Focus Features

From 70s Canadian horror to world-class cinema, David Cronenberg has always defied expectations.

An extract from Sean Penn: His Life and Times on Viggo Mortensen's breakthrough in The Indian Runner.

In These Times editor Joel Bleifuss takes a hard look at the Russian mafia–in film and in the real world.

Jonathan Romney unlocks the secret behind David Cronenberg's talent for making everything wonderfully strange.

Scott Macaulay talks with Alix Lambert whose film Mark of Cain on Russian prison tattoos inspired Eastern Promises.

Director David Cronenberg talks with Scott Macaulay about what makes violence the stuff of cinema.

Here are links to everything nasty, mean, and criminal you could ever want.

Viggo Mortensen mixes poetry and prose as he remembers actress Sandy Dennis.

Follow David Cronenberg's 18-film career from the medical horror story Shivers to Eastern Promises.

Stunt coordinator Julian Spencer explains how he choreographed Viggo Mortensen's naked fight scene in Eastern Promises.

Every country has a mafia, and some export them–like the Russians to London in Eastern Promises.

Novelist Patrick McGrath recalls the lessons he learned from David Cronenberg on their movie Spider.