items tagged with Eastern Promises

ANGELS & DEMONS

You may not necessarily know character actor Armin Mueller-Stahl by name, but you likely know him by sight, and almost surely by voice. Familiar from such thrillers as Eastern Promises, The Game, and the recent The International - and Oscar-nominated as David Helfgott's über-strict father in Shine - the 78-year-old German, with his closely-cropped gray hair and wizened eye slits, doesn't look much different now from how he did playing Jessica Lange's is-he-a-Nazi-or-isn't-he? dad in 1989's Music Box. And he sounds exactly the same, with that heavily accented, hoarse whisper of his; by the time the performer reaches the end of a sentence, he always seems dangerously close to running out of breath.

EASTERN PROMISES

As I generally try to, I held off on reading reviews of David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises until I'd actually viewed the movie. (Admittedly, I occasionally fail at this task.) I was well aware of its hype - the film received the top prize at the recent Toronto International Film Festival - but also leery of it, as Cronenberg is a critics' darling whom I admire but whose works I usually don't. (Despite titles such as A History of Violence, eXistenZ, and Naked Lunch, the last movie of his I genuinely adored was 1988's Dead Ringers.)