It is in this gesture that Cruel Summer falls flat on its face.
Since it is not defined as punishment for a crime, it does not fall under "cruel and unusual punishment," the reasoning goes.
Caravaggio's painting is to be understood as a cautionary image of the cruel fate they might expect to meet were they to fall into captivity.
The Duke welcomed the French commander – "I am very sorry that such a cruel misfortune should have fallen upon a soldier for whom I have the highest regard".
That also seems to be the operating principle of the Irish company Pan Pan's haunting staging of Samuel Beckett's 1957 radio drama "All That Fall," an enigmatic, cruel portrait of a loveless couple that has suddenly come into fashion.
But remember the young man, who was only an actor: the broody debut in "Splendor in the Grass" and the rather cruel older brother in "All Fall Down"; and look again at two immensely brave ventures (far from successes), both beautifully acted, the entertainer in "Mickey One" and the seduced nurse in "Lilith".
The investment banks teeter, and one falls into a cruel grave.
This is the world Annie Clark, aka St Vincent, falls into in Cruel, a world seemingly thought up by Lars von Trier and directed by Sofia Coppola, such is its pastel-hued menace.
There are brutal fights and terrible falls, plenty of cruel or casual infliction of physical pain, vehicular mayhem that would be crippling or deadly, a scene in an extraordinarily crowded university hospital — and then there's that gun.
And if there is one emblem here of a transient population falling victim to cruel times, it was the episode in 2004 when 23 Chinese migrants died in Morecambe Bay, caught in the capricious tides as they picked cockles on behalf of distant gang masters.
