Om Puri, the prolific and internationally renowned actor known for such films as Ardh Satya, East Is East, My Son the Fanatic, Mirch Masala, and AK 47, was the focus of a special tribute program at Museum of the Moving Image prior to a preview screening of The Hundred-Foot Journey, in which he co-stars with Helen Mirren. Puri was interviewed about his remarkable life and career by Madhur Jaffrey, the prolific cookbook author, actress, and journalist.

In Calvary, a masterfully made, darkly comic film that is bound to be one of the most talked-about movies of the year, the great actor Brendan Gleeson plays an Irish priest who is marked for death by a parishioner and given one week to live. Writer/director John Michael Donagh, who has crafted a literary and deeply moving film, and the phenomenal actor Brendan Gleeson (who also starrred in McDonagh's film The Guard), took part in a lively and memorable discussion after a special screening for...

David Chase, the main creative force behind The Sopranos, directed just two episodes of the acclaimed series himself: the pilot and the finale. Airing on HBO on January 10, 1999, the first episode introduced James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano, the New Jersey mobster, family man, and self-proclaimed "waste management consultant." The final episode, "Made in America" aired eight years later, on June 10, 2007, with a stunning and widely discussed ending. Chase spoke at the Museum in a conversation...

Actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Melissa Leo, screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski, and director Denis Villeneuve (Incendies), spoke at Museum of the Moving Image after a special screening of their riveting thriller Prisoners. Gyllenhaal plays Detective Loki, who is investigating the disappearance of two young girls. He arrests a potential suspect, Alex Jones (Paul Dano), but a lack of evidence forces his release. Leo plays Alex's mysterious mother, Holly Jones. As Scott Foundas wrote in Variety,...

The great Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai's eagerly anticipated film The Grandmaster is his first film in six years, and a thrilling return to genre filmmaking that retains his unique personal style. Reinvigorating the martial arts movie with inimitable aesthetic grandeur, The Grandmaster features outstanding performances by Tony Leung and Ziyi Zhang. Wong Kar-wai discussed the film after a special preview screening, part of a complete retrospective of his feature films.

Spring Breakers was the buzz film of the Toronto Film Festival, and was screened at the Museum of the Moving Image immediately after its American premiere at SXSW. The Museum screening was part of a retrospective of Korine's films. Visually and aurally dazzling, Spring Breakers is a high-concept pulp-fest starring former Disney Channel actresses Selena Gomez and Ashley Benson as co-eds who perform a catalogue of illegal and incendiary activities in order to get out of their boring small town...

The 1977 miniseries Roots was one of the most influential and highest rated television events of all time; the final episode had an audience of more than 100 million. Thirty-five years later, Roots still resonates within popular culture, having changed forever the way that African-Americans were depicted on television, and having a strong impact on the nation’s collective guilt about slavery. In this unforgettable evening at Museum of the Moving Image, four stars of the series, Ben Vereen,...

Songwriter, singer, actor, and Tonight show favorite Paul Williams was a cultural icon throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and is the subject of the documentary Paul Williams: Still Alive. The hit songs he wrote dominated the charts and became staples, including “An Old Fashioned Love Song,” “We’ve Only Just Begun,” and “Rainbow Connection,” and Williams appeared as an actor on the big and small screens, most notably as the villainous Swan in Brian De Palma’s cult classic Phantom...

In The Deep Blue Sea, Terrence Davies's lush and deeply moving adaptation of the Terence Rattigan play, Rachel Weisz plays a woman who abandons her passionless marriage, entering a torrid affair with a troubled former Royal Air Force pilot. Weisz gave a career-topping performance that earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, and won her the Best Actress award from the New York Film Critics Circle. Weisz brings to an unmatched luminosity, magnetism, and emotional rawness to her...

Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln was one of his most acclaimed films, in large part due to the magnificent screenplay by Tony Kushner, based in part on the book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. The film focuses on President Lincoln’s tumultuous final months in office, as he pursues a course of action to end the Civil War, unite the country, and abolish slavery. Museum of the Moving Image presented a special screening of Lincoln followed by a...

Ava DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere was one of the most remarkable American independent films of the year in 2012, winner of the Best Director award at Sundance. The film focuses on a woman whose husband is sentenced to eight years in a California prison. Ruby (played by Emayatzy Corinealdi), drops out of medical school to maintain her marriage. Driven by love, loyalty, and hope, Ruby learns to sustain the shame, separation, guilt, and grief that a prison wife must bear. Her new life...

A magnificently mounted and beautifully performed film that both evokes and subverts the craftsmanship and artifice of Hollywood studio filmmaking, Far from Heaven is writer-director Todd Haynes's most critically acclaimed film to date. Both homage to and an update of Douglas Sirk's 1955 melodrama All that Heaven Allows. Haynes, Powell, and Friedberg discuss the film's astonishing craftsmanship, its political relevance for contemporary audiences, and the desire to make a film that would...

As co-founder of the Children's Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop), "the single largest teacher of young children in the world," and the originator of Sesame Street, Joan Ganz Cooney is a television pioneer whose work has had enormous influence in the world of education and entertainment. Cooney sat down with 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl at the Museum of the Moving Image to discuss her remarkable career, advancing children's learning in the digital age, working with Jim Henson, and...

Agnieszka Holland, the great Polish director whose films include Europa Europa and The Secret Garden, discussed her masterful new film In Darkness at a special preview screening at the Museum. Inspired by real events, In Darkness tells the story of Leopold Socha, a Polish sewer worker and occasional grifter who kept a group of Jews hidden from the Nazis during the occupation of Lvov by hiding them deep in the sewage system. After a special screening co-presented by the Polish Cultural...

The acclaimed independent featurePariah follows a 17-year-old African-American woman who lives with her parents and younger sister in Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood as she quietly but firmly embraces her identity as a lesbian. A rousing success, this deeply felt human drama is the feature debut of writer/director Dee Rees. In a conversation with Chief Curator David Schwartz at the Museum of the Moving Image, producer Nekisa Cooper provides insight to how the film came to be funded by the...

The Color Wheel, Alex Ross Perry's highly original second feature, beautifully filmed in black-and-white 16mm, follows the calamity and chaos when a young woman, JR, forces her reluctant and disapproving younger brother Colin on a road trip to help her move out of her professor-turned-lover's apartment. During this conversation with Chief Curator David Schwartz at Museum of the Moving Image, Perry, an inveterate cineaste, discusses his influences, and the film's unique style and its startling...

Martin Scorsese's film Hugo is a vivid, cinematically breathtaking adaptation of Brian Selznick's beloved graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the story of a young boy who lives in a Paris train station and develops an unlikely friendship with film pioneer Georges Méliès. Selznick discusses writing the book as a silent film's storyboard and the depth of research he pursued in creating the world of Méliès and classic French cinema. After a special screening at the Museum the Moving...

Distinctive character actor Dennis Farina (Get Shorty) gives a career performance in the affecting drama The Last Rites of Joe May. Invoking the spirit of 1970s films like Fat City, Joe Maggio's film follows the life of a 60-something hustler who is looking for a last shot at greatness. In a discussion at the Museum of the Moving Image, Farina and Maggio talk about the inspiration for the story, the challenges filmmakers face getting films made today, and the involvement of the Steppenwolf...

In Sean Durkin's impressive first feature, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Elizabeth Olsen delivered a breakthrough debut performance as a woman who escapes from a polygamous cult and struggles to reconnect with her family after years of abuse and estrangement. Olsen and co-star John Hawkes join Chief Curator David Schwartz at the Museum of the Moving Image to discuss what drew them to Durkin's screenplay. This wide-ranging conversation explores the Jackson Frank song used in the film, scouting...

Bennett Miller's acclaimed film Moneyball, based on a true story, stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's, and features a remarkable ensemble cast including Jonah Hill and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Forced to reinvent his team on a tight budget, Beane has to outsmart the richer clubs. It's more than baseball, it's a revolution—one that challenges old school traditions and puts Beane in the crosshairs of those who say he's tearing out the heart and soul of the...

Errol Morris's film Tabloid is an entertaining and provocative compendium of some of his favorite themes, including crime, obsession, truth, and the nature of self-presentation. It digs deeply into a sensational and salacious news story about Joyce McKinney, a former beauty queen whose alleged kidnapping and rape of a Mormon in England in 1977 made her a pop culture sensation. This conversation between Morris and Chief Curator David Schwartz at Museum of the Moving Image included a lively...

As part of the Fashion in Film Festival series "Birds of Paradise," curated by Marketa Uhlirova, this panel discussion with Ronald Gregg, Stuart Comer, Agosto Machado, and Ela Troyano offered a lively conversation about the legacy of the queer aesthetic in which the spectacle of fashion plays a dominant role, from the shimmering dresses in Kenneth Anger's Puce Moment to Jack Smith's reimagining of 1940s Hollywood Orientalism to the stunning, surreal imagery of Steven Arnold. At the Museum of...

Director Duncan Jones followed his acclaimed feature debut Moon with the expertly crafted and provocative thriller Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a soldier who wakes up in the body of a different man and finds that he is part of a mission to find the bomber of a Chicago commuter train. In this conversation at the Museum of the Moving Image, Jones discusses how Moon impacted his career, what it was like to work with editor Paul Hirsch (Star Wars), and how Source Code compared to a...

In 2005, Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King co-created The Comeback, a penetrating and often brutal satire of reality TV, sitcoms, and show business in general. The series was cancelled, but quickly developed a cult following. After a screening of the first episode, Kudrow and Dan Bucatinsky (executive producer and actor on The Comeback) discuss the conception, execution, and untimely demise of the series with Tod Lippy, editor of Esopus, the innovative magazine that had an interview about...