Eastern Promises

Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, and Vincent Cassel star in this David Cronenberg's thriller concerning a London midwife who unwittingly stumbles into a clandestine Russian sex trafficking ring. An unidentified Russian teen has been rushed to a London hospital after going into ...more

With Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg's portrait of London's Russian mafia, the verdict is in: Viggo Mortensen is one of today's coolest and most transformative working actors. This marks Mortensen's second collaboration with Cronenberg, following 2005's A History of Violence, where he played an adept killer of a much different breed. Here, Mortensen's character Nikolai Luzhin belongs to Vory v Zakone, a menacing underworld ruled by emotionless elders, strict codes of loyalty, and, when ...more

Thirty-two years after emerging as one of the most visionary storytellers of his generation with the audacious horror classic Shivers, director David Cronenberg proves with Eastern Promises that he still retains the power to surprise and challenge movie lovers. While a disheartening number of his peers have sadly failed to deliver on the promises made in their groundbreaking early efforts, Cronenberg has instead actually improved with age. His ambitious early films forced moviegoers to reassess ...more