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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Film

  • Garden Party at Goose Creek: The Odd Life of Timothy Green

    Before you meet the young boy with a curious accessory, leaves growing from his ankles, in the new movie from Disney, The Odd Life of Timothy Green, you think the message may have something to do with the environment. Although there’s plenty of dirt from the garden, this feature, conceived by Ahmet Zappa and written…

  • American Dream Gone Gilded Age: Queen of Versailles

    You remember what happened to that queen of yore, the one who in a moment of mythic indifference to her subjects’ suffering suggested they eat cake. That queen is so deliciously portrayed by Diane Kruger in Benoit Jacquot’s fine Farewell, My Queen. In a new documentary, Queen of Versailles, an American version of her, a distortion…

  • Albert Maysles Rocks Guild Hall

    At 85, legendary documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles still has “IT.” This week to commemorate The Rolling Stones’ fiftieth anniversary, he was on hand at Guild Hall for a screening of his early film of the iconic band, Gimme Shelter (1970). The next night, he spoke at a screening of The Love We Make (2011), a…

  • Deconstructing Dad: An Anxiety of Influence

    Perusing a photo of his father in a boat on his honeymoon, smile wide and happy, in his documentary Deconstructing Dad, noted film editor and director Stan Warnow says ruefully, I never saw him this way. Filling in the Freudian gap might be reason enough to make this film, but there’s also the fact that…

  • Farewell, My Queen: A View of Pre-Beheading Versailles

    Director Benoit Jacquot’s take on the last days of Marie Antoinette, Farewell, My Queen, is based on a book by Chantal Thomas, looks at history from the perspective of a servant with a talent for embroidery. I don’t know another filmmaker who studies the behavior of women with quite the care and consideration of this…

  • Searching for Sugar Man at Guild Hall: Alec Baldwin, Honorary Chairman of the Board

    Just days after he married Hilaria Thomas, when he could have been in some exotic place on honeymoon, Alec Baldwin, taking his Hamptons International Film Festival duties very seriously, took the stage at East Hampton’s Guild Hall, to introduce a documentary that’s been garnering buzz at film festivals. A hit at Sundance and Berlin, Searching…

  • Mira Sorvino: Drama Queen in Union Square

    In a bygone era, drug addled users could score in Union Square; now the health-minded can cop organic kale and cucumbers in a caravan of farm stands. Deftly bringing both the edgy past and cleaned up present together with humor and heart, Nancy Savoca’s new movie, Union Square, features a stunning performance by Mira Sorvino…

  • Love Italian Style: Hanging Out with Woody Allen

    Everyone (some real life family and old flames famously excluded) loves Woody Allen. At a press conference at the Regency for his new film To Rome with Love on Tuesday, reporters took that as a given, asking his actors how they get past their own adoration for the auteur. A love fest ensued. Penelope Cruz…

  • Sitting with Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present Premieres at MoMA

    Because the 2010 exhibition of her work at MoMA was titled “The Artist is Present,” Marina Abramovic knew what to do. At a recent screening of a documentary based on this show appropriately at MoMA, she explained she could do nothing but be present, that is, occupy a chair facing a viewer for 12-hour sessions.…

  • Jane Fonda: More Than the Sum of her Parts

    When people say that at 74 a person is over the hill, Jane Fonda says she is looking at the next hill on the horizon. With an upcoming HBO series, her recent book Prime Time, several new movies including one in French and Bruce Beresford's  Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding opening this week, the hill looks more…

  • Kerouac in Cannes: A Road Not Taken

    I am pleased that the reports from Cannes about the On the Road, Walter Salles’ film are mainly favorable, although I have taken note that some say there is no inner world for the characters, that the film has no discernable plot, that it is overlong. I have been following this progress for at least a decade. When…

  • Portrait of Wally and Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story: Two Faces of Ronald Lauder

    Of the atrocities of the Nazi period in Europe, the theft of art may be the least of the horrors, but as the new documentary Portrait of Wally shows, the provenance of art can be infinitely fascinating. “Who owns art?” you might say is the center of the debate concerning art stolen from Jews. But…

  • PEN World Voices: Kronos Quartet vs. A Trio of Scribes

    Wednesday evening at the Metropolitan Museum was meant to be a correspondence, an exploration of words and music featuring the Kronos Quartet and the writers Rula Jebreal, Marjane Satrapi, and Tony Kushner, but to most ears there was a friendly cacophony. Salman Rushdie, president of PEN introduced the much anticipated event noting that the World…

  • Steal the Chandeliers: John Oliver at the Museum of the Moving Image Dinner/ Christopher Hitchens Remembered at Cooper Union’s Great Hall

    Well, The Daily Show funnyman John Oliver did not exactly recommend stealing the six rather heavy looking, grand crystal chandeliers at the St. Regis Hotel, but he did refer to them a few times, as emblematic of the posh surroundings at the same time that he advised the gown and tuxedo clad crowd to follow…

  • Girls Just Wanna Have: HBO’s Girls and Mary Harron’s Moth Diaries

    Grounded in a current day realism about sex, friendship, and work for recent college grads, HBO’s much touted series Girls, airs this weekend. To focus on one aspect of its satire, in Girls, sex is free and freely given, an unsatisfying service by the girls, done with bewildered cads, happy to get what they can.…

  • The Film Society of Lincoln Center Honors Catherine Deneuve

      “I’m the only presenter who slept with Catherine Deneuve,” said Susan Sarandon in a tribute speech at Alice Tully Hall on Monday night when the French actress was honored with the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 2012 Chaplin Award. The ensuing clip from The Hunger (1983) shows the iconic Deneuve kissing her co-star’s hardened nipples.…

  • Be Italian: Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope

    Introducing a private screening of his new movie, We Have a Pope, this week, director Nanni Moretti stopped mid-sentence and walked up the aisle to kiss kiss his pal John Turturro. Of course he was speaking in Italian and the gesture seemed so European, the audience including Tony LoBianco, Gay Talese, John Ventimiglia, Michael Musto,…

  • Harvey Weinstein Will Release Bully Unrated

    Teenhood is not for sissies. Lee Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen’s documentary Bully opens with the dead-eyed gaze of a man, a father, talking about the suicide of his son, a victim of bullying. As if ripped from the proverbial front pages, the movie resonates with public awareness of this mean-spirited practice akin to the Rutgers…

  • Flashing Back with Sara Driver on the Bowery

    My favorite Sara Driver story involves her 1981 film of Paul Bowles’s short story, “You Are Not I.” Long thought lost, a print of the 48-minute film was discovered in 2008 among Bowles’ possessions in Tangier, Morocco in his driver’s insecticide-laden basement. Now restored, the film was featured at several conferences and festivals celebrating the…

  • Public Academic: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Follows Alex Haley’s Roots

    Admiring the television series Roots as a boy, Yale educated and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores a passion for genetics and genealogies in a new PBS series, Finding Your Roots, to start this Sunday. Featuring Mayor Cory Booker and Congressman John Lewis in the season premiere, a private screening wowed audiences at Lincoln…

  • Chill with Frozen Planet on Discovery

    Our winter may be mild but the cold breeze off Lincoln Center last week for the premiere of Frozen Planet was distinct, in the teeth-chattering presence of cool sculptures of an ice waterfall and ice penguins. And inside Alice Tully Hall, the temperature was brisk too. The Discovery Channel’s documentary series Frozen Planet, “The Ends…

  • Audrey Tautou, Etcetera at the French Rendez-vous

    Petite and utterly adorable, the French movie star Audrey Tautou will always be known as the “Amelie” girl for her delightful performance in the 2001 film. On closing night of this year’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema, she was the guest of honor at a soiree at the upper East side Cultural Services of the French…

  • Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, and Fish on Your Plate

    Lasse Hallstrom’s new movie, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, is a romance with an improbable premise. A liberal minded sheik wants to bring salmon to his native Yemen, not the kind you eat, but those that need a waterway for jumping and swimming upstream to spawn. This feat involves more than irrigating the Negev. Being…

  • Game Change on HBO: Sarah Palin, See this Movie!

    For the same reasons that Sarah Palin is a riveting figure in American politics, the HBO movie Game Change is an astonishingly smart look at her and the world that put her in the position of John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election. Even when played by Julianne Moore, you cannot take your…

  • Harvey Weinstein’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema Gets Political

    It’s a great year for Harvey Weinstein. The Weinstein Company co-chairman is  the 2012 recipient of the Legion d’ Honneur awarded by France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy. The distinction was conferred last July but Weinstein wisely requested, according to a press release, “to keep the honor private to avoid a conflict of interest with Academy Award Best…