A painter played by Dane DeHaan falls for the young woman he is painting, who is married to Christoph Waltz, in Justin Chadwick's 2017 romantic drama Tulip Fever. Who is the young woman

LEVEL 3 — 🎞️ FILM BUFF

We begin this Level 3 journey with the period romantic drama Tulip Fever (2017), directed by Justin Chadwick and based on Deborah Moggach's 1999 novel of the same name. The screenplay was written by Moggach and Tom Stoppard. Although the film was shot in 2014, its release was delayed for three years. An early test screening in November 2014 received a negative reaction, and the film was finally released on September 1, 2017. Set during the Dutch tulip craze of the 17th century, the film brought together an impressive cast: Dane DeHaan, Jack O'Connell, Holliday Grainger, Tom Hollander, Matthew Morrison, Kevin McKidd, Douglas Hodge, Joanna Scanlan, Zach Galifianakis, Judi Dench, Christoph Waltz, and Cara Delevingne. But can you remember the actress at the center of this lavish romantic story?

Next, we move on to a 2007 crime action movie with plenty of dark humor, written and directed by Joe Carnahan. The film features a star-studded cast, including Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Andy García, Ray Liotta, Jeremy Piven, Ryan Reynolds, Peter Berg, Taraji P. Henson, Chris Pine, Martin Henderson, Joel Edgerton, and Kevin Durand. It also marks the film debuts of singers Alicia Keys and Common. A prequel followed in 2010, directed by P. J. Pesce and produced and co-written by Carnahan. What is the film?

Next, we move on to another action spy thriller, this time from 2015, titled Survivor. Directed by James McTeigue and written by Philip Shelby, the film follows Milla Jovovich as a woman who must track down a notorious hired killer known by the nickname "The Watchmaker."

Here we go back several decades in search of a director who left a lasting mark on world cinema. Although he had only a few acting roles, one of his most memorable appearances was in Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 (1953), where he played the German camp commander, Oberst von Scherbach. He is the strict and ruthless officer in charge of the prisoner-of-war camp, who frequently comes into conflict with the American prisoners. The film was based on the Broadway play Stalag 17 by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski, which opened at the 48th Street Theatre on May 8, 1951. The play was a success, running for 472 performances before closing in 1952.

This time, we are looking for the title of a film. We have a strong cast: John Savage, Scott Wolf, Jeff Bridges, Ryan Phillippe, and Caroline Goodall, with Ridley Scott in the director's chair. There is also a small but interesting connection: Balthazar Getty, who appears in the film, is the son of John Paul Getty III. Years later, Ridley Scott would tell the story of Getty's father and his infamous kidnapping in Italy in All the Money in the World (2017). And if you still need one more clue, listen carefully to the ending—the film closes with Sting's "Valparaiso." So, can you name the film?

Here we go back to 1964, at the height of Beatlemania. Six teenagers from New Jersey are determined to get as close as possible to their idols when The Beatles arrive in New York for their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. What follows is a wild and funny adventure as they try everything they can to meet the Fab Four, get backstage, and somehow make it into television history. The film is I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), starring Nancy Allen, Bobby Di Cicco, Marc McClure, Susan Kendall Newman, Theresa Saldana, and Wendie Jo Sperber.

Now we move into the 1990s with The Last Seduction (1994), an erotic thriller with a stylish neo-noir atmosphere and one of the most unforgettable femme fatales of the decade. Directed by John Dahl, the film co-stars Peter Berg, and Bill Pullman in a dangerous story of desire, deception, manipulation, and unexpected twists. What may have seemed like another dark thriller at the time gradually found a devoted audience, and over the years, its sharp style and memorable characters helped turn it into a true cult favorite.

In this question, we are looking for a film that became an important moment in the careers of its ensemble cast, bringing together Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, JoBeth Williams, and Meg Tilly. Its success helped raise their profiles and gave several of them greater visibility, opening the door to bigger and more important roles in the years that followed. For some, it became a turning point that helped establish them as major names of their generation.

Another film with a big and impressive cast takes us to a 2007 crime drama, the directorial debut of Korean-American filmmaker Jieho Lee, who co-wrote the screenplay with Bob DeRosa. The film brings together Kevin Bacon, Julie Delpy, Brendan Fraser, Andy Garcia, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Emile Hirsch, and Forest Whitaker. But there is something unusual at the heart of the story. Its four main characters are each connected to a different emotion and, at the same time, to one of the four classical elements: Happiness is Air, Pleasure is Fire, Sorrow is Water, and Love is Earth. Four emotions, four elements, and four lives that gradually become connected.

And once again, we travel back in time, this time to Italy. The film is Stay as You Are (Così come sei), released in 1978. Marcello Mastroianni, aged 53, plays a middle-aged man trapped in a boring marriage who falls in love with Nastassja Kinski, who was 17 at the time and plays a student who falls in love with him. And this is only the beginning of what makes this Italian-Spanish erotic drama so controversial and complicated.

Here we are looking for a beautiful American actress. Her father's ancestry is half Italian and half Portuguese, while her mother has Cherokee Native American and English roots. She began modeling at the age of 15 and made a strong film debut in 2000, appearing in three movies that year: Drop Back Ten, alongside James LeGros; the thriller What Lies Beneath, with Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer; and The Family Man, starring Nicolas Cage. In The Transporter 2, she plays the wife of Matthew Modine, whose child is kidnapped by the same criminals pursued by The Transporter. Can you name the actress?

And we will close this quiz with a film from France in the 1970s. Its story is based on Une femme à sa fenêtre (1929), by French writer, poet, and political thinker Pierre Drieu la Rochelle (1893–1945), one of the most controversial figures in French literature between the two World Wars. He went through several different political ideas before eventually embracing Nazism, collaborated with the Germans during the Occupation, and took his own life at the end of the war.

The novel, also known as A Woman at Her Window, is set in Athens and tells the story of a French diplomat's wife who becomes romantically involved with a young communist wanted by the police. Interestingly, when Drieu wrote the novel, he was still in a much more left-wing and politically unstable phase of his life. The story was brought to the screen in 1976 by director Pierre Granier-Deferre.

And with this final story, our journey through these 12 films comes to the end of its introduction. Now it's your turn to see how much of this cinematic maze you can uncover — and remember, this is a Level 3 Film Buff challenge, so expect a few surprises along the way.