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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Religion

  • Jack Kerouac: A Vision of an Alt-America Screens at the Tribeca Film Festival

    Midcentury author Jack Kerouac is the least dead of dead writers. When he died in 1969 at the age of 47, he left behind unpublished manuscripts and an untoward legacy as the so-called “King of the Beats.” His most famous novel On the Road, a road trip, a bromance, a linguistic tour de force, went…

  • White Lotus in Rajasthan: Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright 

    The fictive White Lotus resort in Thailand, the locus of Mike White’s mega HBO series in its third season, has nothing on the Six Senses wellness retreats in India. Seeing the staff line up to greet guests arriving by boat in episode one recalled entrée into the extraordinarily fabulously fashioned Six Senses Fort Barwara in…

  • Tammy Faye: Finding Religion on Broadway

    Before becoming the pioneering televangelist power couple, Jim Bakker and his enterprising wife Tammy Faye Bakker sold God using puppets out of the back seat of a car, creating an industry and an empire. Religion, as we know, is big business. Limning their rise—and fall– in fame and fortune, the new Elton John musical, Tammy…

  • Remembering Paul Morrissey 

    From the edgy look of his movies—FLESH, TRASH, HEAT, to name a few–you would never think of Paul Morrissey as deeply religious. With his friend and partner Andy Warhol, a fellow Catholic, he made art, collaborating on many cinema-verite films and other ventures including the purchase of cliff-high acreage in Montauk overlooking the Atlantic. The…

  • Luca Guadagnino’s Queer at the New York Film Festival: Daniel Craig Looking for Love

    The novels of William S. Burroughs may be difficult to adapt—just ask David Cronenberg—but in the able imagination of Luca Guadagnino, the transformation of Queer to film is a triumph. The packed audience at the recent Alice Tully Hall premiere, a high point at this year’s New York Film Festival, went wild as the creative…

  • Bob Balaban Directs Blythe Danner, Edie Falco, Alec Baldwin for 2024: The Pursuit of Happiness at Guild Hall

    Begging the question: is it too soon to laugh about the pandemic year, 2020, a collection of short plays by masterful playwrights, did just that in a one-nighter at Guild Hall, directed by Bob Balaban. That was July 2021. Now for July 2024, as we ponder where we are in an arguably post-pandemic year, Balaban…

  • John Slattery, Steve Buscemi, Michael Shannon at Tribeca: Actors Direct

    Among the pleasures of Tribeca this year, actors have taken the helm of movies, working well with other actors, and finding stories that reveal their strengths as directors. Actor John Slattery, well known for his role in Mad Men, is not just another pretty face. He premiered a film at the Tribeca Film Festival as…

  • Andre Royo in Drinking in America: Heads of a Bygone Era

    A glass of wine with dinner, or a joint if you are so inclined, might be a good idea before meeting the array of characters who so imbibe in Eric Bogosian’s award-winning one-man tour-de-force, Drinking in America, a production of Audible at the Minetta Lane Theatre. Performed to wiry perfection by Andre Royo, the assorted…

  • Some Like It Hot: “Nobody’s Perfect,” But Maybe This Musical Comes Close

    The musical Some Like It Hot, based on the beloved movie, tweaks its source, seeing in the original the chance to be both color and gender savvy. To recap the basic storyline, Joe and Jerry are a couple of working musicians who land a gig at a swank Chicago joint run by the mob. In…

  • Salman Rushdie in Public

    In one of the great Curb Your Enthusiasm vignettes, Larry David wanted to make a musical called “Fatwa,” the word itself giggle-worthy. But the fatwa on Salman Rushdie was no joke. Last week a lone, determined man got past light security at Chautauqua, a famous writers conference and knifed the author of Midnight’s Children and…

  • Girl Power: My Brilliant Friend, season 3 on HBO 

    Addiction to the HBO series My Brilliant Friend is second only to a passion for the source, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. That’s why, writing about the eight episodes of season 3, I do not fear spoilers. Faithful to the literature—in fact Ferrante is listed among the script writers—the series follows friends Lenu (Margherita Mazzucco) and…

  • 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…

  • South Etna: A Pop-Up Provides Food for Thought in Montauk

    If it is true, you are what you eat, at South Etna’s inaugural show in Montauk, “Painting is Painting’s Favorite Food: Art History as Muse,” art was most nourishing. At this week’s official gallery opening, a masked affair of course, scenesters and artists alike gathered in the outdoor space beside the exhibition space to talk…

  • Elie Wiesel’s Night: Auschwitz Remembered

    Elie Wiesel wrote Night, you could say, for an evening such as Sunday night’s marathon reading of his Holocaust era memoir at the Museum of Jewish Heritage: To Remember. He knew that the history in concentration camps—Auschwitz was just one of many– was so bad, so bleak, so dark, so beyond belief, he had to…

  • Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah on HBO

    Irritating and irascible, the subject of the documentary short, Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah, the French intellectual writer and filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann, could be charming, and cunning as he got his desired interviews.  His epic-length Shoah (1985) went farthest to document the Holocaust, the most cataclysmic and defining event of the twentieth century, even as…

  • The Testament of Mary: Nailed to the Cross

    The news that The Testament of Mary would close on Sunday hung in the air for Friday evening’s performance, more prominently than any of the play’s props, including a dead tree. At the prologue, the audience comes to the stage circling Mary as blessed icon, robed in blue. How she became that exalted figure is…

  • 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,…