recent posts

about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Film

  • Regarding Susan Sontag on HBO

    Back in the day, Susan Sontag was the big anxiety of influence. Public intellectual, essayist, activist, provocateur, critic, and novelist, she was the giant thinker to topple for any woman. Few could claim her intellectual maternity. “I feel sorry for you,” said one male professor to the women in his class, as if we were…

  • Hamm-Strung at the Gotham Awards

    The annual celebration of indie films kicking off the vibrant awards season every year gets more glamorous, honoring the outstanding and risk-taking films that are going to make it to Oscars—like Boyhood and Birdman, as well as those that are just great, likes’Laura Poitra documentary Citizenfour, Ira Sachs’ Love is Strange, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin,…

  • An Enigma Wrapped in Inhumanity: The Imitation Games’ Algebra of Need

    The story of a brilliant man, Alan Turing, brought to suicide after being disgraced for being gay, the movie The Imitation Game reflects the sexual politics of a bygone era. In the midcentury, homosexuality was a disease that could be cured, and surprisingly in the US Bible belt, some believe that canard today. In this…

  • Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar: Here to Go

    Last year we had Gravity, a chamber music concert compared to this year’s grand oratorio, Interstellar. As we all know, our planet is going to seed, or in this case, dust, and something must be done to save mankind, worthy or not. Epic, each in its way, Gravity’s outer space was intimate, a place for…

  • Jake Gyllenhaal’s Eyes in Nightcrawler

    Jake Gyllenhaal’s Leo Bloom in Nightcrawler is as creepy as the movie’s title suggests. A bug-eyed loner who preys on the misfortunes of others, Bloom’s very language appropriates television-speak with information garnered on the Internet to make him reptilian. Negotiating his way through interactions, he acquires a camera and means to follow disasters, and finds…

  • Lunch with Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones: The Theory of Everything

    Stephen Hawking, ALS and all, is such a “character,” he’s perfect as the charismatic center of a movie. That’s partly because of his brilliance in physics and cosmology, partly because his bold yet childlike persona, and partly because of the woman who kept his brain alive, his wife Jane. A new movie based on her…

  • James Brown on HBO: Deconstructing Mr. Dynamite’s Moves

    Alex Gibney’s documentary, Mr. Dynamite, limns the extraordinary rise of James Brown’s career, and more: interviews with his sidemen give a history of rhythm and blues, and race. Mick Jagger talks about coming to the Apollo to see James Brown and trying to simulate, and surpass, the legendary performer’s signature moves. Jazz musicians Fred Wesley…

  • Jason Reitman’s Lonely Planet: Men, Women, and Children

    Every computer-age gadget is deployed to bad effect in Jason Reitman’s satiric new movie, Men, Women, and Children, and that’s the least of the targets of his scrutiny: how about sex, ambition, and most of all, power, particularly of the parental kind. Let me say, there was not one adult I could admire in this…

  • Julianne Moore in Still Alice Closes the Hamptons International Film Festival

    Radiant in black taffeta on Guild Hall’s stage after the movie Still Alice screened, Julianne Moore said the way you play a woman with degenerating early Alzheimer’s is to reach for normality, for what she can remember. Even buffeted by family, a supportive Alec Baldwin, and daughters Kate Bosworth and Kristen Stewart, son Hunter Parrish,…

  • Robert Downey, Jr.’s Anxiety of Influence in The Judge

    As any Freudian will tell you, father and son relationships are mythically fraught. In Robert Downey, Jr.’s new movie, The Judge, he’s a killer New York lawyer with a small town judge father (Robert Duvall) to topple, but there’s a twist: he has to defend his father in a murder case. The courtroom tension rests…

  • Hilary Swank in The Homesman at the Hamptons International Film Festival

    Holding court after a sumptuous brunch honoring Hilary Swank for receiving Montblanc’s Creative Impact in Acting award and Variety’s “Class of 10 Actors to Watch” at the Maidstone in East Hampton, Swank, her dog Kai by her side, spoke about her role as Mary Bee Cuddy in The Homesman, Tommy Lee Jones’ movie set in…

  • Burroughs: The Movie Returns to The New York Film Festival

    Burroughs: The Movie opens with a clip from Saturday Night Live. The actress/ model Lauren Hutton introduces William S. Burroughs, proclaiming him the greatest living American writer, in her view. That last qualifier had to be included so that it would not look like a hoax, SNL’s music director Hal Willner told me last night…

  • Bill Murray’s Funny Moves in St. Vincent: The Premiere

    Bill Murray’s got some moves in St. Vincent, a big-hearted movie that had its New York premiere last night, a few days prior to opening the Hamptons International Film Festival this coming weekend. Murray’s shimmying in his seedy Sheepshead Bay kitchen, and singing to Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm,” are some of the film’s many…

  • Children Lost and Found: The Good Lie Premieres

    Film audiences may flock to The Good Lie, a compelling drama because Reese Witherspoon is one of the stars, but they will fall in love with Arnold Oceng, Ger Duany, rapper Emmanuel Jal, and Kuoth Wiel; the story, about the lost boys and girls of Sudan during the terrible reign of war lords, The Good…

  • Quincy Jones Holds Court at Keep On Keepin’ On ‘s Premiere

    The buzz continues for the documentary Keep On Keepin’ On, even this early in awards season:  this documentary may follow 20 Feet from Stardom to Oscars. The documentary’s catchy title, Keep On Keepin’ On, comes from the legendary trumpeter Clark Terry, now 94, a line he uses to inspire young musicians such as Justin Kauflin,…

  • At the New York Film Festival: Alarming Women in David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars and David Fincher’s Gone Girl

    David Cronenberg turns horror to comedy in his latest feature Maps to the Stars, based on fiction by Bruce Wagner. Hollywood is known more for its superficiality than for depths of any kind, so exploring themes of damaged children, incest, and high narcissism set in L.A., you may come up with a movie as disturbing…

  • On the Set: Federico Castelluccio Directs Lily of the Feast

    On the last day of shooting Lily of the Feast, a feature set in 1970’s Williamsburg, Troy Garity, in a suit, sits on the edge of a bathtub, counting. The L.A. based actor, son of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden plays Santo Bastucci, a young man with a gift for memorizing numbers, a handy skill,…

  • Old School Heroics: Denzel Washington in The Equalizer and Ethan Hawke’s Seymour: An Introduction at the New York Film Festival

    Ethan Hawke made it to the Stone Rose Lounge for the premiere of Denzel Washington’s new movie The Equalizer. Co-host of the party, Hawke proclaimed that the big blast action movie was polar opposite to the documentary he made about Seymour Bernstein, a poetic composer/ pianist/ educator, one of many highlights of the New York…

  • The Green Prince: Is Peace in the Middle East a Possibility?

    Mosab Hassan Yousef fixes you with his intense, messianic gaze, hardly seeming to blink. The son of a Hamas founder, dubbed “the green prince,” he gave intelligence to the Israeli Shin Bet, went into exile, and wrote a book about his experience, Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable…

  • Meryl Streep Hosts the NY Premiere of My Old Lady at MoMA

    Along with Glenn Close, Meryl Streep hosted a premiere screening this week of Israel Horovitz’ My Old Lady at MoMA. Her family in tow, husband Don Gummer and daughter Mamie, she was celebrating her pal Kevin Kline’s lead performance in this charming romance set in Paris, as well as Horovitz’ debut as filmmaker. At 75,…

  • Steve Buscemi’s Day Job: HBO’s A Good Job: Stories of the FDNY

    Stories about firefighters conjure images of 9/11, inevitably, as no one can forget the enormous sacrifice of those men climbing up the stairs as others rushed down. In the documentary, A Good Job, images of the site the day after haunt, well after the documentary, directed by Liz Garbus, finishes with its final big hugs:…

  • John Waters’ Women at the Film Society of Lincoln Center

    No one missed the irony of a John Waters retrospective at The Walter Reade Theater across Lincoln Center’s plaza from Fashion Week. On opening night, Waters, in hot red pants and print jacket, introduced the Female Trouble screening noting that he had to explain to drag queens that cha-cha heels, coveted by his heroine Dawn…

  • Summerdoc Finale and Others: The Overnighters, Pump, Levitated Mass

    The Overnighters, Jesse Moss’ much lauded film at Sundance, screened last night at Guild Hall, a finale for the Hamptons International Film Festival Summerdocs series. Thinking he was following the story of the many men who descended on North Dakota looking for work in the fracking boom there, Jesse Moss found a compelling central character, Pastor Jay…

  • Hamptons Journal: Last Days in Vietnam Screens at Guild Hall

    The war in Vietnam still conjures volatile emotions for those who lived during that heady time in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. That’s why Alec Baldwin insisted that the audience at Guild Hall Saturday night ask only questions related to the documentary, Last Days in Vietnam; host of the Hamptons International Film Festival’s Summerdocs series, he…

  • Remembering Robert Altman in a Documentary on EPIX

    When critics talk about the heyday of American filmmaking in the 1970’s, director Robert Altman was not only a part of that flourishing, he was at the forefront. With movies like McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Nashville (1975), and Three Women (1977), my personal favorites—his films did not seem to operate by any predictable formula.…