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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Film

  • Call Me By Your Name: On Peaches and Paternity 

    Just announced, the movie Call Me By Your Name garnered six Independent Spirit Award nominations, more than any other film. On the same day, Andre Aciman and Luca Guadagnino, just back from Italy, spoke about the film at the New York Public Library at 42nd Street. “I hate the word adaptation,” said Andre Aciman, about, eh,…

  • Get Out: Jordan Peele’s Race Matters

    Ever since the movie Get Out opened last February, people have been talking. Is this edgy horror story a vision of blacks’ worst nightmares? Or, are whites more disturbed by the social satire? Comedian/ writer/ director Jordan Peele’s smart movie puts this discourse on the table. For anyone still in the dark, the plot goes…

  • At Lunch with Annette Bening: Being Gloria Grahame

    The Oscar winning actress Gloria Grahame was hardly Hollywood royalty, a sulky blond bombshell playing bad girls and good. The movie Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, directed by Paul McGuigan and based on Peter Turner’s memoir of his affair with the American actress, takes you from her saucy time meeting Turner, a Brit much…

  • Spike Lee, Race in America, and the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville

    “Brooklyn is in the house,” laughs Spike Lee from the stage of the Paramount during his conversation with Maurice Wallace, a high point of last weekend’s Virginia Film Festival. The security at the historic theater is something akin to that in airports, producing long lines for avid film lovers. Spike Lee, in an astute bit…

  • Errol Morris and Joe Berlinger at the 2nd Annual Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards

     “Every time you make a documentary,” said Errol Morris accepting a lifetime achievement award at the 2nd Annual Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards ceremony this week, “you get to reinvent the form. When I sold my series, Wormwood to Netflix, I sold it as the Everything Bagel..

  • Rose Marie in Wait For Your Laugh: Comedienne in her Ninth Decade

    A documentary by Jason Wise  about Rose Marie, Wait For Your Laugh, is a trip down show biz memory lane. Reaching back to the early part of the 20th century, the anecdote-rich film reveals a remarkable career in vaudeville, radio and early television. At age 4, Rose Marie got her big break when the performer Evelyn Nesbit reached out…

  • Al Gore in An Inconvenient Sequel

    When former vice president Al Gore was running for president, few thought he was the life of the party. That lack of pizzazz may have posed a problem for a presidential candidate, who, you may recall won the popular vote. Now comfortably removed from the White House scene, he’s way past that moment, raising awareness…

  • Lois Smith in Marjorie Prime: History in the Making

    In Marjorie Prime, in a not so far away future, humans will have primes, that is, hologram avatars of our deceased loved ones, enabling us to continue to work out the dicey parts of human relationships. This is the hopeful premise of Jordan Harrison’s award winning play Marjorie Prime, on which the movie of Marjorie…

  • Woody Harrelson as LBJ: What it Takes to be Presidential 

    A riveting, bejowled Woody Harrelson occupies the screen making LBJ something he wasn’t: a most charismatic president. Insecure, politically ambitious, Johnson became president under abject circumstances: the presidency was thrust upon him when JFK was assassinated. He wanted the job, but not that way. His personality, his conflicts with Bobby Kennedy, well played by Michael…

  • Justin Timberlake in Wonder Wheel: NYFF’s Closing Night

    In Wonder Wheel, Woody Allen’s latest movie, Justin Timberlake narrates this tale as Mickey, a drama student at NYU and lifeguard at Bay 7 in Coney Island. A cute guy, and a gentleman, he’s into romance, and falls in love with two women: first, a would-be actress, now a waitress at Ruby’s Clam House, Ginny…

  • Goodbye Christopher Robin: A Festive Premiere at the New York Public Library

    “The last time I cast a nine-year old boy,” said director Simon Curtis this week, “it was Daniel Radcliffe.” This time, for his new movie Goodbye Christopher Robin, about the making of the Winnie the Pooh books, Curtis was referring to the impossibly adorable dimpled Will Tilston who plays author A. A. Milne’s son. At…

  • Kumail Nanjiani at “Variety’s 10 to Watch” at the HIFF

    Kumail Nanjiani was in a heated conversation with Bob Balaban at Nick & Toni’s in East Hampton. Without ever having met him before, the Silicon Valleystar named a character in his hit movie of last summer, The Big Sick, on Balaban, and so it seemed at Variety’s 10 to Watch brunch that only six degrees…

  • Julie Andrews Honored at the Hamptons International Film Festival

    Even when she’s coaxing a cockroach out of her purse as a down and out chanteuse in 1930’s Paris, as she does as Victoria in the 1982 Blake Edwards directed comedy Victor/Victoria, Julie Andrews is classy. Screened at the Hamptons International Film Festival this weekend, just prior to a Q&A with Alec Baldwin, a Lifetime…

  • HBO’s Spielberg Premieres at the New York Film Festival

    Director Steven Spielberg seems too young to have a biopic made about him, a filmmaker perpetually in mid-career. His The Post, about the Pentagon Papers will be out this November, he told the crowd pressing around him at HBO’s dinner at Lincoln following the Alice Tully Hall premiere of Spielberg, to air this week. Documentary…

  • Noah Baumbach’s “Stories” Premieres at the New York Film Festival

    At the Q&A following a recent screening of The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) at The New York Film Festival, viewers professed to have seen themselves and loved ones in the story of a family immersed in the elder care of their father, Harold Meyerowitz, a narcissistic sculptor played to perfection by Dustin Hoffman. To…

  • Opening night NYFF: Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying

    Richard Linklater follows his Everybody Wants Some!!, an affable college boy sports romp, with Last Flag Flying, a buddy movie with older guys, featuring Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, and Laurence Fishburne, who played a soldier in Vietnam in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, back in the day, good preparation for this role. Three Vietnam vets on the…

  • Emma Stone as Billie Jean King in The Battle of the Sexes

    Those of us who remember the events of 1973, including the tennis match between feminist Billie Jean King and chauvinist pig Bobby Riggs, see King’s triumph in the larger context of Roe v. Wade, and other advances for women. In the thoroughly enjoyable new movie, The Battle of the Sexes, filmmakers Valerie Faris and Jonathan…

  • Judi Dench Speaks Urdu: Victoria and Abdul

    No one does queen better than Judi Dench! And director Stephen Frears has some experience with queens too, having directed The Queen with Helen Mirren as Elizabeth. In his new film, Victoria and Abdul, Dench plays Queen Victoria as both bored old lady and lonely royal, fatigued by outliving everyone she has ever loved. Into this…

  • Extraordinary Ordinary People Premieres

    Guinean dancer Sidiki Conde walks on his hands as a result of a childhood accident, but that doesn’t stop him from performing traditional dance, and drumming, dedicated to his mother, and motherland. This weekend he and Sheila Kay Adams, a banjo playing balladeer from North Carolina entertained at Cinema Village, following the premiere of Alan…

  • Angelina Jolie’s First They Killed My Father: A Family Story

    Angelina Jolie’s latest directorial –and humanitarian–effort, First They Killed My Father, the film version of Loung Ung’s well-received book from 2000, adds to this gifted director’s body of work illuminating injustice. A personal history of the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia seen through the eyes of a 5 year old little girl, the movie softens…

  • Top of the Lake: China Girl’s Matrilineage

    A fetus is found in a sex worker’s womb, her dead body encased in a valise washed up on shore in Sydney. Crime detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) is on the case, and meets up with her biological daughter, the product of a gang rape when she was 16. Mary (Alice Englert), now 17, has…

  • Rebel in the Rye: Explaining the Reclusive J. D. Salinger

    It is not easy to capture a writer’s creative process in a movie, especially when the artist was determined to stay out of the public eye. Danny Strong took on that task in his Rebel in the Rye, the story of J. D. Salinger’s coming of age as a writer, culminating in the publication of…

  • Heat and Dust Gets a New Life: An Interview with Director James Ivory

    James Ivory, with his partner Ismail Merchant, famously made outstanding films, often based on literary works, for several decades. Charles Cohen, known for distributing fine foreign films, has restored their sumptuous Heat and Dust (1983), his third Merchant-Ivory classic, after Howard’s End (1991) and Maurice (1987) to be revived through his Cohen Film Collection. Set…

  • Icarus on Netflix: Summerdocs’ Finale at Guild Hall

                                It almost sounded like a good word about ISIS as filmmaker Bryan Fogel compared the tactics of the Russian Government with respect to whistleblowers, to the terrorists we know and fear at the final evening in the HIFF Summerdocs series at Guild Hall. He was saying that when they off people, ISIS steps up and…

  • Eric Fischl’s Poster Celebrates the 25th Anniversary of the Hamptons International Film Festival

    Eric Fischl might be the East End’s busiest artist: aside from painting, and showing his work, the North Haven-based painter is President of Guild Hall’s Academy of the Arts, and active with his wife April Gornik in the effort to rebuild the Sag Harbor Cinema as a community film and arts center. When he was…