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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Events

  • Safe Haven Heats Up

    You could say that the chemistry between Katie (Julianne Hough) and Alex (Josh Duhamel) is incendiary in the psychological thriller cum romance Safe Haven. This film by Lasse Hallstrom based upon a Nicholas Sparks novel may be on trend in some unforeseen ways. Without spoiling the inflammatory (pun intended) end for its assured volume of…

  • John Lloyd Young’s “My Turn” at the Café Carlyle

    From beginning to end, John Lloyd Young’s performance at the Café Carlyle was a love affair attuned to the Valentine’s Day of your youth. “You’re Just Too Good to be True,” the Tony winning original “Frankie Valli” from “Jersey Boys” crooned, to “How Can I Be Sure,” followed by an homage to the room itself.…

  • Ferlinghetti: Not all Beat Poets are Beat

    Back in the day, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was all the rage. Paperbacks of A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) could be seen stuffed in jean pockets on college campuses, on subways. Even mainstream readers who were not particularly into poetry loved the surreal imagery of this verse. A decade later, books by Allen…

  • Gloria Steinem and The Faces of Feminism: MAKERS: Women Who Make America

    The Women’s Movement is not only about Gloria Steinem, she will readily tell you. First, as Rita Mae Brown exclaims in MAKERS, a documentary chronicling the most recent phase of the Women’s Movement, she’s drop dead gorgeous. Then again, she’s smart, talented, and even when the focus is on her, as when she walked the red…

  • Oscar’s Divine Decadence: Cabaret at Forty

    Innovative in its time, Cabaret, the quintessential movie musical marked its anniversary with a special screening last week at The Ziegfeld Theater where it premiered forty years ago. The stars, Liza Minelli, Joel Grey, Michael York, and Marisa Berenson joined Robert Osbourne onstage, answering some questions about the making of this landmark song and dance…

  • How Am I Doing? Koch: The Movie

    On Wednesday morning, just after the premiere of Neil Barsky’s documentary Koch, the news came on a television crawl: Ed Koch had missed the party, hospitalized. And this morning, on the film’s opening day, he has died. His tenure as New York mayor was not exactly “the best of times,” given a span of three-terms…

  • The Americans at The Russian Tea Room

    Brrrrr! On this chilly weekend, the new FX television series The Americans premiered at the DGA Theater: a young couple played by Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell enter a Maryland motel room circa 1960’s. Russian spies, they are finding the U.S. summer brutal. Spying an air conditioner, they are relieved to bask in the frigid…

  • Disaster is My Muse: Hannah Arendt and The Art of Spiegelman at the Jewish Film Festiva

    Even in the age of terrorism, the terror of the last century’s The Holocaust, has not lost its hold on the artistic imagination. As the victims of The Shoah are remembered at the United Nations and in synagogues worldwide, films continue to shed light on that darkest hour of the twentieth century. The Jewish Film…

  • The Motherf—ker in Charge: National Board of Review/ Academy Award Nominations

    Who knew host Meredith Vieira could swear like a trucker, or imagine herself at 59 as a dead Pussy Galore? But as the television personality reminded a packed Cipriani’s on 42nd street for the National Board of Review’s Awards Gala on Tuesday night, paraphrasing Jessica Chastain’s “Maya” in Zero Dark Thirty: “I’m the Motherf—ker in charge.” …

  • Hold the Free-Range Chicken and Creamed Kale: Tom Hooper Celebrated at Michael’s

    Having dined royally on Les Miserables, a musical that has its characters literally singing idealistic and starving to death, well-wishers came together for lunch at Michael’s on Tuessday–four tables worth in the garden room– to congratulate Tom Hooper on his stellar achievement directing this film. But, why now, the day of the National Board of…

  • Deploying the “F” Word at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards

    Around midnight on Monday night, the area around Crimson had a pulse. Four women from Amsterdam stood outside the club looking for Chris Rock. A crowd rushed screaming “Daniel” on East 21st street. Was it Craig, sneaking a Bond-worthy getaway in a black tricked out SUV? Or was it Day Lewis, who was honored as…

  • Anticipating a Big Week for Zero Dark Thirty

    At a luncheon at “21” early last December, Jessica Chastain was relieved. Not because her new film Zero Dark Thirty was chosen as Best Film by the New York Film Critics Circle and National Board of Review, but because her secret could now be known. For a year after she was slated for the lead…

  • Jack Kerouac’s Mother Tongue: On the Road and The Voice is All

    Kerouac aficionados will have a fine time teasing out details director Walter Salles and scriptwriter Jose Rivera took from the 1957 On the Road publication vs. the 1951 scroll text, the ur-Road first published in 2007. For example, the first line of the new movie focuses on the father, but then the story flips to the fictional characters…

  • Dr. Oz Prescribes Silver Linings Playbook at Le Cirque

    Standing high on a stepladder, Dr. Mehmet Oz addressed the crowd at Le Cirque, at cocktails for Silver Linings Playbook director David O. Russell and his star Robert DeNiro. The talk show host applied his professional expertise, noting the unexpected relevance of SLP to current events, the horrific tragedy in Newtown, Ct. as this audience…

  • Revisiting the Crime Scene: West of Memphis and Paradise Lost Trilogy: The Boxed Set

    While The Hobbit, Peter Jackson’s prequel to his Tolkien inspired Lord of the Rings series, leads the box office charts, the New Zealand director was in town last week for its premiere, but that was not the only film he has opening. The next night, he introduced his film of passion, West of Memphis, the…

  • Les Mis at the Four Seasons/ Museum of the Moving Image Honors Hugh Jackman

    They’ve been going non-stop. With New York screenings and lavish dinners, a quick jump across the pond for the London premiere, and back for the New York party at MoMA and appearances on many talk shows, Hugh Jackman was positive we’d all be sick of him by now. From his Jean Valjean role in Les…

  • Quartet: Dustin Hoffman as Breakthrough Director

    Fresh from Kennedy Center Honors, the actor Dustin Hoffman was promoting his new movie, Quartet, his directorial debut. At a Q&A following a screening last week, the Academy Award winning actor noted the relationship between acting and directing. When he was starting out, he wanted to direct. He had a dream: You could be the…

  • Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts: Rust and Bone’s Tender Heart

    Midway through a luncheon celebrating Rust and Bone, news came that the French film starring Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts was nominated for an Independent Spirit Best International film award. Not even a glass was raised, as if awards for this edgy movie were simply a matter of course. SONY Pictures Classics’ Michael Barker said…

  • Independent Film Project’s Gotham Awards: Don’t Hate Me Because I Won

    Jared Leto won the audience award at the annual IFP’s Gotham Awards at Cipriani Wall Street for his movie Artifacts; the film was mostly unknown to most at my table of industry insiders, but that sums up the theme of this, the ultimate alternative awards ceremony that even has a category, Best Film Not Playing…

  • Girls’ Night Out: Zero Dark Thirty and the Death of Osama bin Laden

    Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s take on the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a thrilling Zero Dark Thirty, begins with torture so brutal I found it an eye averting experience. But not CIA operative Maya (the delicate, fine-boned, redhead Jessica Chastain) on assignment, recruited after high school to work on the war on terrorism. “She’s…

  • Flight Director Robert Zemeckis Flies

    On the face of it, Flight is your standard redemption story. Taking you aboard a plane falling apart in heavy winds, Flight is not what it seems. Audiences may be expecting Airplane! without the laughs, or a claustrophobic bumpy drama aboard a doomed vehicle. The film is about character, extending beyond the lead to nuanced supporting…

  • Documentaries on the Case: The Central Park Five and Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God

    On April 19, 1989, you could not miss the headlines—and the horror of the Central Park jogger case. A white woman in a tracksuit, pummeled, raped, unconscious. Who did this? Packs of wild black boys aprowl in the park. Case closed. The Central Park Five, the final non-fiction feature in the DOC NYC Fest last…

  • On the Road: The Vehicle Gets a Tune Up

    En route to L.A. for its West Coast premiere, Director Walter Salles introduced a private screening of his new film, On the Road, last week, pointing out that as a teen in his native Brazil, he was drawn to the characters in Jack Kerouac’s novel; they represented a freedom foreign to his homeland, where writing…

  • Silver Linings Playbook: Reading the Signs with Jacki Weaver

    The winner of audience awards in Toronto, the Hamptons, and other film festivals, David O. Russell’s new movie, Silver Linings Playbook is not only a crowd pleaser, it has the gravitas to make it to the top awards. This movie is to Philadelphia, The Eagles and football what Lowell, Massachusetts and the ring was to…

  • Inventing David Geffen on PBS: What Am I Gonna Do With Cher?

    David Geffen is so funny, sharing anecdotes featuring a Who’s Who in music and movies for the two-hour PBS documentary, Inventing David Geffen, you would never know that he actually dislikes public speaking. A self-proclaimed dummy in his Brooklyn elementary school, by 1976 he had sold several companies and had amassed a billion dollars. As…