Life of Pi star Irrfan Khan forges a cross-cultural career

“I can’t think of a more pathetic situation for an actor than to do a film and not connect to it,” Irrfan Khan says. “And I pray to God that I never face that situation.” Khan might not be one of the most prominent stars in Bollywood, especially not when…

Cloud Atlas Takes Off

It’s a Sunday afternoon in New York, and Tom Tykwer and the filmmakers formerly known as the Wachowski Brothers are talking about Zardoz, that odd and ambitious 1974 science-fiction drama most infamous for featuring a gun-vomiting godhead and Sean Connery in a mankini. As a film that confronts viewers from…

All the subtext of Wuthering Heights is stuck at surface level

English filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s atypical, impressionistic approach to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is her adaptation’s main hook. As with Fish Tank and Red Road, Arnold’s last two feature-length dramas, the new Wuthering Heights is very much about the act of looking. The novel’s tempestuous plot is thus unmercifully filtered through…

Animator Genndy Tartakovsky still goes it alone

“I hate realism,” director Genndy Tartakovsky said last week over the phone. “In America, especially, we’re very narrow-minded as far as animation goes. There is only one kind of movie, and that’s that big, family-oriented, four-quadrant, please-everyone kind of film. But if I wanted realism, I’d watch a live-action movie…

David France examines the history and survival of ACT UP

“Death wasn’t being responded to as a public health problem,” David France says. “It was dealt with with sniggers. It was left to religious leaders to explain or respond to the epidemic. And they responded by calling it the wrath of God.” He adds: “That’s the hostility we all saw…

David Koepp on New York City, George Romero and bad script notes

David Koepp writes, and now directs, superior B-movies. This is an admirable and tough-to-master skill given how few major movie studios are willing to take chances on films with lower budgets that don’t employ a found-footage gimmick or generally look like they were made on an aglet-less shoestring budget. So…

David Cronenberg’s vision of the cosmopolis

One of the most interesting things about Cosmopolis, writer/director David Cronenberg’s extraordinary adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel by the same name, is that it’s based on the first script Cronenberg has both written and shot since 1999’s eXistenZ. Additionally, Cronenberg’s adaptation of Cosmopolis marks the first time he has adapted…