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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Events

  • Jerry Lewis Takes MoMA as Max Rose, First Movie in Two Decades

    Off the charts irrepressible, Jerry Lewis, a few days after his 90th birthday, took charge at his own Q&A at MoMA after a screening of his first movie in 18 years, Max Rose. From a script written by first time director Daniel Noah, who persisted through many rejections from those who think you cannot make…

  • Matthew Modine, Treat Williams, Rosie Perez, Olympia Dukakis Talk Politics at the Sarasota Film Festival

    A political theme ran through this year’s Sarasota Film Festival extending to its yearly event Cinema Tropicale redubbed Cinema Politicale. At the huge bash at Michael’s on East, a near naked man wore stars and stripes body paint in red, white, and blue. Guests included Matthew Modine, represented at the festival with a screening of Full…

  • Rumer Willis Debuts at the Café Carlyle

    Rumer Willis, eldest daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis may have her own take on love. At 28, she’s a headliner at the famed Café Carlyle with a jazzy, pop show that looks at love from many angles. Covering Doris Day’s “Perhaps,” she imagines a new honesty in the cha-cha beat. For Buddy Johnson’s…

  • Anderson Cooper’s Anxiety of Influence: Gloria Vanderbilt

    Depending on what era formed you, you can relate to a piece of Gloria Vanderbilt. If you are old enough, it’s the “Poor Little Rich Girl” headlines, or maybe it’s her dating Frank Sinatra, or the designer jeans with the swan logo. Women wore her name across their derrieres. She’s lived every era fully, and…

  • Steven Soderbergh’s Film to Television: The Girlfriend Experience on Starz

    The woman to my left at the Paris Theater premiere of The Girlfriend Experience pulled a lipstick out of her Prada bag and applied the nude Bobbi Brown in one swift motion without a mirror. I do that with my way more risky Russian red MAC, I thought, feeling competitive, and contemplating the series sample I…

  • Robert Mapplethorpe: His Perfect Moment on HBO

    The subtitle of the unflinching documentary, Robert Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, comes from Senator Jesse Helms, enemy of free expression, hallmark of our democracy. Bookending the movie about the photographer who came of age in the ‘60’s and died at age 42 of AIDS in 1989, the senator’s words are meant to denigrate the art of…

  • Steve Martin Plays Banjo for Bright Star’s Opening Night

    The sweet twang of bluegrass is just the right sound for the sweet happy ending of “Bright Star,” a musical based on a newspaper item found by Edie Brickell describing a miracle. Working with Steve Martin, a not so wild and crazy guy in his current incarnation as Americana icon, the two have composed country…

  • Steven Page at the Café Carlyle: “Heal Thyself: Past, Present, and Future”

    Steven Page, a guy-next-door type who co-founded a Canadian pop band called the Barenaked Ladies, and left to pursue a solo career in 2009, performs at the Café Carlyle for two weeks. You won’t be singing along to his tunes of day-to-day male angst. That’s because his tunes are not familiar: he has composed all of…

  • Missing Nora Ephron: Everything is Copy on HBO

    The patron saint of smart New York women, Nora Ephron is sorely missed. We have not seen her like since 2012 when she died at age 71 of pneumonia and leukemia. Not that you could refashion her particular savvy, audacity, and wit. Now her son Jacob Bernstein has made a film about her, Everything is…

  • Joan Osborne: Tangled Up in Blue at the Café Carlyle

    Joan Osborne’s many fans expected her to sing her signature “One of Us” at the Café Carlyle this week, but instead she sang a specially designed show of Bob Dylan tunes, and had us all in a head bobbing sing-along. “Who knew the Carlyle could become a hootenanny,” she quipped after telling tales of performing…

  • Smokefall at the Lucille Lortel Theater: What’s Going on in that Womb?

    Forget Cats. So much has spun off T. S. Eliot’s poetry, the Wasteland and Four Quartets scribe would be especially laughing from the grave with Noah Haidle’s surreal play Smokefall, a MCC production at the Lucille Lortel Theater. If you pay attention to the Playbill’s author note where Haidle claims to be living in Detroit…

  • Rendez-Vous with French Cinema: Women Directors Flouish

    Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, a popular film series at Lincoln Center, was particularly robust this year. Following upon the American Academy Awards season, Rendez-vous was especially refreshing with so many films directed by women. In general, the French film industry seems less mired in obsessions with political diversity, and P.C. poses. Men and women act…

  • Michael Shannon Stars in a Sci-Fi Thriller: Midnight Special

    Cults, car chases, a kid with lazer beam eyes, a satellite from outer space! What more could you want in a movie? As director Jeff Nichols said over high tea at 21 this week, “I wanted to make a sci fi-chase movie.” As he did in his film Take Shelter, Nichols cast Michael Shannon as…

  • Helen Mirren in Eye in the Sky: Debating the Cost of War

    What a coup! Publicist Peggy Siegal exulted in the day’s headlines: drones taking down 150 al-Shabab inductees in Africa. The occasion was a luncheon at la Grenouille to celebrate the movie Eye in the Sky. Directed by Gavin Hood and starring Helen Mirren, with Alan Rickman in his last performance for the screen, this nail-biting…

  • Sarah Jessica Parker’s Ruse at the Guild Hall Gala

    Sarah Jessica Parker is a terrific actress. That’s what artist Eric Fishl, in his role as Guild Hall’s President of the Arts and gala host, said on Tuesday night at the Rainbow Room where the Sex & the City star was being feted for a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Performing Arts. On the red…

  • Lupita Nyong’o in Eclipsed: Girls Interrupted

    A local Liberian warlord’s women in a bare hut in Eclipsed at the Golden Theater are called wife #1, #3, and #4, but as written by Danai Gurira, they could not be more individual if you knew them by their mother-given names. Unseen, when he comes by, “C.O.” beckons them. Each returns to the room,…

  • Mavis! On HBO: I’ll Take You There

    Aretha’s no Mavis! The declaration gets a laugh in Jessica Edwards’ documentary Mavis! on HBO. Last week’s premiere screening at the Alliance Francais, was the film party of the season: inspiring at 76, Mavis Staple is a dynamo. When Edwards heard her perform at the band shell in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, she knew she had…

  • Rita Wilson at the Café Carlyle: Picturing Tom Hanks

    “I’m in a roomful of people I know,” Rita Wilson began her intimate set at the Café Carlyle on Thursday. Though this was not opening night, the room took on an extra glow: on one side sat Michael J. Fox, on the other, Tom Brokaw, Carolina Herrera, Ken Auletta, Richard Cohen, and William Ivey Long…

  • Carol Composer Carter Burwell: An Interview

    Todd Haynes’ film Carol, an evocative love story set in the 1950’s, adapted from an edgy Patricia Highsmith novel, The Price of Salt, is nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Original Score, composed by Carter Burwell. His music can be heard in several current movies including the Oscar nominated animated Anomalisa, and the Coen…

  • “Til it Happens to You:” Diane Warren’s Oscar-Nominated Collaboration with Lady Gaga

    The Hunting Ground, a powerful documentary from filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, shines a light on the widespread phenomenon of rape on college campuses. The film’s music supervisor Bonnie Greenberg called Diane Warren to write the music. The prolific and popular songwriter with 7 Oscar nods immediately said yes. Now, with “Til it Happens…

  • “This Place” at the Brooklyn Museum: Outsiders Photograph Israel

    In the fall of 2012, the French-born photographer Frederic Brenner took me to a swimming hole in the Bet Shean valley in Israel. Crowds sat on the edge of rocks waiting to jump in. Brenner exulted in the place, where the Romans, he told me, came in ancient times, a site I “dare not miss.”…

  • Simple Song #3 in Youth: An Interview with Composer David Lang

    In Paolo Sorrentino’s movie Youth, Michael Caine plays a retired composer on holiday at a spa in the Swiss Alps. He hears a young student practicing the composition for which he is best known. The precocious boy says his professor finds it easy to learn, and continues, “It’s more than that. It is beautiful.” Caine’s character…

  • Linda Lavin in Our Mother’s Brief Affair

    At first inRichard Greenberg’s Our Mother’s Brief Affair, as described by her son Seth while she is on her deathbed, Linda Lavin’s Anna appears to be cut from the familiar cloth of Great Neck moms, ambitious for their children and somewhat lost in suburban torpor. But Anna has a secret, actually two, that she needs…

  • John Lloyd Young at the Café Carlyle: A Jersey Boy Goes Rogue

    Trading in the tux for leathers, John Lloyd Young used aviator glasses to hide his prom date good looks, but this makeover did not deter his devoted fans on opening night of his set, “Yours Truly,” at the Café Carlyle. Yes, there was no shortage of Jersey Boys hits with “Sherry” and “Can’t Take My…

  • Jane Fonda at Caroline’s Comedy Club: Championing the Equal Rights Amendment

    Photo: Paula Schwartz Sunday night’s Superbowl may have been the focus for a majority of Americans, but a rival event took place at Caroline’s Comedy Club, with Jane Fonda as M. C., introduced by Gloria Steinem. Calling herself a quintessential late bloomer to feminism, Jane Fonda recalled that she really did not understand what it…