“Third Person,” written and directed by Paul Haggis (“Million Dollar Baby,” “Crash”), tells three love stories about passion, trust and betrayal. “In any relationship,” Haggis said, “there is always a third person present in some form.” Israeli actress Moran Atias, who starred in the TV series “Crash,” pitched the idea of a multi-plotline film about…
Doug Liman made his reputation directing “Swingers,” a film that helped establish the viability of independent film, not to mention the careers of Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau. His personal favorite is “Go,” a movie he knows “no one saw.” But certainly Liman is best known as an action director: “Bourne Identity,” “Mr. & Mrs….
Photo: Chloe Aftel Call it a boy-meets-girl-who-thinks-boy-was-born-a-girl story. In “Adam,” the debut novel from cult graphic memoirist Ariel Schrag, an awkward California teenager named Adam Freedman parachutes into an alien landscape of subcultures and identities when he joins his lesbian sister in Brooklyn for the summer. (Full disclosure: Schrag was featured in “Graphic Details: Confessional…
Courtesy of Joel Warner Denver journalist Joel Warner and his co-author Peter McGraw, a marketing and psychology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, trekked across the world in search of the answer to a seemingly simple question: What makes people laugh? Their book, “The Humor Code,” is at once a lighthearted collection of…
Michael Maren has lived an Indiana Jones kind of life: Peace Corps volunteer, war correspondent from Africa, kidnap victim of a Somali warlord, author, and now filmmaker. However, anyone expecting a hard-hitting documentary exposing the troubles of foreign aid (the subject of his book, “The Road to Hell”) is in for a surprise. In fact,…
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…
‘Frozen’ has hit the place where it (almost) never freezes: Israel. The Disney hit, which has grossed $1.13 billion worldwide — and counting, translates to “Lishbor Et Ha’Kerach” in Hebrew, which means “Breaking the Ice”. “Let It Go” becomes ‘La’azov’ in Hebrew, and it means “To Let Go / To Leave.” Ice Queen Elsa is…
Movies about the army are usually about fighting, sacrifice, a tense atmosphere and people in uniform plotting war strategies. “Zero Motivation,” the first feature film by Israeli director Talya Lavie, shows a different aspect of military life: Set in an army base in the Israeli desert in 2004, it tells the story of a group…
