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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Film

  • Kon-Tiki at The Explorers Club and in Battery Park City

    Thor Heyerdahl’s legendary journey from Peru to Polynesia on a raft was made famous in the Oscar winning documentary made in 1950, Kon-Tiki. In a new film of this voyage, Kon-Tiki, made with a fine cast of Norwegian actors, Thor Heyerdahl (Pal Sverre Hagen) enters The Explorers Club hoping to find support for this mad trip, and…

  • Breakfast with Screenwriter Paul Laverty: on Ken Loach’s The Angels’ Share and Margaret Thatcher

    Even at 9 AM, you want a whiskey when you’re talking about Ken Loach’s new movie The Angels' Share, screenplay by Paul Laverty, especially as you want to brace yourself for the political and economic realities of this master storyteller’s work. Meeting Paul Laverty at the Nomad Hotel over a latte and chocolate croissant, I…

  • Holocaust Remembrance: Three Films of Survival

    For Holocaust remembrance 2013, what do we remember? As my mother, a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and liberated from Stutthof used to teach us, life is a gift. And it really does matter, how you survive.  Stories of survival can read like fairy tales, best case scenarios fueled by heroism, ingenuity, and luck.…

  • Barbara Walters in Our Nixon

    It was like travelling to the moon, to an alien place, said Barbara Walters about her trip to China with the president during the Nixon administration. If he were here right now, he was so awkward, he wanted so much to be liked, he would tell a dirty joke. Speaking from the stage at the…

  • Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper: The Place Beyond the Pines

    Shoulder to shoulder like Homeric heroes, Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper descended the long stairs at the Landmark Theater on Thursday night, joining Eva Mendes, Ray Liotta, Dane DeHaan and others of the cast and crew onstage for the premiere of Derek Cianfrance’s new movie, The Place Beyond the Pines. The two actors, perhaps the…

  • Gimme the Loot / New Director New Films 2013

    On the eve of this year’s New Directors / New Films Festival, a collaboration between The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, the Titus I theater was abuzz with downtown indie elite: Sofia Coppola, Alex Karpovsky, Elizabeth Olsen, John Cameron Mitchell, Mark Birbiglia, Julia Garner, and photographer Bob Gruen. Gimme…

  • Chris O’Dowd Rocks Out in The Sapphires

    As the manager of a girl band looking, Dave Lovelace (Chris O’Dowd) teaches the four Aboriginal singers the distinction between country western and soul music: both are about loss, but in country western, they just resign themselves to it and whine. In soul, they yearn to get back what they had. In 1968 Australia, this…

  • Ode to Girls: Girl Rising

    The documentary Girl Rising—the title evokes uprising– mixes urgency with great storytelling appeal. The latest moment of the feminist revolution is not about debating issues of women’s equality in the workplace. It is about changing the world one girl at a time through education. Coming just after the recent PBS series, MAKERS, a history of…

  • Audrey Tautou and Populaire at the Paris: Rendez-vous with French Cinema

    Director Regis Roinsard was particularly excited when his film, Populaire, opened the annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema at the Paris Theater. He exulted introducing his stars Romain Duris and Deborah Francois. Evoking Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn movies, Populaire follows this festival’s first night traditions as a frothy comedy with old-fashioned sexist overtones, charming as…

  • Harry Belafonte Waxes Historic at The First Time Film Festival

    “This is a competition disguised as a film festival,” said First Time Film Festival co-founder Johanna Bennett, before introducing a panel featuring Harry Belafonte on Saturday morning at The Players Club. Twelve first films are screening and a winner will get distribution. Just when you thought the world had enough film festivals! But in addition to…

  • The Real Hunger Games: A Place at the Table

    Sounds like a joke, but Hunger Games composer T Bone Burnett, took a break to record his own original music for the documentary, A Place at the Table, a film illuminating the problem of hunger in America. This subject is no joke. Directed by Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson, this film follows a few emblematic…

  • At Restaurant Daniel for the Oscars: Forget Walking the Red Carpet

    In New York on Oscar Sunday, the red carpet will be more than a runway for hopefuls in borrowed gowns and glitter. Chef Daniel Boulud will host a special dinner and viewing of the awards show for the east coast Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at his Restaurant Daniel. The signature drink, a…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Sundance Envy: Kill Your Darlings to Shakespearean Villain: House of Cards

    Back in 2007 when I first took on gossipcentral.com, I wrote about “Sundance Envy,” an oft misdiagnosed disease with one symptom: celluloid deprivation in January. Dr. Freud, are you listening? It is not that I yearn for icy ski conditions. This year Sundance seemed particularly alluring to me with two beat era films, movies of Kerouac’s…

  • 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…