Paul Williams

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 Museum members.

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 with Chief Curator David Schwartz, and fielded questions about the ending, and other topics, after a screening of the episodes at the Museum.

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, Prisoners sustains an almost unbearable tension for two-and-a-half hours of screen time, satisfying as both a high-end genre exercise and a searing adult drama of the sort Hollywood almost never makes anymore."

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 for spring break. With the encouragement of their new friend “Alien” (James Franco) and an assortment of neon bikinis, they will stop at nothing for an experience they will never forget.

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, Lou Gossett, Jr., LeVar Burton, and Leslie Uggams, participated in a discussion about the show’s production and its long-lasting legacy, moderated by Donald Thoms, Vice President of Programming, PBS. The program was presented in collaboration with the PBS series Pioneers of Television,/i>.

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 of the Paradise (which he also co-scored). Williams was honored with a weekend retrospective at Museum of the Moving Image. This discussion followed the screening of Phantom of the Paradise.

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 performance, which she discussed after a screening of the film at the Museum of the Moving Image.

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 conversation with screenwriter and playwright Kushner (Angels in America, Munich) and with the noted Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, author of the official film companion book Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America.