

Colin Farrell has raised €774,000 (£644,000) for a charity supporting people with a rare skin condition by running the Dublin marathon while pushing one of the oldest survivors of the disease in Ireland around part of the course in her wheelchair.

The actor, who was born in the Irish capital, raised the money for Debra Ireland, an organisation that supports people with the incurable genetic condition epidermolysis bullosa (EB), or “butterfly skin”, which causes people to have very fragile and blistering skin.

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Banshees of Inisherin shines light on Ireland’s west coast in tourism spin-off

Despite film’s macabre plot, campaign featuring its actors and locations draws millions of views

It has a macabre plot featuring violence, mutilation and despair, but that has not stopped The Banshees of Inisherin being used as a global advertisement for visiting Ireland.

A tourism campaign based on the film has taken off and transformed its dark story into a glowing promotion for Ireland’s west coast islands.

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‘The world is so quick to pull the trigger of judgment’: Colin Farrell praises ‘discourse’ over cancel culture

Actor speaks ahead of Venice premiere of the Banshees of Inisherin, which reunites him with Martin McDonagh and Brendan Gleeson for first time since In Bruges

Discourse and the exchange of ideas are a “gorgeous thing” in a world that’s “quick to pull the trigger of judgment” and cancel people, actor Colin Farrell has said.

Speaking at a press conference ahead of the premiere of Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin in Venice, the actor spoke passionately about how the film could act as a counter to today’s “information age” that “takes us away from the intimacy that’s required and interests that are needed to exist”.

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The Batman review – Robert Pattinson’s emo hero elevates gloomy reboot

Matt Reeves’ film is spectacular and well-cast but an intriguing saga of corruption devolves into a tiresome third act

That definite article means it’s the genuine article. Adding “the” to Batman’s name has become a huge part of the brand identity, a sign of how elemental and atavistic this shadowy figure is supposed to be. You can imagine some growly voice saying “the Batman” – but not Tom Holland putting on a deep baritone to say he’s “the Spider-Man”, or Henry Cavill booming he’s “the Superman” (although maybe you could have Billy Joel stride into a dark Gotham City bar to raspingly confront “the Piano Man”).

Director and co-writer Matt Reeves has created a new Batman iteration in which Robert Pattinson reinvents billionaire Bruce Wayne as an elegantly wasted rock star recluse, willowy and dandyish in his black suit with tendrils of dark hair falling over his face; but Wayne magically trebles in bulk when he reappears in costume and mask as the Dark Knight, his whole being weaponised into a slab-like impassivity. And this of course is happening in the sepulchral vastness of Gotham City, the brutal and murky world which Christopher Nolan thrillingly pioneered with his Dark Knight trilogy and made indispensable for imagining Batman on screen.

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Men behaving badly: why cinema’s great hellraisers were a breed apart

Rip Torn belonged to a high-spirited tradition that was fuelled by too much booze and testosterone. Like it or not, we may never see their like again

The death of the film and TV star Rip Torn, whose drunken exuberance so often resulted in the breaking of glass, the splintering of wood and the bandaging of limbs, has led the industry to ponder that exotic creature whose rock’n’roll behaviour, from the 1960s onwards, persisted for decades to tolerant chortling from the similarly inclined or wistfully well-behaved gentlemen of the press. And that creature is the “hellraiser” – a term that originates from a defiant credo espoused by the hard-drinking, hard-living Hollywood legend Richard Burton: “God put me on this earth to raise sheer hell!”

Peter O’Toole’s death in 2013 led to a similar outpouring of grief for the booze legends who have evidently been replaced by corporate dullards, drinking mineral water, policing their own language and anxiously checking their mentions on Twitter. Once we had hellraisers: now we have “disrupters”, people who give Ted talks about their revolutionary new app for maximising your leisure time. Actors used to spend every penny getting fantastically drunk. Now George Clooney gets a reported $1bn for selling his Casamigos Tequila brand to the drinks retailer Diageo — although Clooney was reported to lose his cool after a few drinks.

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