Museum of the Moving Image Pinewood Dialogues

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.