When Susanna Fogel and Joni Lefkowitz decided to write “Life Partners,” they used Nicole Holofcener’s “Walking and Talking” as their model. The 1996 indie is about two close friends, played by Anne Heche and Catherine Keener, and how their relationship changes as one is about to get married and the other struggles with single life…
In the film “Fed Up,” opening May 9, the untenable reality pours down like a mid-summer rain: In the United States, more people die from obesity than starvation. 87% of food items on supermarket shelves have added sugars. Teenagers are having gastric bypass surgery. We’ve become a corpulent nation, which is not news to anyone…
“I was never one of those happy cripples,” is the way Jerome Felder described himself. Why would he be? He was just 6 years old when he contracted polio. And in a sad irony fit for a blues song, the young Brooklynite caught the virus at a country summer camp he’d been sent to specifically…
Shades of “Chrismukuh.” That’s the blended holiday celebrated by the blended Cohen family on the TV show, “The O.C.” But Challoweenukah? It’s the holiday that will be celebrated on the October 18 episode of “The Neighbors,” a show about blended peoples. When the Weaver family moved into the gated Hidden Hills development last season, they…
Joshua Harmon applied for admission to the Juilliard School’s prestigious playwriting program three times. Three times he was told sorry, try again. On his fourth attempt, “Bad Jews” got him in. No, that’s not a reference to crooked admissions officers. “Bad Jews” is Harmon’s play about relatives battling over a special chai pendant that belonged…
To paraphrase a famous fundraising slogan, a mind is a terrible thing to watch wasting away. But that’s what filmmaker Alan Berliner does in his moving and lovingly motivated documentary, “First Cousin Once Removed,” premiering on HBO September 23. Berliner’s subject is his cousin, Edwin Honig (1919-2011), the noted poet, translator and teacher, who spent…
The drama and tension of life in the Middle East are a potential goldmine for filmmakers. Few have excavated that terrain more successfully than Israeli director Eran Riklis. “Zaytoun” (Olive), which opened in New York September 20, is his latest movie to examine the region’s politics in micro-terms. There was an Israeli Druze cross-border wedding…
One of the toughest tickets on Broadway today is “Book of Mormon,” the hilarious spoof on the Church of Latter Day Saints. It is a hoot. But I distinctly remember how uncomfortable I was as I watched, even while laughing out loud. My personal litmus test in these situations is, what if the writers were…
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