title: BMX XXX

text: "BMX XXX" received "mixed or average" reviews on all platforms according to video game review aggregator Metacritic, with some reviewers concluding that the game was lacking in innovation outside of its vulgarity and sexual content. Todd Zuniga of "Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine" further denounced the game as "the worst example of what PS2 games are capable of", and described it as milquetoast in all gameplay aspects. However, Steve Steinberg of "GameSpy" and the reviewers of "Nintendo Power" considered it to be a solid gaming experience despite its crude content, with Steinberg pointing out that the game's "twisted novelty" could not function in other genres, and worked because of the game's fundamental playability. Scott Steinberg of "Playboy" also opined that the title was at its strongest outside of its comedic elements, attributing the gameplay's refinements over the course of a more mundane franchise.


title: BMX XXX

text: The control scheme was mostly found to be comfortable and intuitive, though Bryn Williams of "GameSpy" and Justin Nation of "Planet GameCube" considered the stunt system to be simplified compared to other extreme sports titles such as "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4". Although Jeff Gerstmann of "GameSpot" was impressed by the variety of tricks, he felt that none of them seemed special or important, and pointed out that the game engine's unrealistic quirks reduced the sense of challenge. Scott Alan Marriott of "AllGame", Dan Leahy of "Electronic Gaming Monthly", and AM Urbanek of "TechTV" observed a lack of inertia in the player's bike, which contributed to a sense of inconsistency in the controls. Although Steve Steinberg commended the camera as solid and logically placed, others criticized it as jumpy and jerky, with Marriott and "IGN"s Matt Casamassina citing a tendency to bounce off walls and barriers, and Zuniga expressing frustration at having to stop the bike to look around. The levels were said to not be as large and creative as those in Z-Axis's previous efforts, and their design was faulted as barren, with an abundance of spaces bereft of features. Reviewers complained of the vague challenge objectives, which were exacerbated by the lack of any source of direction or orientation; Steve Steinberg and Gerstmann cited a specific instance of an early mission that tasked the player with running down a "fruitbooter" while giving no indication that the term is derogatory slang for an inline skater. The necessity of returning to a non-player character's position to retry a failed challenge was an additional annoyance, with Matt Helgeson of "Game Informer" noting that the characters do not always stay at their post. Helgeson, fellow "Game Informer" reviewer Justin Leeper, and Aaron Boulding of "IGN" were unenthused by the high amount of scavenger hunt missions, though Leeper found some objectives humorous, and Casamassina complimented their presentation. Socrates of "TeamXbox" enjoyed the multiplayer mode, but felt that the lack of the single-player campaign's lewdness made the mode feel indistinct from other extreme sports titles. Steve Steinberg was uneased by the Paintball mode, and wondered how it was left intact after several games were delayed or reworked after the September 11 attacks. The stripper videos were noted to be insufficiently explicit for the "XXX" title, and reviewers felt that they were too difficult to unlock to be worth the effort, particularly for adults who have easier means to access explicit content.


title: BMX XXX

text: Assessments of the visuals were generally unfavorable, with some reviewers finding them comparable to a PSone title. While the animation and frame rate were commended for their smoothness, the characters were criticized for their blocky models, stiff body movements, and blurry textures. Some pointed out that the rough character models worked against the game's attempt at sex appeal, with Tom Bramwell of "Eurogamer" remarking that "not since Orchid in the original "Killer Instinct" have I seen such angular assets". Nation further observed that a topless female biker in a third-person video game served little function beyond novelty due to the camera's position behind her back as well as her hunched position. Dan Elektro of "GamePro" and Casamassina cited occasional collision issues in which riders temporarily sink through the ground or a wall. While Gerstmann and Casamassina described the environments as large in scope, Nick Valentino of "GameZone" felt that they were not as large or impressive as those in "Aggressive Inline", and he and Bramwell found some areas to be plain and uninteresting. Marriott noticed some distant pop-up, and felt that the rider customization was insufficiently extensive. Socrates commented that the environments "look like they have been coated in a layer of Vaseline", and he considered the stripper videos to be the game's best-looking element. Boulding and Valentino also complimented the videos' professional quality, with Boulding stating that they "might convince you that you're watching an episode of "G String Divas" but without all of that talking and emoting". Nation, however, determined the production to be low-budget, saying that it "looks like it was copied off of a copy of an older Super 8 tape".


title: BMX XXX

text: The soundtrack was classified as a combination of rock, punk, hip hop and ska that was typical of the extreme sports genre, with Casamassina remarking that the selections, though well-executed, "seem to appear on every extreme sports soundtrack in the universe". While Marriott, Elektro, and fellow "GamePro" reviewer Tokyo Drifter admired the soundtrack, Bramwell and Helgeson were not taken with it, with Bramwell being thankful for the Xbox version's option to insert a custom playlist. Valentino found the background music's downplayed prominence odd, and Gerstmann was perplexed by the soundtrack's editing of racial slurs and drug references considering the marketing campaign's emphasis on obscenity. Boulding was annoyed by an audio flaw that caused custom playlists to start again from the first track any time the music was paused for a gameplay reason, such as initiating a challenge. The sound effects were regarded as unremarkable and monotonous. Reactions to the voice acting were mostly positive, with Socrates elaborating that the humorous voices and accents successfully conveyed the game's light-hearted tone, though Boulding and Urbanek noted that the game's small pool of actors was evident, and the commentary from pedestrians was derided as repetitive. Marriott and Gerstmann were more negative, describing the voice-overs as grating and detrimental to the game's attempts at humor.


title: BMX XXX

text: The humor was generally dismissed as juvenile and off-putting, though Williams and Casamassina found some of the jokes effective. Helgeson remarked that the content was "nothing that would raise an eyebrow on HBO", and concluded that those who were old enough to purchase the title would be too old to be shocked by it. Urbanek also saw irony in the demographic that he believed would find the game funny being too young to purchase it. Nation elaborated that the game's jokes, on top of being tired, were lacking in context and delivery, and he concurred that the game's lack of sophistication in its humor or sexual content, combined with the unremarkable gameplay, left its audience unclear. Marriott deemed the concept of a Mature-rated sports title nonsensical, and found the game's presentation of a seedy urban tone unpleasant, proclaiming that "being bombarded with obnoxious vendors and annoying pedestrians everywhere you turn should be considered a form of mental anguish". Nation, Zuniga and Urbanek accused the game's content of misogyny and racism, with Nation pondering "Why objectify women and stereotype several races and social classes so callously, taking a ton of criticism in the process, and then settle for such a poor excuse for a pay-off on all levels?".


title: BMX XXX

text: In February 2003, Mirra filed a $20 million lawsuit against Acclaim claiming that "BMX XXX" damaged his image. He explained that Acclaim allegedly used his name and likeness to promote "BMX XXX" after both parties agreed to disassociate his name from the product. The suit comprised a total of 11 claims, including unfair competition and injury to business reputation and dilution. Acclaim's public relations director Alan Lewis denounced the lawsuit as baseless and declared that Acclaim would fight vigorously against it. In the following month, two additional lawsuits were filed by Acclaim's shareholders alleging that the company's management misled it and the public on five accounts of misinformation relevant to the company's operations, including inadequate disclosure of the company's plans to publish mature-themed games. The suits claimed that titles such as "BMX XXX" "materially impeded the company's ability to access broad-based retail channels" and damaged revenue projections. On October 27, 2003, Acclaim announced that Mirra's suit had been settled with no monetary or other damages being paid by either side, and that Mirra's licensing agreement would continue until 2011. Additionally, Acclaim confirmed the development of a new "Dave Mirra BMX" game for next-generation systems.


title: BMX XXX

text: The game's limited distribution and loss of celebrity endorsement resulted in "BMX XXX" becoming Acclaim's lowest-selling BMX title to date. According to director Glen Egan, the game sold a little over 160,000 copies by December 2005, making slightly under $5 million in its lifetime. The financial failure and lack of mass market appeal of "BMX XXX" among other titles was cited as a factor in Acclaim's 2004 bankruptcy and liquidation. Rosen left Acclaim soon after the game's release and eventually abandoned the video game industry, having established a koi pond business by 2017.


title: BMX XXX

text: "GameSpy" included the game's conception and Acclaim's violation of its agreement not to use Mirra's name and likeness to promote the game in its list of "25 Dumbest Moments in Gaming". Mike Williams of "USgamer", within his list of "10 Games That Killed a Franchise", deemed "BMX XXX" and "" to be the "two nails in Acclaim's coffin". In 2015, the game was among several titles banned from streaming by Twitch. Todd Ciolek of "IGN", in a retrospective feature covering major game publisher blunders, described "BMX XXX" as Acclaim's "last cry for attention" in a series of desperate publicity stunts by the financially ailing company.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: Eyjafjallajökull (; ), sometimes referred to by the numeronym E15, is one of the smaller ice caps of Iceland, north of Skógar and west of Mýrdalsjökull. The ice cap covers the caldera of a volcano with a summit elevation of . The volcano has erupted relatively frequently since the Last Glacial Period, most recently in 2010, when, although relatively small for a volcanic eruption, it caused enormous disruption to air travel across northern and western Europe for a week.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: Eyjafjallajökull consists of a volcano completely covered by an ice cap. The ice cap covers an area of about , feeding many outlet glaciers. The main outlet glaciers are to the north: Gígjökull , flowing into Lónið , and Steinholtsjökull , flowing into Steinholtslón . In 1967, there was a massive landslide on the Steinholtsjökull glacial tongue. On 16 January 1967 at 13:47:55 there was an explosion on the glacier. It can be timed because the seismometers at Kirkjubæjarklaustur monitored the movement. When about of material hit the glacier a massive amount of air, ice, and water began to move out from under the glacier into the lagoon at the foot of the glacier.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: The mountain itself, a shield volcano, stands at its highest point, and has a crater in diameter, open to the north. The crater rim has three main peaks (clockwise from the north-east): Guðnasteinn , ; Hámundur , ; and Goðasteinn , . The south face of the mountain was once part of Iceland's coastline, from which, over thousands of years, the sea has retreated some . The former coastline now consists of sheer cliffs with many waterfalls, of which the best known is Skógafoss. In strong winds, the water of the smaller falls can even be blown up the mountain. The area between the mountain and the present coast is a relatively flat strand, wide, called Eyjafjöll .


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: The Eyjafjallajökull volcano last erupted on 14 April 2010 in Iceland. It left behind vast ash clouds so large that in some areas daylight was entirely obscured. The cloud not only darkened the sky but also interfered with hundreds of plane flights. However, the people of Iceland were not concerned about the ash clouds: they were more concerned about flooding. That year all the residents close to the volcano had to evacuate in case the area flooded. When the volcano erupted, all the melted ice had to go somewhere. It did not flood that much: most of it went into rivers, but if it had flooded down the farm valleys it could have swept away all the farms in the valley. The farms in the valley were however covered in a soft layer of ash, which the farmers thought would give bad crops, but the warmth and nutrition from the ash enabled the crops to grow rather well.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: The name means "glacier of Eyjafjöll" (or more properly here "ice cap"). is the name of the southern side of the volcanic massif together with the small mountains which form the foot of the volcano. The word , meaning glacier or ice cap, is a cognate with the Middle English word surviving in the "-icle" of English "icicle".


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: The name is made up of the words (genitive plural of , meaning "eyot" or "island"), and the plural word , meaning "fells" or "mountains", and together literally means: "the mountains of the islands". The name probably refers to the close by archipelago of Vestmannaeyjar.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: The stratovolcano, whose vents follow an east–west trend, is composed of basalt to andesite lavas. Most of its historical eruptions have been explosive. However, fissure vents occur on both (mainly the west) sides of the volcano.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: The volcano is fed by a magma chamber under the mountain, which in turn derives from the tectonic divergence of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It is part of a chain of volcanoes stretching across Iceland. Its nearest active neighbours are Katla, to the northeast, and Eldfell, on Heimaey, to the southwest.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: The volcano is thought to be related to Katla geologically, in that eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull have generally been followed by eruptions of Katla.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: Eyjafjallajökull erupted in the years 920, 1612, 1821, and 2010. The eruption in 920 was a radial fissure eruption while the subsequent 1612 and 1821 eruptions were small summit eruptions. In the case of the 1821 eruption, a short explosive phase in December of 1821 was followed by a year of intermittent explosive to effusive activity.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: Some damage was caused by a minor eruption in 1821. Notably, the ash released from the eruption contained a large fraction of fluoride, which in high doses may damage the bone structure of cattle, horses, sheep and humans. The eruption also caused some small and medium glacier runs and flooding in nearby rivers Markarfljót and Holtsá . The eruptive phase started on 19 and 20 December 1821 by a series of explosive eruptions and continued over the next several days. The sources describe heavy ash fall in the area around the volcano, especially to the south and west.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: From the end of June until the beginning of August 1822, another sequence of explosive eruptions followed. The eruption columns were shot to considerable heights, with ashfall in both the far north of the country, in Eyjafjörður, and in the southwest, on the peninsula of Seltjarnarnes near Reykjavík.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: The period from August to December 1822 seemed quieter, but farmers attributed the death of cattle and sheep in the Eyjafjörður area to poisoning from this eruption, which modern analysis identifies as fluoride poisoning. Some small glacier runs occurred in the river Holtsá. A bigger one flooded the plains near the river Markarfljót. (The sources do not indicate the exact date.).


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: In 1823, some men went hiking up on Eyjafjallajökull to inspect the craters. They discovered a fissure vent near the summit caldera a bit to the west of "Guðnasteinn".


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: In early 1823, the nearby volcano Katla under the Mýrdalsjökull ice cap erupted and at the same time steam columns were seen on the summit of Eyjafjallajökull.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: The ash of Eyjafjallajökull's 1821 eruptions is to be found all over the south of Iceland. It is dark grey in colour, small-grained and intermediate rock containing about 28–40% silicon dioxide.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: On 26 February 2010, unusual seismic activity along with rapid expansion of the Earth's crust was registered by the Icelandic Meteorological Office. This gave geophysicists evidence that magma was pouring from underneath the crust into the magma chamber of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano and that pressure stemming from the process caused the huge crustal displacement at Þorvaldseyri farm. In March 2010, almost three thousand small earthquakes were detected near the volcano, all having a depth of . The seismic activity continued to increase and from 3–5 March, close to 3,000 earthquakes were measured at the epicenter of the volcano.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: The eruption is thought to have begun on 20 March 2010, about east of the top crater of the volcano, on Fimmvörðuháls, the high neck between Eyjafjallajökull and the neighbouring icecap, Mýrdalsjökull. This first eruption, in the form of a 300-meter-long radial fissure vent, did not occur under the glacier and was smaller in scale than had been expected by some geologists. The eruption consisted of 15 lava fountains reaching heights of up to 185 meters. The fissure opened on the north side of Fimmvörðuháls, directly across the popular hiking trail between Skógar, south of the pass, and Þórsmörk, immediately to the north.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: On 14 April 2010 Eyjafjallajökull resumed erupting after a brief pause, this time from the top crater in the centre of the glacier, causing "jökulhlaup" (meltwater floods) to rush down the nearby rivers, and requiring 800 people to be evacuated. This eruption was explosive, due to meltwater getting into the volcanic vent. It was estimated to be ten to twenty times larger than the previous one in Fimmvörðuháls. This second eruption threw volcanic ash several kilometres up in the atmosphere, which led to air travel disruption in northwest Europe for six days from 15 to 21 April 2010. This disruption affected over 20 countries and as many as 10 million air travelers. The volcano erupted again in May 2010, causing the closure of airspace over many parts of Europe. The eruptions also created electrical storms. On 23 May 2010, the London Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre declared the eruption to have stopped, but stated that they were continuing to monitor the volcano. The volcano continued to have several earthquakes daily, with volcanologists watching the volcano closely. As of August 2010, Eyjafjallajökull was considered dormant. Infrasound sensors have been installed around Eyjafjallajökull to monitor for future eruptions.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: In total, the 2010 eruptions generated about 0.27 cubic km (270 000 000 cubic metres) of tephra, causing ash fallout over central southern Iceland and parts of continental Europe. Nearby areas saw an ash layer of up to several centimeters, and surrounding glaciers saw a significant albedo reduction due to the ash.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: Eyjafjallajökull lies west of another subglacial volcano, Katla, under the Mýrdalsjökull ice cap, which is much more active and known for its powerful subglacial eruptions and its large magma chamber. Each of the eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull in 920, 1612, and 1821–1823 has preceded an eruption of Katla. Katla did not display any unusual activity (such as expansion of the crust or seismic activity) during the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull, though geologists have been concerned about the general instability of Katla since 1999. Some geophysicists in Iceland believe that the Eyjafjallajökull eruption may trigger an eruption of Katla, which would cause major flooding due to melting of glacial ice and send up massive plumes of ash. On 20 April 2010, Icelandic President Ólafur Grímsson said "the time for Katla to erupt is coming close...we [Iceland] have prepared...it is high time for European governments and airline authorities all over the world to start planning for the eventual Katla eruption".


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: Volcanologists continue to monitor Katla, aware that any eruption from Katla following an eruption from Eyjafjallajökull has historically occurred within months of an Eyjafjallajökull eruption. The Icelandic Meteorological Office updates its website with reports of quakes at both Eyjafjallajökull and Katla. On 8 July 2011 there was a jökulhlaup that destroyed a bridge on the Ring Road and caused cracks to appear on Katla's glacier.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: Icelandic Post issued three special stamps in 2010 for the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. All stamps contain real volcanic ash which fell on 17 April 2010.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: The volcano was featured in the 2013 movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, where Walter had to flee from an eruption after pursuing photographer Sean O'Connell to Iceland.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: Emo band The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die released a song on their 2010 EP "Formlessness" called "Eyjafjallajokull Dance."


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: In the season 1 episode 8 of Sense8, Will wants to see "the volcano no one can pronounce the name of", and Riley responds with it.


title: Eyjafjallajökull

text: If the corresponding DLC is owned, the volcano is a possible natural wonder that can spawn in Sid Meier's Civilization VI. On Steam, the game has a related achievement that references the ensuing aviation shutdown due to the 2010 eruptions.


title: Interceptor (film)

text: Interceptor is a 2022 action drama film directed by Matthew Reilly from a screenplay that he co-wrote with Stuart Beattie. The film stars Elsa Pataky and Luke Bracey. It is about terrorists who want to launch a nuclear attack on the United States with stolen missiles. When the terrorists attack a remote offshore missile interceptor platform that could stop their missiles,


title: Interceptor (film)

text: The United States has two interceptor launch sites aimed at intercepting any nuclear warhead launches; the first, Fort Greely in Alaska, is attacked by unknown assailants presumably affiliated with a terrorist faction, while 16 nuclear warheads are simultaneously seized from Russian territory. The second site is a remote platform in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. U.S. Army Captain J. J. Collins is recently reassigned to the latter of the two interceptor missile launch sites. Following the conclusion of a high-profile case where she reported sexual misconduct by one of her superiors, she experienced hazing, bullying and threats from her peers in the military as revenge, hence her new deployment to this remote station.


title: Interceptor (film)

text: Under the command of Lt. Colonel Marshall, and working alongside Beaver and Shah in the station's command center, Collins finds herself as part of the last line of defense after the hostile takeover of Fort Greely. The station is infiltrated by a small group of operatives led by ex-military intelligence soldier Kessel, who promptly kill Marshall and the other occupants of the base, leaving only Collins, Shah, and an unconscious Baker, who was grazed by a stray bullet, as the survivors, holed up in the command center. The infiltrators attempt to negotiate entry into the command center, by which they can disarm the interceptor system and leave the continental U.S. open to nuclear attack from the sixteen stolen warheads. They are rebuffed however, and attempt to forcibly enter instead with blowtorches. An operative launches a surprise attack after entering via a floor hatch, but is defeated and killed by Collins and Shah. Beaver regains consciousness and reveals himself to be an inside man for the infiltrators and motivated by a big pay day and xenophobia, holding both Collins and Shah at gunpoint while allowing Kessel and the remaining operatives to enter and assume control.


title: Interceptor (film)

text: Kessel hijacks a live feed and streams his manifesto about the failures in the history of the United States online, naming the sixteen American cities to be destroyed, and instructing the terrorist faction to launch the nukes immediately. Collins breaks free of her restraints and locks Kessel, Beaver, and a henchman back out of the command center, while defeating and killing Kira, the lone enemy operative still in the room, and another henchman. Kessel attempts to force Collins to surrender, torturing her father, but she refuses and her father is apparently killed when the transmission is cut. Kessel turns to plan B, initiating the station's scuttling protocol, hoping to sink the station if he cannot take control of it. As the station begins to sink, Shah volunteers to drop through the floor hatch to the ocean below and manually re-engage the station's hatches, in order to slow down the station from sinking, such that the interceptors are still able to launch and destroy the warheads when they eventually pass through the airspace overhead. Shah succeeds, but he is killed by Beaver.


title: Interceptor (film)

text: Collins decides to make a risky gamble, hiding in the command center and letting Kessel, Beaver, and the remaining henchman take over and disable the seemingly empty center. Her ruse works, with Beaver going to check up on the station's roof to find and eliminate her. Collins is able to stealthily dispatch the remaining henchman while Kessel flees the room. Grabbing a laptop, Collins ascends to the roof and plugs the device in, hoping to manually launch the interceptor missiles using this method. She is found by Beaver however, and the two engage in hand to hand combat, with Collins emerging victorious after using razor wire to decapitate Beaver. Kessel, who had called in a Russian submarine to pick up the team of operatives earlier, finds Collins just as she successfully launches the interceptor missiles with a fraction of a second left before the nukes would have crossed the point of interception. His plan failed, he engages in combat with Collins, who manages to defeat and subdue him, just as the Russian submarine ascends from the sea. A pair of Russians emerge from the submarine tower, but rather than shooting Collins, they fire at Kessel instead, and the Russian Captain salutes Collins before departing.


title: Interceptor (film)

text: Collins later recovers from her ordeal in the hospital, and she is personally given a promotion by the U.S. president for her efforts. She also receives a visit of her father who had been rescued by friends who had witnessed his plight on the live broadcast, and he comforts her over her grief for Shah's death.


title: Interceptor (film)

text: In addition, Mark Dessaix appears as the dismissive game theory strategist advising the President, while one of the film's executive producers, Chris Hemsworth, has an uncredited cameo as the laid-back salesman at a big box consumer electronics store.


title: Interceptor (film)

text: Reilly began writing the screenplay for "Interceptor" in 2017. The script's action took place predominantly on one set, as Reilly wanted to ensure that the film's budget would not go over $15 million. Beattie was brought on board after Reilly sent him a copy of the script; after reading a few pages Beattie stated that he "called him up and I said, 'I absolutely love it. Can I re-write it?' He was like, 'Yeah, sure, go for it'."


title: Interceptor (film)

text: Beattie shared the script with producers, who were told that Reilly intended to serve as director. Reilly experienced some pushback on this, but was successful in maintaining his position as director. Netflix greenlit the film, and Elsa Pataky was signed to perform as the lead character, JJ Collins. She prepared for the role by training for up to five hours each day with the help of her husband, Chris Hemsworth, who served as an executive producer and also had an uncredited role as a television store sales clerk.


title: Interceptor (film)

text: Filming took place in New South Wales, Australia over a period of 33 days, beginning on 29 March 2021.


title: Interceptor (film)

text: "Interceptor" was released globally on Netflix on 3 June 2022. Plans to release the film theatrically in Australia in 2021 were announced, but fell through. The film instead had a short theatrical release in Australia on 26 May 2022, the week before its worldwide Netflix release.


title: Interceptor (film)

text: On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 51 out of 100 based on reviews from 6 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: Biffy Clyro

text: Biffy Clyro are a Scottish rock band that formed in Kilmarnock, East Ayrshire, composed of Simon Neil (guitar, lead vocals), James Johnston (bass, vocals), and Ben Johnston (drums, vocals). Currently signed to 14th Floor Records, they have released nine studio albums, six of which ("Puzzle", "Only Revolutions", "Opposites", "Ellipsis", "A Celebration of Endings" and "The Myth of the Happily Ever After") reached the top five in the UK Albums Chart, with their sixth studio album, "Opposites" claiming their first UK No. 1 album. Three consecutive studio albums ("Opposites", "Ellipsis" and "A Celebration of Endings") peaked at number one in the UK official albums chart. After their first three albums, the band expanded their following significantly in 2007 with the release of their fourth album, "Puzzle", creating more mainstream songs with simpler rhythms and distancing themselves from the more unusual dissonant style present in their previous three albums. "Puzzle" peaked at No. 2 on the UK Albums Chart on 16 June 2007. The album went platinum in the UK in 2012, having sold over 300,000 copies.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: The band released "Only Revolutions" in 2009 which reached No. 3 in the UK chart and went gold within days of its release in 2009, going platinum later in 2010 (achieving double-platinum status in August 2011) and receiving a Mercury Music Prize nomination. "Only Revolutions" included the UK hit singles "Mountains", "That Golden Rule", and "Many of Horror", all of which reached the UK Top Ten. The latter reached No. 8 on the UK Singles Chart after "The X Factor" 2010 winner, Matt Cardle covered the song, and became the UK number one Christmas single for the year 2010. In 2011, the band was nominated for the Brit Awards for Best British Group. At the 2013 NME Awards, they received the award for Best British Band. On 25 August 2013 Biffy Clyro headlined the main stage at Reading and Leeds Festival. Their sixth studio album, the double album "Opposites" was released in 2013, and was their first No. 1 album. Their seventh studio album, "Ellipsis" also reached number one upon release in 2016. Based on their album and single certifications, the band have sold in excess of 1,240,000 albums and 400,000 singles in the UK alone. "A Celebration of Endings" was released on 14 August 2020, and debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart on 21 August 2020. "The Myth of the Happily Ever After" was release on 22 October 2021, and entered the UK album chart at number four.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: As of 2021, in total, the band have spent 165 weeks in the top seventy-five of the UK Album Charts, with three of those weeks being at the top position at number one and 76 weeks within the main top forty of the albums charts. The band's singles have spent a total of 79 weeks in the UK Singles Charts, with six weeks in the top ten and 42 in the top forty.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: The first incarnation of what would eventually become Biffy Clyro was formed in 1995, when fifteen-year-old Ayr-based guitarist Simon Neil started playing his songs with friend Kilmarnock-born Ben Johnston. Ben's twin brother, James Johnston was soon brought in, and the three spent the next two years rehearsing, writing and covering songs. On 31 January 1995, they played their first gig under the name "Skrewfish" as the support for a band called Pink Kross at the Key Youth Centre in East Kilbride, now known as Universal Connections East Kilbride. In 1997, the trio moved to Glasgow, where Neil went to the University of Glasgow, and the Johnston twins went to Stow College, studying Electronics with Music and Audio Engineering, respectively.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: After playing gigs around Glasgow and receiving positive and enthusiastic reactions from audiences, the band were spotted by Dee Bahl, who soon became their manager. Bahl offered them a chance to release an independent single on Aereogramme's Babi Yaga record label: "Iname" was released on 28 June 1999, with Northsound Radio's Jim Gellatly (later of Beat 106 & Xfm Scotland) giving the band their first radio play. This first release led to the band being chosen by Stow College's Electric Honey record label to release a record: "thekidswhopoptodaywillrocktomorrow" was released on Nerosa on 13 June 2000, receiving airplay from BBC Radio Scotland DJ Vic Galloway. A few days prior to the release of "thekidswhopoptodaywillrocktomorrow", the band were spotted at the Unsigned Bands stage at T in the Park 2000 by a Beggars Banquet representative, and were signed to the independent Beggar's Banquet soon thereafter.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: On 9 April 2001, the previously unreleased "27" was released as a single. On 1 October 2001, a song from "thekidswho..." was re-recorded and released as a single, "Justboy"; this was repeated again on 4 February 2002, when the song "57" was released. On 11 March, the band's debut album, "Blackened Sky", was released to generally positive reviews. It was around this time that the band began touring extensively, including supporting Weezer on 20 March at the Barrowlands in Glasgow. On 15 July, the fourth single from the album, "Joy.Discovery.Invention", was released as a double A-side with a newly recorded song called "Toys, Toys, Toys, Choke, Toys, Toys, Toys" (which would later also appear on their next album "The Vertigo of Bliss").


title: Biffy Clyro

text: They toured as part of the Kerrang tour in 2001 alongside Sunna and Hell is For Heroes, followed by their first UK wide headline tour later on in the year.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: In 2003, the band retreated to the Linford Manor recording studio in Great Linford, Milton Keynes, England, to record the follow-up to "Blackened Sky". On 24 March, a new single was released called "The Ideal Height", followed by a further new single "Questions and Answers" on 26 May. The band's second album, "The Vertigo of Bliss" was released on 16 June, to positive reviews which focused on the more experimental style of the album in comparison to "Blackened Sky", as well as the introduction of string sections.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: After touring relentlessly for "The Vertigo of Bliss", the band retreated to Monnow Valley Studio in Monmouth, Wales to record a follow-up album. As with the previous album, two singles were released before the actual album: "Glitter and Trauma" and "My Recovery Injection" on 9 August and 20 September respectively. An additional digital download was also released on 31 May, called "There's No Such Thing as a Jaggy Snake". On 4 October, the band's third album, "Infinity Land" was released, followed by the final single from the album, "Only One Word Comes To Mind", on 14 February 2005. On 16 February, the band performed a cover of Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" live from Maida Vale on Zane Lowe's BBC Radio 1 show.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: Simon Neil's side project Marmaduke Duke also released an album in 2005, known as "The Magnificent Duke". He toured the UK together with the Johnston twins accompanying on bass and drums.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: In 2006, Biffy Clyro left Beggars Banquet and signed a deal with 14th Floor, an offshoot of Warner Bros. In September, the band went to Canada to record their fourth album at The Warehouse Studio in Vancouver (where it was engineered by Mike Fraser), and The Farm Studio in Gibsons. From these sessions the song "Semi-Mental" was released as a digital download on 25 December. On 5 March 2007 "Saturday Superhouse" was released, reaching No. 13 on the UK Singles Chart.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: "Puzzle" was released in June and helped the band to reach their highest UK Albums Chart position ever, hitting No. 2 in the first week of release, also reaching No. 17 in Ireland, and No. 39 in the overall world charts. The album is certified Gold in the UK, having sold over 220,000 copies, and as of February 2009 has sold over 300,000 worldwide. This album is notable for having somewhat more straightforward song structures and a more melodic overall sound than their previous work, while still retaining some more unusual elements. "Puzzle" was voted the best album of 2007 by Kerrang! and Rock Sound. On 25 August, it was announced that "Machines" would be the next single from "Puzzle", which was released on 8 October.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: Support slots for acts such as Muse (at the new Wembley Stadium), The Who, Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Rolling Stones were significant in expanding Biffy's fan base. The band also played the Download 2007, Glastonbury 2007, Reading and Leeds Festival and T in the Park for a record seventh time. The band opened for Linkin Park during January on their European tour. In 2008, the band toured with Queens Of The Stone Age on their European and North American tours for "Era Vulgaris", and opened for New Jersey rockers Bon Jovi at Twickenham during the Lost Highway Tour. In December 2008 the band played their biggest headline shows, including a date at Glasgow's 10,000 capacity SECC.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: The band released a new single entitled "Mountains" in July 2008, which reached No. 5 in the UK Singles Chart – the band's first song to reach the top 10, and their highest charting single to date. "Mountains" would later be included on their new album.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: In an interview with the "NME", the band stated that they had started work on a follow up to "Puzzle", with Simon Neil saying that the album would include some of the band's "heaviest riffs to date". In an interview with XFM, Ben Johnston revealed that the forthcoming album would be "Oli Coates", and that they already had 16 demos laid down. Simon Neil told Kerrang magazine about the new album on 8 December, playfully saying "The soft bits are softer, and the hard bits are harder...", mocking how bands always label their new albums the most heavy and yet melodic so far. The band worked with "Puzzle" producer Garth Richardson once again at Ocean Way studios. Many videos were shown on the internet of them playing along to Shania Twain's "You're Still the One". A "Kerrang!" article, published in March 2009, stated that they planned to enter the studio in April, revealing a working title for the upcoming album: "Boom, Blast and Ruin". A series of weekly updates on their official site slowly revealed letters of the new album title, and, after "Rock Sound" mistakenly revealed the album's name as "Only Exceptions", it was officially announced that the album would be titled "Only Revolutions".


title: Biffy Clyro

text: In July 2009, "Kerrang!" reported that they were filming the video for the first single from the album, "That Golden Rule". It was filmed on 1 July in London, with the band saying that the song is "like Kyuss and Tool playing with some Scottish freaks screaming over the top of it." "That Golden Rule" got its first play on Zane Lowe's Radio 1 show on 8 July, playing the song twice in a row; it was then announced that the single would be released on 23 August 2009. It went on to reach No. 10 on the UK Singles Chart. Just before the official release of "That Golden Rule", Biffy Clyro performed on the main stage at V Festival, their second appearance at the festival (the first time being in 2006, in a much earlier slot; during their set on the Chelmsford leg, the band experienced power failures twice during the opening song "Glitter and Trauma").


title: Biffy Clyro

text: "The Captain" was released as a single on 26 October 2009, following its first radio play on Zane Lowe's Radio 1 show on 8 September. "Only Revolutions" was released on 9 November 2009. On 24 February 2010, "The Captain" won an NME Award for Best Video.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: Biffy Clyro were confirmed to be supporting Muse for 14 dates on their European tour, including Wembley Stadium on 11 September, performing after I Am Arrows and White Lies. Biffy Clyro performed on the Main Stage at the T in the Park, Oxegen and Reading and Leeds music festivals in 2010. The band were also slated to perform at New Zealand's largest music festival Rhythm & Vines at Waiohika Estate Vineyard in Gisborne on 29 December, but had to pull out due to "minor medical procedures" required by two band members.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: On 2 and 3 July 2011 Biffy Clyro supported Foo Fighters in front of 130,000 fans (65,000 each night) at the Milton Keynes Bowl (National Bowl) in the U.K. On Saturday 9 July 2011, Biffy Clyro headlined the main stage (Apollo Stage) at Sonisphere Festival at Knebworth House. The following day, they headlined the main stage (West Stage) at Wakestock in Cardigan Bay, North Wales. Biffy Clyro opened for Metallica in Bangalore, India in 2011.The band revealed via the NME that they would release two studio albums in 2012, "The Land at the End of Our Toes", and "The Sand at the Core of Our Bones". From 17 May 2012, the band allowed fans to watch the recording process of "The Land at the End of Our Toes" and "The Sand at the Core of Our Bones" via a webcam link-up on their official website. The official Biffy Clyro website | biffyclyro.com The live feed has confirmed the involvement of frequent Biffy Clyro producer Garth Richardson, who also produced "Puzzle" and "Only Revolutions".


title: Biffy Clyro

text: On 30 July 2012, the band announced on Twitter that a new track titled "Stingin' Belle" would be given its official premiere in the UK on Zane Lowe's Radio 1 show the following evening, and that the music video for the song would be available from 9pm for 12 hours to members of the band's official fan club. At 19:37 BST on Tuesday 31 July, Simon Neil confirmed on Zane Lowe's show on BBC Radio 1 that the new album title would be "Opposites" . Their new single titled Black Chandelier premièred on BBC Radio 1 on 19 November 2012. The band announced they would be playing a large arena tour through March/April 2013, including London's The O2 Arena, with City and Colour in support.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: On Sunday 3 February 2013, "Opposites" topped the UK Albums Charts, giving Biffy Clyro their first number one album. The next day, it was announced on BBC Radio 1 by Zane Lowe that they were the second headliner for Reading & Leeds Festivals. Biffy Clyro also headlined the second day of the annual Radio 1 Big Weekend festival on 25 May 2013 in Derry, as well as the Cape Town and Johannesburg legs of RAMfest 2014.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: Simon Neil was interviewed by NME on 6 January 2014, and announced a planned "Opposites" b-side compilation, entitled "Similarities", for release later in the year. Being interviewed for the article, lead singer Simon Neil stated that the band had come up with "six or seven" riffs for new material, although he did point out that their next album would not be recorded until at least 2015. "Similarities" was later released on 18 July 2014.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: The band announced that 2015 would be their 'year off.' In an interview with 3FM in June 2014, Neil stated that "[the band] will take a quiet year next year and disappear so people don't get sick of the lovely Biffy." In the same interview he stated that they were working on about 19 new songs, but felt it was too early to play them live. He confirmed that a new album was coming, most likely towards the end of 2015. The first single "Wolves of Winter" was exclusively played as Hottest Record on Monday 21 March 2016 on Radio 1. On Monday 21 March 2016, during the live premiere of "Wolves of Winter" on Hottest Record on Beats 1, Zane Lowe, Neil announced that the band's new album would be titled "Ellipsis". The album, due for release on 8 July 2016, was made available to pre-order in a limited edition box set on the Biffy Clyro web store.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: "Ellipsis" was released on 8 July 2016, entering the UK charts at No. 1. Following the successful launch of "Ellipsis", the band performed co-headline slots (co-headlining with Fall Out Boy) at the Reading & Leeds festival. The new "Ellipsis" songs featured prominently in the setlist. Between the two headline slots, Biffy Clyro also performed a huge outdoor show in Glasgow, with Fall Out Boy filling in as the support act. In November 2016, Biffy Clyro were announced as the Saturday headliners of the Download Festival 2017. This marked their sixth appearance at the festival and their first headline performance on the main stage.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: To coincide with these headline performances, a U.K. arena tour was announced with Brand New announced as the support act. The tour culminated in a performance at London's O2 arena, in December 2016.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: In February 2017, Biffy Clyro performed at the Shepherd's Bush Empire as part of Brit's Week to raise money for charity War Child. To celebrate such an intimate performance at this point in their career, the band performed as their own support act with Simon Neil announcing "we are Biffy Clyro, circa 2003 to 2005", and they played an hour long set of material from their first three albums.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: On 27 May 2017, Biffy Clyro performed to 25,000 people at the Radio 1's Big Weekend Hull 2017. The band also performed at Glastonbury on Sunday 25 June 2017.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: Autumn of 2018 saw the release of the "" show on DVD and album. A European tour of the show soon followed plus a few other pieces that translated well acoustically.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: In April 2018, Biffy Clyro announced that they were concurrently working on two albums, their eighth studio album with the working title "Opus 8" (released in 2020 as "A Celebration of Endings") as well as a soundtrack album. For the soundtrack album, they were working with Welsh director Jamie Adams producing a movie to go along with new, original music. The film, called "Balance, Not Symmetry" debuted at the Edinburgh Film Festival on 23 June 2019. The 17-song soundtrack album, also named "Balance, Not Symmetry" was released digitally on 17 May 2019 with a vinyl pre-order made available for release on 26 July. The film stars Laura Harrier, Bria Vinaite, Tasmin Egerton, Freya Mavor, Kate Dickie, Scott Miller, and Lily Newmark.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: On 20 February 2020, Biffy Clyro released the single "Instant History". The track was taken from their eighth studio album "A Celebration of Endings". The second single "End Of" was released on 5 March alongside the announcement of the album's title and the release date of 15 May, although this date had to be postponed to 14 August, due to the coronavirus pandemic. The third single from the album "Tiny Indoor Fireworks" was released on 14 May. "A Celebration Of Endings" entered at No.1 on the UK Albums Chart, making it the band's third consecutive No.1 album.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: The band had initially announced a UK, Europe and Australia arena tour, beginning in September 2020, although this was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, the band played a livestream concert from the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow, playing all the songs from their new album. They also announced a series of tour dates in smaller venues in April 2021, titled the "Fingers Crossed Tour," though this was also postponed to October-November 2021.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: The band contributed a cover of the Metallica song "Holier Than Thou" to the charity tribute album "The Metallica Blacklist", released in September 2021. On 3 September 2021, they released the single "Unknown Male 01", alongside the announcement of another album titled "The Myth of the Happily Ever After", which was released on 22 October 2021.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: In February 2022, Amazon Prime Video released an hour-long documentary about Biffy Clyro and the making of "The Myth of the Happily Ever After", titled "Cultural Sons of Scotland".


title: Biffy Clyro

text: The band have never disclosed where the name "Biffy Clyro" originated, and Simon Neil has said that it was "a stupid name" that was often "awkward" to explain its origins when the band started and when not many had heard their music. Whilst being interviewed on Soccer AM, the band said that they make up stories about how they are named because they are bored with being asked the same question. Among the conflicting answers the band have given are:


title: Biffy Clyro

text: The band cite influences ranging from heavy metal bands such as Metallica to progressive rock band Rush, while reviewers are often quick to link their sound to Nirvana and Foo Fighters – particularly in their use of shifting dynamics, which they adapted from Pixies and Fugazi.


title: Biffy Clyro

text: Mark Z. Danielewski's second novel "Only Revolutions" was influential for the album "Only Revolutions"; the band have since met Danielewski, discovering that he was a fan when he attended one of their shows.


title: Humus

text: In classical soil science, humus is the dark organic matter in soil that is formed by the decomposition of plant and animal matter. It is a kind of soil organic matter. It is rich in nutrients and retains moisture in the soil. Humus is the Latin word for "earth" or "ground".


title: Humus

text: In agriculture, "humus" sometimes also is used to describe mature or natural compost extracted from a woodland or other spontaneous source for use as a soil conditioner. It is also used to describe a topsoil horizon that contains organic matter ("humus type", "humus form", or "humus profile").


title: Humus

text: Humus has many nutrients that improve the health of soil, nitrogen being the most important. The ratio of carbon to nitrogen (C:N) of humus commonly ranges between eight and fifteen with the median being about twelve. It also significantly affects the bulk density of soil. Humus is amorphous and lacks the "cellular cake structure characteristic of plants, micro-organisms or animals".


title: Humus

text: The primary material needed for the process of humification are plant materials. The composition of humus varies dependent on the composition of the primary materials and the secondary microbial and animal products. The decomposition rate of the different compounds will affect the composition of the humus.


title: Humus

text: It is difficult to define humus precisely because it is a very complex substance which is not fully understood. Humus is different from decomposing soil organic matter. The latter looks rough and has visible remains of the original plant or animal matter. Fully humified humus, on the contrary, has a uniformly dark, spongy, and jelly-like appearance, and is amorphous; it may gradually decay over several years or persist for millennia. It has no determinate shape, structure, or quality. However, when examined under a microscope, humus may reveal tiny plant, animal, or microbial remains that have been mechanically, but not chemically, degraded. This suggests an ambiguous boundary between humus and soil organic matter. While distinct, humus is an integral part of soil organic matter.


title: Humus

text: There is little data available on the composition of forest humus because it is a complex mixture that is challenging for researchers to analyze. Researchers in the 1940s and 1960s tried using chemical separation to analyze plant and humic compounds in forest soil, but this proved impossible. Further research has been done in more recent years, though it remains an active field of study.


title: Humus

text: Microorganisms decompose a large portion of the soil organic matter into inorganic minerals that the roots of plants can absorb as nutrients. This process is termed "mineralization". In this process, nitrogen (nitrogen cycle) and the other nutrients (nutrient cycle) in the decomposed organic matter are recycled. Depending on the conditions in which the decomposition occurs, a fraction of the organic matter does not mineralize and instead is transformed by a process called "humification". Prior to modern analytical methods, early evidence led scientists to believe that humification resulted in concatenations of organic polymer resistant to the action of microorganisms, however recent research has demonstrated that microorganisms are capable of digesting humus.


title: Humus

text: Humification can occur naturally in soil or artificially in the production of compost. Organic matter is humified by a combination of saprotrophic fungi, bacteria, microbes and animals such as earthworms, nematodes, protozoa, and arthropods. Plant remains, including those that animals digested and excreted, contain organic compounds: sugars, starches, proteins, carbohydrates, lignins, waxes, resins, and organic acids. Decay in the soil begins with the decomposition of sugars and starches from carbohydrates, which decompose easily as detritivores initially invade the dead plant organs, while the remaining cellulose and lignin decompose more slowly. Simple proteins, organic acids, starches, and sugars decompose rapidly, while crude proteins, fats, waxes, and resins remain relatively unchanged for longer periods of time. Lignin, which is quickly transformed by white-rot fungi, is one of the primary precursors of humus, together with by-products of microbial and animal activity. The humus produced by humification is thus a mixture of compounds and complex biological chemicals of plant, animal, or microbial origin that has many functions and benefits in soil. Some judge earthworm humus (vermicompost) to be the optimal organic manure.


title: Humus

text: Much of the humus in most soils has persisted for more than 100 years, rather than having been decomposed into CO, and can be regarded as stable; this organic matter has been protected from decomposition by microbial or enzyme action because it is hidden (occluded) inside small aggregates of soil particles, or tightly sorbed or complexed to clays. Most humus that is not protected in this way is decomposed within 10 years and can be regarded as less stable or more labile. Stable humus contributes few plant-available nutrients in soil, but it helps maintain its physical structure. A very stable form of humus is formed from the slow oxidation (redox) of soil carbon after the incorporation of finely powdered charcoal into the topsoil. This process is speculated to have been important in the formation of the unusually fertile Amazonian . However, recent work suggests that complex soil organic molecules may be much less stable than previously thought: “the available evidence does not support the formation of large-molecular-size and persistent ‘humic substances’ in soils. Instead, soil organic matter is a continuum of progressively decomposing organic compounds.″


title: Humus

text: Humus has a characteristic black or dark brown color and is organic due to an accumulation of organic carbon. Soil scientists use the capital letters O, A, B, C, and E to identify the master horizons, and lowercase letters for distinctions of these horizons. Most soils have three major horizons: the surface horizon (A), the subsoil (B), and the substratum (C). Some soils have an organic horizon (O) on the surface, but this horizon can also be buried. The master horizon (E) is used for subsurface horizons that have significantly lost minerals (eluviation). Bedrock, which is not soil, uses the letter R.


title: Humus

text: The importance of chemically stable humus is thought by some to be the fertility it provides to soils in both a physical and chemical sense, though some agricultural experts put a greater focus on other features of it, such as its ability to suppress disease. It helps the soil retain moisture by increasing microporosity, and encourages the formation of good soil structure. The incorporation of oxygen into large organic molecular assemblages generates many active, negatively charged sites that bind to positively charged ions (cations) of plant nutrients, making them more available to the plant by way of ion exchange. Humus allows soil organisms to feed and reproduce, and is often described as the "life-force" of the soil.


title: Hello (2017 film)

text: Hello! is a 2017 Indian Telugu-language romantic action film written and directed by Vikram K Kumar, and produced by Akkineni Nagarjuna under Annapurna Studios. The film stars Akhil Akkineni, Kalyani Priyadarshan, Jagapati Babu and Ramya Krishna. The music is composed by Anup Rubens. It was released on 22 December 2017.


title: Hello (2017 film)

text: Seenu is an orphaned street urchin, who used to play Violin and earn money in streets. He has a friend named Junnu. He makes a very close bonding with her. They always play with each other happily. But one day, Junnu's family moves to Delhi because of her father's transfer. When she leaves, Junnu gives her phone number to Seenu written on a note, but a thief named Pandu steals that note. While chasing the thief to get the note, Seenu is hit by a car driven by Sarojini and her husband, Prakash. They later adopt Seenu after taking him to the hospital as Sarojini promised that she would do something good for the boy if he survived. After 14 years, Seenu aka Avinash, along with Junnu aka Priya are both living affluent lifestyles but are not happy without each other. He finally discovers her whereabouts on a whim by hearing a tune they created during childhood while on a wrong call with a cab driver.


title: Hello (2017 film)

text: The cab driver reveals that the location is a music fest, but a street thug (who is Pandu) steals his phone. So, he sets out to get it back to reconcile with Junnu. Flashbacks reveal Seenu / Avinash's journey with Sarojini and Prakash as a happy family. Junnu / Priya is sad in Delhi thinking about Seenu and learns that her father is being transferred to the United States. Before leaving for the United States, she thinks of finding Seenu in Hyderabad and attending her close friend's wedding. While picking up his mother at the airport, Avinash sees Priya but does not recognize her. Later Priya and Avinash meet again when Priya distributes 100 rupees to poor street children. They meet at the wedding but Priya reminded of young Seenu, runs away. Avinash follows her and accidentally breaks the bangle, which was gifted by Seenu they were friends in childhood and were very dear to her. Being heartbroken, An enraged Priya slaps Avinash.


title: Hello (2017 film)

text: Back to the present, Avinash retrieves his phone back from the phone mafia. He learns that Junnu is at the Hyderabad Music Festival. At the festival, he meets Priya, who is still upset about the fight they had at her friend's sangeet/wedding. They forgive each other, and Avinash gifts her a new bangle and wishes her all the best for her new life. Searching for Junnu, he goes to a music stall and starts playing the same tune they created during childhood. Junnu, hearing the song desperately runs searching for him but cannot find him. Avinash finds the note with Junnu's phone number on it, and dials the number repeatedly, but Junnu/Priya cuts the call repeatedly as she is also calling searching for the tune player's location in the fest. She finally picks up the call and speaks with him, but Avinash's mobile runs out of battery. He now knows that Junnu is also at the music festival. He visits the music stall again where Junnu had played earlier and plays one final time. Hearing the tune, Priya/Junnu runs around looking for the player. Stunned by seeing Junnu with a desperate look, Avinash murmurs, identifying Junnu followed by a sign of her saying yes, and they both embrace each other in love.


title: Hello (2017 film)

text: Music of the movie was composed by Anup Rubens. Music released on Aditya Music. The audio function was held at Visakhapatnam on 7 December 2017. The film is Anup Rubens's 50th film.


title: Hello (2017 film)

text: The film was released worldwide on 22 December 2017. It was later dubbed into Hindi under the title "Taqdeer" ( Destiny) and premiered on Star Gold on 23 June 2018. It was dubbed into Tamil with the same title and premiered in Star Vijay, and in Malayalam with the same title in 2019.


title: Hello (2017 film)

text: The film grossed 26.4 crore worldwide in four days, with a distributors share of 14.38 crore. In Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, the four-day gross was 15.75 crore, with a share of 10.1 crore. "Hello" grossed in its first week.


title: Hello (2017 film)

text: An individual from Jharkhand claimed that the phone number used in the film as Junnu's number, which was shown through out the film, belonged to him and that he had been receiving several calls from fans. He alleged that his personal and professional life was impacted because of the calls and had claimed a compensation of . The makers of the film insisted that they attained due permission from the respective telecom company. However, the company refuted the claims and said that no such permission was granted.


title: National Gallery

text: The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current Director of the National Gallery is Gabriele Finaldi.


title: National Gallery

text: The National Gallery is an exempt charity, and a non-departmental public body of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Its collection belongs to the government on behalf of the British public, and entry to the main collection is free of charge.


title: National Gallery

text: Unlike comparable museums in continental Europe, the National Gallery was not formed by nationalising an existing royal or princely art collection. It came into being when the British government bought 38 paintings from the heirs of John Julius Angerstein in 1824. After that initial purchase, the Gallery was shaped mainly by its early directors, especially Charles Lock Eastlake, and by private donations, which now account for two-thirds of the collection. The collection is smaller than many European national galleries, but encyclopaedic in scope; most major developments in Western painting "from Giotto to Cézanne" are represented with important works. It used to be claimed that this was one of the few national galleries that had all its works on permanent exhibition, but this is no longer the case.


title: National Gallery

text: The present building, the third to house the National Gallery, was designed by William Wilkins from 1832 to 1838. Only the facade onto Trafalgar Square remains essentially unchanged from this time, as the building has been expanded piecemeal throughout its history. Wilkins's building was often criticised for the perceived weaknesses of its design and for its lack of space; the latter problem led to the establishment of the Tate Gallery for British art in 1897. The Sainsbury Wing, a 1991 extension to the west by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, is a significant example of Postmodernist architecture in Britain.


title: National Gallery

text: The late 18th century saw the nationalisation of royal or princely art collections across mainland Europe. The Bavarian royal collection (now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich) opened to the public in 1779, that of the Medici in Florence around 1789 (as the Uffizi Gallery), and the Museum Français at the Louvre was formed out of the former French royal collection in 1793. Great Britain, however, did not follow other European countries, and the British Royal Collection still remains in the sovereign's possession. In 1777 the British government had the opportunity to buy an art collection of international stature, when the descendants of Sir Robert Walpole put his collection up for sale. The MP John Wilkes argued for the government to buy this "invaluable treasure" and suggested that it be housed in "a noble gallery... to be built in the spacious garden of the British Museum". Nothing came of Wilkes's appeal and 20 years later the collection was bought in its entirety by Catherine the Great; it is now to be found in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.


title: National Gallery

text: A plan to acquire 150 paintings from the Orléans collection, which had been brought to London for sale in 1798, also failed, despite the interest of both the King and the Prime Minister, Pitt the Younger. The twenty-five paintings from that collection now in the Gallery, including "NG1", arrived later by a variety of routes. In 1799 the dealer Noël Desenfans offered a ready-made national collection to the British government; he and his partner Sir Francis Bourgeois had assembled it for the king of Poland, before the Third Partition in 1795 abolished Polish independence. This offer was declined and Bourgeois bequeathed the collection to his old school, Dulwich College, on his death. The collection opened in 1814 in Britain's first purpose-built public gallery, the Dulwich Picture Gallery. The Scottish dealer William Buchanan and the collector Joseph Count Truchsess, both formed art collections expressly as the basis for a future national collection, but their respective offers (both made in 1803) were also declined.


title: National Gallery

text: Following the Walpole sale many artists, including James Barry and John Flaxman, had made renewed calls for the establishment of a National Gallery, arguing that a British school of painting could only flourish if it had access to the canon of European painting. The British Institution, founded in 1805 by a group of aristocratic connoisseurs, attempted to address this situation. The members lent works to exhibitions that changed annually, while an art school was held in the summer months. However, as the paintings that were lent were often mediocre, some artists resented the Institution and saw it as a racket for the gentry to increase the sale prices of their Old Master paintings. One of the Institution's founding members, Sir George Beaumont, Bt, would eventually play a major role in the National Gallery's foundation by offering a gift of 16 paintings.


title: National Gallery

text: In 1823 another major art collection came on the market, which had been assembled by the recently deceased John Julius Angerstein. Angerstein was a Russian-born émigré banker based in London; his collection numbered 38 paintings, including works by Raphael and Hogarth's "Marriage à-la-mode" series. On 1 July 1823 George Agar Ellis, a Whig politician, proposed to the House of Commons that it purchase the collection. The appeal was given added impetus by Beaumont's offer, which came with two conditions: that the government buy the Angerstein collection, and that a suitable building was to be found. The unexpected repayment of a war debt by Austria finally moved the government to buy Angerstein's collection, for £57,000.


title: National Gallery

text: The National Gallery opened to the public on 10 May 1824, housed in Angerstein's former townhouse at No. 100 Pall Mall. Angerstein's paintings were joined in 1826 by those from Beaumont's collection, and in 1831 by the Reverend William Holwell Carr's bequest of 35 paintings. Initially the Keeper of Paintings, William Seguier, bore the burden of managing the Gallery, but in July 1824 some of this responsibility fell to the newly formed board of trustees.


title: National Gallery

text: The National Gallery at Pall Mall was frequently overcrowded and hot and its diminutive size in comparison with the Louvre in Paris was a cause of national embarrassment. But Agar Ellis, by then a trustee of the Gallery, appraised the site for being "in the very gangway of London"; this was seen as necessary for the Gallery to fulfil its social purpose. Subsidence in No. 100 caused the Gallery to move briefly to No. 105 Pall Mall, which the novelist Anthony Trollope described as a "dingy, dull, narrow house, ill-adapted for the exhibition of the treasures it held". This in turn had to be demolished for the opening of a road to Carlton House Terrace.


title: National Gallery

text: In 1832 construction began on a new building by William Wilkins on the northern half of the site of the old Royal Mews in Charing Cross, after late 1820s transformation of the southern half into Trafalgar Square. The location was a significant one, between the wealthy West End and poorer areas to the east. The argument that the collection could be accessed by people of all social classes outstripped other concerns, such as the pollution of central London or the failings of Wilkins's building, when the prospect of a move to South Kensington was mooted in the 1850s. According to the Parliamentary Commission of 1857, "The "existence" of the pictures is not the end purpose of the collection, but the means only to give the people an ennobling enjoyment".


title: National Gallery

text: 15th- and 16th-century Italian paintings were at the core of the National Gallery and for the first 30 years of its existence the Trustees' independent acquisitions were mainly limited to works by High Renaissance masters. Their conservative tastes resulted in several missed opportunities and the management of the Gallery later fell into complete disarray, with no acquisitions being made between 1847 and 1850. A critical House of Commons report in 1851 called for the appointment of a director, whose authority would surpass that of the trustees. Many thought the position would go to the German art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen, whom the Gallery had consulted on previous occasions about the lighting and display of the collections. However, the man preferred for the job by Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and the Prime Minister, Lord Russell, was the Keeper of Paintings at the Gallery, Sir Charles Lock Eastlake. Eastlake, who was President of the Royal Academy, played an essential role in the foundation of the Arundel Society and knew most of London's leading art experts.


title: National Gallery

text: The new director's taste was for the Northern and Early Italian Renaissance masters or "primitives", who had been neglected by the Gallery's acquisitions policy but were slowly gaining recognition from connoisseurs. He made annual tours to the continent and to Italy in particular, seeking out appropriate paintings to buy for the Gallery. In all, he bought 148 pictures abroad and 46 in Britain, among the former such seminal works as Paolo Uccello’s "The Battle of San Romano". Eastlake also amassed a private art collection during this period, consisting of paintings that he knew did not interest the trustees. His ultimate aim, however, was for them to enter the National Gallery; this was duly arranged upon his death by his friend and successor as director, William Boxall, and his widow Lady Eastlake.


title: National Gallery

text: The Gallery's lack of space remained acute in this period. In 1845 a large bequest of British paintings was made by Robert Vernon; there was insufficient room in the Wilkins building so they were displayed first in Vernon's town house at No. 50 Pall Mall and then at Marlborough House. The Gallery was even less well equipped for its next major bequest, as J.M.W. Turner was to bequeath the entire contents of his studio, excepting unfinished works, to the nation upon his death in 1851. The first 20 of these were displayed off-site in Marlborough House in 1856. Ralph Nicholson Wornum, the Gallery's Keeper and Secretary, worked with John Ruskin to bring the bequest together. The stipulation in Turner's will that two of his paintings be displayed alongside works by Claude is still honoured in Room 15 of the Gallery, but his bequest has never been adequately displayed in its entirety; today the works are divided between Trafalgar Square and the Clore Gallery, a small purpose-built extension to Tate Britain completed in 1985.


title: National Gallery

text: The third director, Sir Frederick William Burton, laid the foundations of the collection of 18th-century art and made several outstanding purchases from English private collections. The acquisition in 1885 of two paintings from Blenheim Palace, Raphael's "Ansidei Madonna" and Van Dyck's "Equestrian Portrait of Charles I", with a record-setting grant of £87,500 from the Treasury, brought the Gallery's "golden age of collecting" to an end, as its annual purchase grant was suspended for several years thereafter. When the Gallery purchased Holbein's "Ambassadors" from the Earl of Radnor in 1890, it did so with the aid of private individuals for the first time in its history. In 1897 the formation of the National Gallery of British Art, known unofficially from early in its history as the Tate Gallery, allowed some British works to be moved off-site, following the precedent set by the Vernon collection and the Turner Bequest. Works by artists born after 1790 were moved to the new gallery on Millbank, which allowed Hogarth, Turner and Constable to remain in Trafalgar Square.


title: National Gallery

text: The agricultural crisis at the turn of the 20th century caused many aristocratic families to sell their paintings, but the British national collections were priced out of the market by American plutocrats. This prompted the foundation of the National Art Collections Fund, a society of subscribers dedicated to stemming the flow of artworks to the United States. Their first acquisition for the National Gallery was Velázquez's "Rokeby Venus" in 1906, followed by Holbein's "Portrait of Christina of Denmark" in 1909. However, despite the crisis in aristocratic fortunes, the following decade was one of several great bequests from private collectors. In 1909 the industrialist Dr Ludwig Mond gave 42 Italian renaissance paintings, including the "Mond Crucifixion" by Raphael, to the Gallery. Other bequests of note were those of George Salting in 1910, Austen Henry Layard in 1916 and Sir Hugh Lane in 1917.


title: National Gallery

text: In the National Gallery on 10 March 1914, the "Rokeby Venus" was damaged by Mary Richardson, a campaigner for women's suffrage, in protest against the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst the previous day. Later that month another suffragette attacked five Bellinis, causing the Gallery to close until the start of the First World War, when the Women's Social and Political Union called for an end to violent acts drawing attention to their plight.


title: National Gallery

text: The initial reception of Impressionist art at the Gallery was exceptionally controversial. In 1906, Sir Hugh Lane promised 39 paintings, including Renoir's "Umbrellas", to the National Gallery on his death, unless a suitable building could be built in Dublin. Although eagerly accepted by the director Charles Holroyd, they were received with extreme hostility by the Trustees; Lord Redesdale wrote that "I would as soon expect to hear of a Mormon service being conducted in St. Paul's Cathedral as to see the exhibition of the works of the modern French Art-rebels in the sacred precincts of Trafalgar Square". Perhaps as a result of such attitudes, Lane amended his will with a codicil that the works should only go to Ireland, but crucially this was never witnessed. Lane died on board the "RMS Lusitania" in 1915, and a dispute began which was not resolved until 1959. Part of the collection is now on permanent loan to Dublin City Gallery ("The Hugh Lane") and other works rotate between London and Dublin every few years.


title: National Gallery

text: A fund for the purchase of modern paintings established by Samuel Courtauld in 1923 bought Seurat's "Bathers at Asnières" and other modern works for the nation; in 1934, many of these were transferred to the National Gallery from the Tate.


title: National Gallery

text: Shortly before the outbreak of World War II the paintings were evacuated to locations in Wales, including Penrhyn Castle, the university colleges of Bangor and Aberystwyth. In 1940, during the Battle of France, a more secure home was sought, and there were discussions about moving the paintings to Canada. This idea was firmly rejected by Winston Churchill, who wrote in a telegram to the director Kenneth Clark, "bury them in caves or in cellars, but not a picture shall leave these islands". Instead a slate quarry at Manod, near Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales, was requisitioned for the Gallery's use. In the seclusion afforded by the paintings' new location, the Keeper (and future director) Martin Davies began to compile scholarly catalogues on the collection, with assistance of the Gallery's library which was also stored in the quarry. The move to Manod confirmed the importance of storing paintings at a constant temperature and humidity, something the Gallery's conservators had long suspected but had hitherto been unable to prove. This eventually resulted in the first air-conditioned gallery opening in 1949.


title: National Gallery

text: For the course of the war Myra Hess, and other musicians, such as Moura Lympany, gave daily lunch-time recitals in the empty building in Trafalgar Square, to raise public morale as every concert hall in London was closed. Art exhibitions were held at the Gallery as a complement to the recitals. The first of these was "British Painting since Whistler" in 1940, organised by Lillian Browse, who also mounted the major joint retrospective "Exhibition of Paintings by Sir William Nicholson and Jack B. Yeats" held from 1 January – 15 March 1942, which was seen by 10,518 visitors. Exhibitions of work by war artists, including Paul Nash, Henry Moore and Stanley Spencer, were also held; the War Artists' Advisory Committee had been set up by Clark in order "to keep artists at work on any pretext". In 1941 a request from an artist to see Rembrandt's "Portrait of Margaretha de Geer" (a new acquisition) resulted in the "Picture of the Month" scheme, in which a single painting was removed from Manod and exhibited to the general public in the National Gallery each month. The art critic Herbert Read, writing that year, called the National Gallery "a defiant outpost of culture right in the middle of a bombed and shattered metropolis". The paintings returned to Trafalgar Square in 1945.


title: National Gallery

text: In the post-war years, acquisitions have become increasingly difficult for the National Gallery as the prices for Old Masters – and even more so for the Impressionists and Post-impressionists – have risen beyond its means. Some of the Gallery's most significant purchases in this period would have been impossible without the major public appeals backing them, including "The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist" by Leonardo da Vinci (bought in 1962) and Titian’s "Death of Actaeon" (1972). The Gallery's purchase grant from the government was frozen in 1985, but later that year it received an endowment of £50 million from Sir Paul Getty, enabling many major purchases to be made. In April 1985 Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover and his brothers, the Hon. Simon Sainsbury and Sir Timothy Sainsbury, had made a donation that would enable the construction of the Sainsbury Wing.


title: National Gallery

text: The directorship of Neil MacGregor saw a major rehang at the Gallery, dispensing with the classification of paintings by national school that had been introduced by Eastlake. The new chronological hang sought to emphasise the interaction between cultures rather than fixed national characteristics, reflecting the change in art historical values since the 19th century. In other respects, however, Victorian tastes were rehabilitated: the building's interiors were no longer considered an embarrassment and were restored, and in 1999 the Gallery accepted a bequest of 26 Italian Baroque paintings from Sir Denis Mahon. Earlier in the 20th century many considered the Baroque to be beyond the pale: in 1945 the Gallery's trustees declined to buy a Guercino from Mahon's collection for £200. The same painting was valued at £4 million in 2003. Mahon's bequest was made on the condition that the Gallery would never deaccession any of its paintings or charge for admission.


title: National Gallery

text: Jock McFadyen was the first Artist in Residence in 1981. Since 1989, the gallery has run an Associate Artist scheme that gives a studio to contemporary artists to create work based on the permanent collection. They usually hold the position of associate artist for two years and are given an exhibition in the National Gallery at the end of their tenure.


title: National Gallery

text: The respective remits of the National and Tate Galleries, which had long been contested by the two institutions, were more clearly defined in 1996. 1900 was established as the cut-off point for paintings in the National Gallery, and in 1997 more than 60 post-1900 paintings from the collection were given to the Tate on a long-term loan, in return for works by Gauguin and others. However, future expansion of the National Gallery may yet see the return of 20th-century paintings to its walls.


title: National Gallery

text: In the 21st century there have been three large fundraising campaigns at the Gallery: in 2004, to buy Raphael's "Madonna of the Pinks", in 2008, for Titian's "Diana and Actaeon", and in 2012, Titian's "Diana and Callisto". Both Titians were bought in tandem with the National Gallery of Scotland for £95 m. Both of these major works were sold from the collection of the Duke of Sutherland. The National Gallery is now largely priced out of the market for Old Master paintings and can only make such acquisitions with the backing of major public appeals; the departing director Charles Saumarez Smith expressed his frustration at this situation in 2007.


title: National Gallery

text: In 2014 the National Gallery was the subject of a documentary film by Frederick Wiseman. The film shows the gallery administration and staff at work, the conservation laboratory, guided tours and the mounting of exhibitions on Leonardo da Vinci, J.M.W. Turner and Titian in 2011–12.


title: National Gallery

text: The first suggestion for a National Gallery on Trafalgar Square came from John Nash, who envisaged it on the site of the King's Mews, while a Parthenon-like building for the Royal Academy would occupy the centre of the square. Economic recession prevented this scheme from being built, but a competition for the Mews site was eventually held in 1831, for which Nash submitted a design with C. R. Cockerell as his co-architect. Nash's popularity was waning by this time, however, and the commission was awarded to William Wilkins, who was involved in the selection of the site and submitted some drawings at the last moment. Wilkins had hoped to build a "Temple of the Arts, nurturing contemporary art through historical example", but the commission was blighted by parsimony and compromise, and the resulting building was deemed a failure on almost all counts.


title: National Gallery

text: The site only allowed for the building to be one room deep, as a workhouse and a barracks lay immediately behind. To exacerbate matters, there was a public right of way through the site to these buildings, which accounts for the access porticoes on the eastern and western sides of the façade. These had to incorporate columns from the demolished Carlton House and their relative shortness resulted in an elevation that was deemed excessively low, thus failing to provide Trafalgar Square with its desired commanding focal point to the north. Also recycled are the sculptures on the façade, originally intended for Nash's Marble Arch but abandoned due to his financial problems. The eastern half of the building housed the Royal Academy until 1868, which further diminished the space afforded to the National Gallery.


title: National Gallery

text: The building was the object of public ridicule before it had even been completed, as a version of the design had been leaked to the "Literary Gazette" in 1833.


title: National Gallery

text: Two years before completion, its infamous "pepperpot" elevation appeared on the frontispiece of "Contrasts" (1836), an influential tract by the Gothicist A. W. N. Pugin, as an example of the degeneracy of the classical style. Even William IV (in his last recorded utterance) thought the building a "nasty little pokey hole", while William Makepeace Thackeray called it "a little gin shop of a building". The twentieth-century architectural historian Sir John Summerson echoed these early criticisms when he compared the arrangement of a dome and two diminutive turrets on the roofline to "the clock and vases on a mantelpiece, only less useful". Sir Charles Barry's landscaping of Trafalgar Square, from 1840, included a north terrace so that the building would appear to be raised, thus addressing one of the points of complaint. In 1891 the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association placed bay trees in boxes on the railed-in terraces during the summer months. Opinion on the building had mellowed considerably by 1984, when Prince Charles called the Wilkins façade a "much-loved and elegant friend", in contrast to a proposed extension. ("See below")


title: National Gallery

text: The first significant alteration made to the building was the single, long gallery added by Sir James Pennethorne in 1860–61. Ornately decorated in comparison with the rooms by Wilkins, it nonetheless worsened the cramped conditions inside the building as it was built over the original entrance hall. Unsurprisingly, several attempts were made either to completely remodel the National Gallery (as suggested by Sir Charles Barry in 1853), or to move it to more capacious premises in Kensington, where the air was also cleaner. In 1867 Barry's son Edward Middleton Barry proposed to replace the Wilkins building with a massive classical building with four domes. The scheme was a failure and contemporary critics denounced the exterior as "a strong plagiarism upon St Paul's Cathedral".


title: National Gallery

text: With the demolition of the workhouse, however, Barry was able to build the Gallery's first sequence of grand architectural spaces, from 1872 to 1876. Built to a polychrome Neo-Renaissance design, the Barry Rooms were arranged on a Greek cross-plan around a huge central octagon. Though it compensated for the underwhelming architecture of the Wilkins building, Barry's new wing was disliked by Gallery staff, who considered its monumental aspect to be in conflict with its function as exhibition space. Also, the decorative programme of the rooms did not take their intended contents into account; the ceiling of the 15th- and 16th-century Italian gallery, for instance, was inscribed with the names of British artists of the 19th century. However, despite these failures, the Barry Rooms provided the Gallery with a strong axial groundplan; this was to be followed by all subsequent additions to the Gallery for a century, resulting in a building of clear symmetry.


title: National Gallery

text: Pennethorne's gallery was demolished for the next phase of building, a scheme by Sir John Taylor extending northwards of the main entrance. Its glass-domed entrance vestibule had painted ceiling decorations by the Crace family firm, who had also worked on the Barry Rooms. A fresco intended for the south wall was never realised, and that space is now taken up by Frederic, Lord Leighton’s painting of "Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence" (1853–1855), lent by the Royal Collection in the 1990s.


title: National Gallery

text: Later additions to the west came more steadily but maintained the coherence of the building by mirroring Barry's cross-axis plan to the east. The use of dark marble for doorcases was also continued, giving the extensions a degree of internal consistency with the older rooms. The classical style was still in use at the National Gallery in 1929, when a Beaux-Arts style gallery was built, funded by the art dealer and Trustee Lord Duveen. However, it was not long before the 20th-century reaction against Victorian attitudes became manifest at the Gallery. From 1928 to 1952 the landing floors of Taylor's entrance hall were relaid with a new series of mosaics by Boris Anrep, who was friendly with the Bloomsbury Group. These mosaics can be read as a satire on 19th-century conventions for the decoration of public buildings, as typified by the Albert Memorial's "Frieze of Parnassus". The central mosaic depicting "The Awakening of the Muses" includes portraits of Virginia Woolf and Greta Garbo, subverting the high moral tone of its Victorian forebears. In place of Christianity's seven virtues, Anrep offered his own set of "Modern Virtues", including "Humour" and "Open Mind"; the allegorical figures are again portraits of his contemporaries, including Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell and T. S. Eliot.


title: National Gallery

text: In the 20th century the Gallery's late Victorian interiors fell out of fashion. The Crace ceiling decorations in the entrance hall were not to the taste of the director Charles Holmes, and were obliterated by white paint.


title: National Gallery

text: The North Galleries, which opened to the public in 1975, marked the arrival of modernist architecture at the National Gallery. In the older rooms, the original classical details were effaced by partitions, daises and suspended ceilings, the aim being to create neutral settings which did not distract from contemplation of the paintings. But the Gallery's commitment to modernism was short-lived: by the 1980s Victorian style was no longer considered anathema, and a restoration programme began to restore the 19th- and early-20th-century interiors to their purported original appearance. This began with the refurbishment of the Barry Rooms in 1985–86. From 1996 to 1999 even the North Galleries, by then considered to "lack a positive architectural character" were remodelled in a classical style, albeit a simplified one.


title: National Gallery

text: The most important addition to the building in recent years has been the Sainsbury Wing, designed by the postmodernist architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown to house the collection of Renaissance paintings, and built in 1991. The building occupies the "Hampton's site" to the west of the main building, where a department store of the same name had stood until its destruction in the Blitz. The Gallery had long sought expansion into this space and in 1982 a competition was held to find a suitable architect; the shortlist included a radical high-tech proposal by Richard Rogers, among others. The design that won the most votes was by the firm Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, who then modified their proposal to include a tower, similar to that of the Rogers scheme. The proposal was dropped after the Prince of Wales compared the design to a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend", The term "monstrous carbuncle", for a modern building that clashes with its surroundings, has since become commonplace.


title: National Gallery

text: One of the conditions of the 1982 competition was that the new wing had to include commercial offices as well as public gallery space. However, in 1985 it became possible to devote the extension entirely to the Gallery's uses, due to a donation of almost £50 million from Lord Sainsbury and his brothers Simon and Sir Tim Sainsbury. A closed competition was held, and the schemes produced were noticeably more restrained than in the earlier competition.


title: National Gallery

text: In contrast with the rich ornamentation of the main building, the galleries in the Sainsbury Wing are pared-down and intimate, to suit the smaller scale of many of the paintings. The main inspirations for these rooms are Sir John Soane's toplit galleries for the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the church interiors of Filippo Brunelleschi (the stone dressing is in pietra serena, the grey stone local to Florence). The northernmost galleries align with Barry's central axis, so that there is a single vista down the whole length of the Gallery. This axis is exaggerated by the use of false perspective, as the columns flanking each opening gradually diminish in size until the visitor reaches the focal point (as of 2009), an altarpiece by Cima of "The Incredulity of St Thomas". Venturi's postmodernist approach to architecture is in full evidence at the Sainsbury Wing, with its stylistic quotations from buildings as disparate as the clubhouses on Pall Mall, the Scala Regia in the Vatican, Victorian warehouses and Ancient Egyptian temples.


title: National Gallery

text: Following the pedestrianisation of Trafalgar Square, the Gallery is currently engaged in a masterplan to convert the vacated office space on the ground floor into public space. The plan will also fill in disused courtyards and make use of land acquired from the adjoining National Portrait Gallery in St Martin's Place, which it gave to the National Gallery in exchange for land for its 2000 extension. The first phase, the East Wing Project designed by Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones, opened to the public in 2004. This provided a new ground level entrance from Trafalgar Square, named in honour of Sir Paul Getty. The main entrance was also refurbished, and reopened in September 2005. Possible future projects include a "West Wing Project" roughly symmetrical with the East Wing Project, which would provide a future ground level entrance, and the public opening of some small rooms at the far eastern end of the building acquired as part of the swap with the National Portrait Gallery. This might include a new public staircase in the bow on the eastern façade. No timetable has been announced for these additional projects.


title: National Gallery

text: In April 2021, a jury short-listed six firms of architects – Caruso St John, David Chipperfield Architects, Asif Kahn, David Kohn Architects, Selldorf Architects, and Witherford Watson Mann Architects – in a competition for design proposals to upgrade the Sainsbury Wing.


title: National Gallery

text: One of the most persistent criticisms of the National Gallery, apart from those who criticise inadequacies of the building, has been of its conservation policy. The Gallery's detractors accused it of having had an over-zealous approach to restoration. The first cleaning operation at the National Gallery began in 1844 after Eastlake's appointment as Keeper, and was the subject of attacks in the press after the first three paintings to receive the treatment – a Rubens, a Cuyp and a Velázquez – were unveiled to the public in 1846. The Gallery's most virulent critic was J. Morris Moore, who wrote a series of letters to "The Times" under the pseudonym "Verax" savaging the institution's cleanings. While an 1853 Parliamentary Select committee set up to investigate the matter cleared the Gallery of any wrongdoing, criticism of its methods has been erupting sporadically ever since from some in the art establishment.


title: National Gallery

text: The last major outcry against the use of radical conservation techniques at the National Gallery was in the immediate post-war years, following a restoration campaign by Chief Restorer Helmut Ruhemann while the paintings were in Manod Quarry. When the cleaned pictures were exhibited to the public in 1946 there followed a furore with parallels to that of a century earlier. The principal criticism was that the extensive removal of varnish, which was used in the 19th century to protect the surface of paintings but which darkened and discoloured over time, may have resulted in the loss of "harmonising" glazes added to the paintings by the artists themselves. The opposition to Ruhemann's techniques was led by Ernst Gombrich, a professor at the Warburg Institute who in later correspondence with a restorer described being treated with "offensive superciliousness" by the National Gallery. A 1947 commission concluded that no damage had been done in the recent cleanings.


title: National Gallery

text: The National Gallery's attribution of paintings has been disputed on occasion. Kenneth Clark's decision in 1939 to label a group of paintings from the Venetian school as works by Giorgione was controversial at the time and the panels were soon identified as works by Andrea Previtali by a junior curator Clark had appointed. Decades later, the attribution of a 17th-century painting of "Samson and Delilah" (bought in 1980) to Rubens has been contested by a group of art historians, who believe that the National Gallery has not admitted the mistake to avoid embarrassing those who were involved in the purchase, many of whom still work for the Gallery.


title: National Gallery

text: The National Gallery was sponsored by the Italian arms manufacturer Finmeccanica between October 2011 and October 2012. The sponsorship deal allowed the company to use gallery spaces for gatherings and they used it to host delegates during the DSEI arms fair and the Farnborough international air show. The sponsorship deal was ended a year early after protests.


title: National Gallery

text: In February 2014, "Men of the Docks", by U.S. artist George Bellows, was bought by the National Gallery for $25.5 million (£15.6 million). It was the first major American painting to be purchased by the Gallery. Director Nicholas Penny termed the painting a new direction for the Gallery, a non-European painting in a European style. Its sale was controversial in the U.S. The Gallery was found in 2018 to be one of the first London public galleries to charge more than £20 for admission to a special exhibition of works by Claude Monet.