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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Film

  • Hamptons Journal: Bay Street’s Camelot, Robert Longo at Guild Hall, Diana Frank at Tripoli Gallery

    Legends of King Arthur and his court are having a moment: The Green Knight in theaters, and out east, Bay Street Theater’s production of Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot –under the stars! Now a classic, its signature song “If Ever I Would Leave You” sends a particular nostalgic chill—ah love—especially for the musical theater genre that…

  • Remembering Anthony Bourdain in Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner

    The Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville assembled much evocative footage of his latest subject, Anthony Bourdain for his movie Roadrunner, even controversially putting words in the celebrity chef’s mouth—literally using A. I. While the film’s critics are abuzz over this technique, Anthony Bourdain’s life and work are overall well served in Neville’s treatment as he tries…

  • Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation: Genius Never Gets Old

    T Literary titans Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, both Southerners and gay, travelled in the same artistic circles. Friends with Paul and Jane Bowles, Donald Windham, and Gore Vidal, they were also friends/rivals; each called the other “genius.” The documentary Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation puts them in dialogue using evocative archival footage. The…

  • Love It Was Not and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit: The Holocaust in Film

    Maya Sarfaty’s Love It Was Not, a most unusual documentary, tells the improbable story of the infatuation of a high-ranking SS officer with a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz. An Austrian-Israeli coproduction, the film was part of a program at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, with a Q&A with the director and Austrian producer, Kurt…

  • Revisiting A Quiet Place II: Shhhhhhh!

    For my first venture into a theater, still restricted for COVID, I screened A Quiet Place II, coincidentally the very last movie I saw in a theater, on March 9, 2020. When life changed the following weekend, it was understood, the very last thing anyone should see at this time is a work of art…

  • Zombies Unite!: Army of the Dead: Location, Location, Location

    At a Q&A at the Paris Theater, after a screening of the new Netflix zombie hit, Army of the Dead, to air this weekend, director and D.P.—this is so his movie– Zack Snyder said he was thinking about The Sheltering Sky and how a protagonist dies in the desert of some weird disease. In conversation…

  • Oscar Women: What They Wore

    One could suspect from the way the Oscars were put together at LA’s Union Station, this was an unusual year. How do you dress for well, the imperative to simply show up? Some women took the Hollywood glam route: Amanda Seyfried’s red ball gown seemed from every camera angle to fill the room. Ditto for…

  • Midnight Cowboy in 1969: How to Win an Oscar Without a Campaign

    This week, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures sent out a Timeline featuring many “firsts:” among them citing Midnight Cowboy (1969), the first X-rated film to win Best Picture. With Glenn Frankel’s new book, Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic, much has been written clarifying that X-rating:…

  • Secrets of the Whales Premieres in Time for Earth Day

    Introducing the National Geographic series at a virtual premiere, to stream on Disney +, part of a weeklong celebration of Earth Day, the actress Sigourney Weaver, found the secrets of whales “astonishing.” What is truly astonishing is how intimate National Geographic photographer Brian Skerry becomes with the whales, learning their “secrets.” It is no spoiler…

  • The Man Who Sold his Skin: Skin in the Oscar Game

               “You want my soul?”             “I want your back.” Provocative and transactional, the dialogue illustrates the film, The Man Who Sold his Skin’s pact with the Devil. From Tunisia, the film frames director Kaouther Ben Hania’s central conceit for the state of Syrian refugees, and is nominated for this year’s Best International Feature Academy…

  • Rendez-vous with French Cinema: The Pleasures of French Movies

    Netflix’ great series Call My Agent put me in the mood to hear as much French as possible. While the sophisticated, cultured patter of this hugely popular Parisian-set series does not speak for all of France, now Lincoln Center’s annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema, in collaboration with Unifrance, is in full swing, expanding the French…

  • Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s Golden Globes: Dressed Up for Inclusivity

    Bicoastal for the first time in its history, the Golden Globes ceremony was a seamless coup, with Amy Poehler hosting at the Beverly Hilton and Tina Fey at the Rainbow Room. In this pandemic year, it managed to pull off the red carpet glitz and glamor and general attenuated awards nights malaise, unfolding before a…

  • Allen v. Farrow on HBO: Hearing Dylan Farrow

    Perhaps you are wondering, is there anything more to say about this decades-old very public scandal? To recap, Woody Allen’s adult daughter Dylan has accused him of molestation when she was seven. Even in his most recent 2020 memoir, Apropos of Nothing, Allen proclaims innocence, affirmed in the courts and in a lie detector test.…

  • Two of Us: A French Feature is Nominated for a Golden Globe

    France’s entry for the Best International Feature Academy Award, Two of Us, is now nominated for a Best Motion Picture-Foreign Language Golden Globe. A story of secret love, two women of a certain age attempt to take the next step in their relationship when something goes terribly wrong with one of them. Families take charge.…

  • The Golden Globes Goes Bi-Coastal

    Back in the day, film insiders would say, the Golden Globes was the Hollywood event of the year. The champagne, the parties, the sheer weight of the statue—the air of frivolity for this serious award given by the Hollywood Foreign Press. Protracted in a pandemic, the nominations, announced today, had few disappointments, and few surprises:…

  • Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman: Awarding a Revenge Fantasy

    As awards season ratchets up, Carey Mulligan’s performance in Promising Young Woman is the one to beat for over-the-top best actress accolades. She plays a sharp-witted young woman who has had enough! The National Board of Review named Mulligan Best Actress, and screenwriter/ director Emerald Fennell is slated for the Independent Spirit Award’s Best Director.…

  • Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI: Reflections on a Complicated Legacy

     “I love America,” filmmaker Sam Pollard asserts, interviewed by The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb, “but it’s a complicated, fucked up place.” The occasion was the opening of his latest documentary, MLK/FBI, released in time for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day; the interview from the fall, predated the events of January 6 that more than anything…

  • Rebranding the The Gotham Awards

    Breaking news: the IFP Gotham Awards will now be called The Gothams. Kicking off the awards season, this week’s celebration of “indie” or lower budget films managed to recreate the Gotham experience, seating guests at their packed tables in the cavernous Cipriani Wall Street, virtually, of course. Sipping my wine, I could kibbitz with fellow…

  • Hilary Swank in Fatale: Bridging Two Hollywoods

    Two-time Academy Award winning Hilary Swank may be the most famous name attached to the new noir feature, Fatale, but, said director Deon Taylor in a Q&A after a virtual special screening, for black audiences Michael Ealy is a bigger star. Debate this point all you want. These actors are sublime in Fatale, acting out…

  • Tom Hanks in Paul Greengrass’ News of the World: Does the Right Thing

    Back in the early days of the coronavirus, when we heard the news that Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, on location in Australia, tested positive for COVID-19, a cry could be heard round the world. How could Hollywood’s essential decent man, in every role—think Sully or Captain Phillips–, and his image in person, be so vulnerable?…

  • Denzel Washington’s Vision: The Museum of the Moving Image Honors Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

    Blues singer Ma Rainey was plus sized in many ways, most especially her voice. In a new film based on August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Viola Davis gives her Ma a grimace to go with her mega-sound, as large as life for blacks in America. Davis’s Ma is a grand performance balanced by…

  • Nomadland: Off the Grid with Frances McDormand

    Chloe Chao’s extraordinary film Nomadland is a map of America, seen in Frances McDormand’s face. Unadorned, craggy, her face looms large in every frame—that is, when the camera is not tracking roads along America’s most beautiful open spaces, the deserts of the West. You do not want to take your eyes off McDormand’s Fern, a…

  • The Gotham Awards 2020 Recognizes Five Movies by Women Directors for Best Feature

    Kudos to this year’s Gotham Award nominees. Traditionally, the IFP Gotham Awards kicks off the film awards season. As celebrations go, this decidedly downtown dinner brings together New York’s movie making elite while honoring lower budget fare in Oscar-like categories. Ah, longing for Cipriani Wall Street, packed to the gills with the year’s moguls and…

  • DOC NYC 2020: In THE MEANING OF HITLER, Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker Explore the Cult of Personality

    Of the extraordinarily fine offerings at this year’s DOCNYC 2020, The Meaning of Hitler, from directors Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker stands out in illuminating the continued fascination with dictatorial psychopaths epitomized by Adolf Hitler and extending to the Nazis of World War II. Leading off on the topic, novelist Martin Amis,who has grappled with…

  • Ric Burns on Making Oliver Sacks: His Own Life: Narrative is Therapy

    Waxing euphoric, documentarian Ric Burns, exclaimed, “The story in 14,233 lines was an attempt to get to the bottom, to heal the world.” He was not speaking of Doctor Oliver Sacks and his biopic, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, of the noted neurologist and writer of Awakenings (1972) and The Man Who Mistook his Wife…