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about: Regina Weinreich

  • Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody and Three Great Actresses in The Favourite: It’s Good to be Queen

    Mercury2“I don’t sing. I never touched a piano,” Rami Malek told filmmakers at his audition for Bohemian Rhapsody. That did not stop him from incarnating Freddie Mercury, Queen’s frontman until he died of AIDS, in a role that just earned Malek a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Drama and may be a prelude to an Oscar nod.

    At a luncheon at the Russian Tea Room this week celebrating his achievement in Bohemian Rhapsody members of the academy praised his performance as he explained how he managed to electrify the screen. To get the right moves and music, he got Eddie Redmayne’s movement coach, and then he watched Mercury and danced around at home for a year. “When Brian May of Queen was on set, I did my best version of Freddie. I was working on him so long, I fell in love with him,” Malek gushed. “I keep blowing him kisses.”

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  • Glenn Close Honored at the Museum of the Moving Image Gala: “With One Look”

    Glen Close
    It was the lustful look as Glenn Close’s character locked eyes with Michael Douglas at dinner in the clip from the unforgettable Fatal Attraction that was truly the show stopper at the 583 Park Avenue party space where The Museum of the Moving Image held their gala honoring Close’s extraordinary career on stage and screen this week. Everyone knows what follows, from the boiled rabbit to the bathtub in this game changer for cinema history, and if this were the only movie Close ever did, the only role she ever occupied, it would distinguish her legacy. Add to that her Cruella DeVille in 101 Dalmations, her Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard recently revived on Broadway, and her role opposite the formidable Jonathan Pryce in her current movie, The Wife. Her demeanor can morph in a moment, paced meticulously as you measure her emotion. You may even gasp, breathless.

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  • Season Two of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Premieres: Nostalgia in Pink

    MarvolusMrs
    Spoiler alert: At Season Two’s start of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Mrs. Maisel’s marriage is still in turmoil. Everyone glued to this thoroughly entertaining Amazon Prime series is familiar with the domestic impasse, a source of angst for the couple, and humor for everyone else. Why can’t two people deeply in love be together?

    As episode 1 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel opens, our heroine, the divine Rachel Brosnahan, forced to take odd jobs, answers phones at one of those switchboards, moving about on a swivel chair. Think Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing. And then she is summoned home. Before you can say Ooh La La, our Midge is in Paris with her dad, the amazing Tony Shaloub, for some perfectly pitched father-daughter banter, and neither one knows French. Ever resourceful, Midge manages to do her act even there, finding an expat New Yorker at a drag show to translate her weepy story of failed marriage. Get ready to sob in hysteria.

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  • The Illusionists: Magic of the Holidays at the Marriott Marquis on Broadway: A Review

    Illusionist
    On the expansive stage of Broadway’s Marquis Theater, a new production of The Illusionists does the near impossible, bringing the intimacy of close up magic to a big 1444-seat house. Eschewing the larger escapist tricks, or cutting a woman in two, or turning a mouse into an elephant, the show keeps the magic magical by making its intimacy large. Featuring Shin Lim as “the Manipulator,” the show gives simple card tricks a new allure. Able to baffle Penn & Teller twice on their show, this recent “America’s Got Talent” champion mesmerizes with his ability to find your card in more and more seemingly impossible situations; where there’s smoke, he can make an entire deck disappear.

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  • Isaac Mizrahi: Peter and the Wolf at the Guggenheim

    PeterATheWolf
    Prokoviev’s classic Peter and the Wolf is reimagined in a snazzy reboot at the Guggenheim Museum, an ingenious recreation from Isaac Mizrahi. The fashion designer cum cabaret performer has worked costuming for theater for decades, and for the Guggenheim’s program of Works and Process the Peter and the Wolf story is set, where else, but in the neighborhood, in Central Park.

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  • Gotham Awards: Showing Up is its Own Reward

    Ethan+Hawke+2018+Gotham+Awards+SGJGJb27wFllTraditionally, the IFP Gotham Awards kicks off the film season’s tributes. As celebrations go, this decidedly downtown dinner brings together New York’s movie making elite while honoring films in Oscar-like categories. A balcony at Cipriani Wall Street becomes a giant schmooze fest, a meet and greet for many before the big events in Los Angeles, before the night’s filet mignon is served, and while the nominees for Best Actor, Feature, etc. continue to be hopeful. There, Ethan Hawke pontificated about Claire Denis and how she should receive a Gotham. We could not praise him enough for his movie Blaze, one that he directed about a music legend. That was before he took home a Best Actor statue for his performance in Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, and Schrader received his for Best Screenplay. But the night was young.

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  • Elaine May in The Waverly Gallery: Aging With Dignity and Laughs

    Elaine May
    There’s a sweet hotel on Waverly, on the north side of Washington Square Park that could be the prototype of Kenneth Lonergan’s play The Waverly Gallery at the Golden Theater. Even if that’s not the spot where Gladys, a remarkable Elaine May, runs an art gallery that does not seem to make much for the owner or the artists, it could be. This funny, real as the table you can touch drama, trades on the familiarity of places and people: Ellen, Gladys’ beleaguered daughter (an excellent Joan Allen), her husband (a fine David Cromer); and two young actors, bookends of each other: Don, an artist (Michael Cera) and Gladys’ grandson Daniel (Lucas Hedges in his Broadway debut), the IT boy in such films as last year’s Lady Bird, and this year’s Mid-90’s and Boy Erased, taking over from Cera, a prior IT boy.

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  • A Chorus Line: A Singular Sensation at New York City Center

    ChorusLine
    New York City Center celebrated its 75th year with a performance of the iconic A Chorus Line followed by dinner at the Plaza Hotel. Back in 1975 when it first hit the stage at the Public Theater, A Chorus Line was a game changer of a musical. Scripted from taped interviews with theatrical types: singers and dancers, the book, written by Michael Bennett, collaborating with lyricist Ed Kleban, with music by Marvin Hamlisch—well, this was the winning dream team that made A Chorus Line the Hamilton-scale hit of its day. Re-visioned now 43 years later for this one-week engagement, the musical feels fresh, and simply fabulous.

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  • Variety and The History Channel Host the Second Annual Salute to Service: Honoring Those Who Stand Up

    History
    “Thank you for your service is not enough,” said Montel Williams, a US Navy veteran, who also said, “I promised not to cry” as he accepted his award at the 2nd annual Salute to Service luncheon hosted by Variety and The History Channel at Cipriani 25 Broadway. Ken Fisher, a friend who had accompanied Williams to Dover to meet with Gold Star families, introduced him as a “veteran’s veteran.” Having recently suffered a massive stroke, Williams showed up anyway, for veterans, and was teary-eyed reminding everyone to do more. They may be home, he said, but “their service is not over.”

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  • Alfonso Cuaron Goes Local: Roma at the Whitby Hotel

    Rome
    No Oscar list this season will fail to have Alfonso Cuaron’s latest masterpiece Roma at the top. On critics’ minds: will the award be for Best Foreign Language Film or a straight Best Picture? But that’s not what’s on this director’s mind. Already an Oscar winner for Gravity, he turned his talents to a black & white, acutely detailed, Spanish and indigenous language realization of a key figure in his childhood, a maid he renamed Cleo who came to live with his family in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City. A mother figure to him, from a disadvantaged class, he asks himself, what does she represent in the world of now?

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  • John Pizzarelli & Jessica Molaskey Tell “American Stories” at the Café Carlyle

    Pitzerelli7John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey hit the Café Carlyle stage singing– that is Jessica sang Paul Simon’s “American Tune” accompanied by John on the guitar. At this point, as regulars at the Café Carlyle and so familiar on NPR with their highly entertaining Radio Delux, first names are in order for this couple, married in life and music. There is simply nothing like settling into their sublime show, especially after the tensions of Election Day in the rain. With a superb Konrad Paszkudzki on piano and an excellent Mike Karn on bass, there was no talk of religion or politics.

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  • Mercedes Ruehl in Torch Song: If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother

    Torch Song
    Family values loom large in the revival of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy on Broadway. The hyper loneliness of Arnold, a gay man who performs in drag is what the actor Michael Urie kvetches about in his pursuit of love. Dressing as the play opens under its neon Torch Song lights, Arnold could be anyone longing for a lover, with spider lashes and red lips, equal only to the spectacular Andrew Garfield’s Prior Walter in the recent revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. While that great show explores an AIDS ravaged America, this setting inhabits more intimate space: a ‘70’s gay bar’s backroom, a bed, and a kitchen. That’s where Arnold’s mom comes to visit, and she is every bit as large and terrifying as any woman painted by de Kooning, or penned by Philip Roth. As performed by Mercedes Ruehl, she’s a nightmare in pastel, but she’s Arnold’s, and in due course, even as they spar for supremacy in suffering, they belong to each other.

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  • Margarethe von Trotta’s Anxiety of Influence: Searching for Ingmar Bergman

    Gossip?
    Actress, director Margarethe von Trotta was not thinking of making a documentary film, but when offered the opportunity to honor Swedish director Ingmar Bergman who would be 100 this year with a film about him, she could not say no. Von Trotta is best known for her feature films, Rosa Luxemburg, Rosenstrasse, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (co-written and co-directed with her ex-husband Volker Schlondorff), among them, now screening at Quad Cinema for a retrospective of her work. And with Criterion putting together a boxed DVD set of Bergman’s films, she accepted the challenge of making the documentary, wondering, she told me this week on the phone from Munich, “how can I make a film about such a genius?” Told, do it in a personal way, she made Searching for Ingmar Bergman a most insightful, entertaining tribute from one filmmaker to another.

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  • Maggie Gyllenhaal Crosses the Line as The Kindergarten Teacher

    The Kindergarden Teacher
    1 Jake Gyllenhaal, hosting a special screening of his sister’s new film, The Kindergarten Teacher, at Metrograph, was all praise for Maggie Gyllenhaal. “I’ve been watching her act all my life,” he smiled broadly at a crowd that included Christopher Lloyd, Israel Horowitz, Diane Sawyer, and many others including his Wildlife director Paul Dano and co-writer Zoe Kazan. The titular kindergarten teacher joins a roster of edgy women brought to life by Gyllenhaal’s ample talents. Think Secretary where her character enjoys a good spanking. In this movie, she’s a thwarted poet who recognizes the poetic gifts of one of her students, a five-year old Jimmy Roy played by one of the producer’s children’s classmate Parker Sevak. Wishing to nurture his verse, Gyllenhaal’s Lisa goes creepy, unacceptable. Every parent will get the willies watching what she does, all with a “good heart.”

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  • Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman: Already This Season’s Best Play 

    The-ferryman-3
    In Northern Ireland in 1981 The Troubles pit Irish against Irish, resulting in a great deal of anguished, epic drama. Think Michael McDonagh, and the movies of Ken Loach. In Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, at the Bernard B. Jacobs theater on Broadway, a monumental 3 hours and 15 minutes zip by, beginning with the news: the body of a ten-years missing man, turned up in a bog, hands and feet bound. Nearby his wife holds the fort, living in her husband’s brother Quinn’s lively household with her son, now a teen. To celebrate the harvest they are cooking goose, and just as the family learns the news about the recovered body, the once live bird hangs on a hook at the kitchen window, bound, emblematic of Seamus’ remains, best left to the imagination.

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  • The Price of Everything: Poons, Koons, and Balloons

    The Price of Everything3
    “Contemporary art is a luxury brand,” declared HBO’s Richard Plepler, introducing Nathaniel Kahn’s excellent, entertaining documentary, The Price of Everything, at a posh premiere at MoMA last week. “And the artist is our last best hope.” These words were not lost on a crowd that included artists like George Condo, Marilyn Minter, Larry Poons and Jeff Koons, all featured in the film. In addition, museum curators, private collectors, and auction house personnel were all part of the mix celebrating a movie about a market that keeps its prices up. After all, “you can’t have a golden age without gold,” as someone wisely put it. All the while, the work created on camera, as some question what makes art art, or good art, seems to ignore the vagaries of commerce, allowing the money minded to thrive.

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  • Gloria: A Life: A Talking Circle in Union Square

    Gloria a Life
    Emily Mann’s Gloria: A Life, a theatrical event about journalist, feminist, activist Gloria Steinem is not so much a drama, but an exposition of the history of this wave of feminism, the feminist discourse of our time. As the titular Christine Lahti, sporting Gloria’s signature black bell bottom jeans and native American inspired belt with just a change of vest to jacket to bunny ears, wants women to speak their truth and consider the power in numbers. Yes to pussy hats!

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  • The Times of Bill Cunningham Premieres at the New York Film Festival

    Bill Cunningham
    When New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham would train his camera on you—whether at a posh opening or on the street—it made your day. Anna Wintour –Cunningham photographed the Vogue editor since she was a teen—famously used to say, “One dresses for Bill.” His discerning eye assessed celebrities and civilians alike, snapping those with elan, style, joie de vivre. His attention would say, You had “IT.” This beloved New York icon, who died in 2016 at age 88, is revived in a new documentary, The Times of Bill Cunningham, Mark Bozek’s loving tribute. Featuring an interview with Cunningham at its center, this entertaining documentary premiered at Alice Tully Hall this week, one of several stellar non-fiction selections at this year’s New York Film Festival.

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  • Free Solo: High at Lincoln Center

    Free Solo
    If any one can make the perilous professional sport of rock climbing sexy and glamorous, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi can. In Free Solo, their latest documentary (the couple made the extraordinary Meru), they turn their lens on renowned climber Alex Honnold, as he fulfills a dream, to climb El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Of course he had done this before, utilizing all the tools of his trade including ropes, but now he wants to go it without. Needless to say, many have died attempting to climb without this support. To add to the drama, Alex is also in a relationship with Sanni. The charm of Free Solo is that the film goes into Alex’s personal, eccentricities, living in a van, eating with a spatula as his utensil of choice. He’s quite the barbarian, softened by a lovely blond who teaches him to say, I love you.

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  • Jane Fonda in Five Acts: Hair Epiphanies and Other Revelations

    Jane Fonda2
    Despite a long and distinguished career making film portraits as creator of PBS’ American Masters series, Susan Lacy will not just do anyone. She proclaimed at a Q&A with Alec Baldwin at a Hamptons International Film Festival pre-screening of her HBO documentary, Jane Fonda in Five Acts, she would not make a film about someone she does not like, “like someone who I want to get out of the White House.” “I really understand,” replied Baldwin, scrunching up into his best Trump face. “I really, really do.”

    Reflecting on her PBS time, recounting the genesis of American Masters, Lacy spoke about her certainty that stories on culture-shifting figures such as James Baldwin, Joni Mitchell, Judy Garland, and her favorite, Leonard Bernstein, were inherently dramatic, often geniuses fighting against cultural mores, or their own demons. That was a difficult sell, but she prevailed. Now making films for HBO, like last year’s superb Spielberg, she does not have to raise the money. HBO just asks, what’s your budget?

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  • The Oslo Diaries on HBO

    Oslo
    Peace in the Middle East feels like a mirage, a glimmering haze on a distant desert horizon. But in 1992, key figures from Israel and the PLO came together in a neutral place in Norway armed only with hope to frame a peace agreement on the fragile and beleaguered strip of land that is called Israel. Last year a hit play at Lincoln Center dramatized their dialogue of peace. And now, timed with the September 13 anniversary of the Oslo Accords, and the Jewish New Year, a new documentary, The Oslo Diaries, airs on HBO. For filmmakers Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, residents of Tel Aviv, in historic Rabin Square, with their two children, the story of the Oslo Accords is personal. They add to the existing record with diaries and fresh interviews with the men from Israel, Jewish and Palestinian leaders, who met for 1,000 days, recognizing one another’s right to exist, forging strong bonds, waging the terms of peace, and watching them turn to dust. Last week I had the opportunity to speak to the filmmakers: is the hope of peace kaput forever?

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  • Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9: How Did We Get Here? What Do We Do Now?

    Michle Moore2
    Now in our second year of a presidency that continues to depress the spirits of most Americans, Michael Moore returns to the scene with Fahrenheit 11/9, which had a stellar New York premiere this week at Alice Tully Hall. A human barometer of what’s going on in the heartland, Moore continues his filmic outrage at our government, entwining narratives of racism, Russians, guns, greed, and craven leadership in his coverage of the lead-infused water in Flint, Michigan, with the passion of Parkland students, going places obscured in the average daily news cycle. Often operatic, Moore’s tragicomedy intensifies as Pagliacci overtakes the soundtrack. An equal opportunity blamer, he is tough on Trump and does not spare Democrats who did not do enough, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, in his outcry: Take Action!

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  • Jane Lynch and Kate Flannery: Two Lost Souls at the Café Carlyle

    JaneLynchPhoto: David Andrako

    Warming up with “When You’re Smiling,” the charismatic, jazzy backup band for Jane Lynch and Kate Flannery cued the Café Carlyle audience: we were set for a night of music and laughs. The “Two Lost Souls” came onstage, like a pair of Chaplinesque hobos, foils of one another, and funny. Reaching up, Jane Lynch, the more “Sapphic” of the duo could hit the ceiling. And crouching down, Kate Flannery, “by way of Jameson,” had a low center of gravity. Between the two, such songs as “One Note Samba,” “Bei Mir Bist Du Shon,” and “Good King Wenceslas,” rose to lively, harmonious levels. Kate’s “Shy,” belted out, was hilariously unconvincing. And Jane did a great “Mambo Italiano.” And on they went till the near finale, Jule Styne’s “The Party’s Over,” followed by Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.”

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  • Ethan Hawke’s Blaze of Glory

    BlazeAs a filmmaker, Ethan Hawke is something of a wildchild, fresh, irreverent, unexpected and totally loveable. His new movie, Blaze, about a little known country western singer/guitarist Blaze Foley is a marvel to watch, because everyone involved seems to be having so much fun immortalizing a man, a wildchild, who lived life in a no holds barred way, following his passions and foibles without restraint. Looking and acting the quintessential flower child, Blaze Foley could take no sound advice about his abundant talent as a musician and songwriter, nor about his life, blessed with true love, hokey as that sounds. Sybil Rosen, a Jewish girl with kinky hair joined him for a romp for a time, until the real world made their Edenic world unlivable. Blaze died tragically in 1989 at age 39, trying to help a friend, and Sybil wrote a book about him, Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley, the backbone of this thrilling movie.

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  • The Summit at Guild Hall: New Voices on a Traditional Stage

    Summit
     “I am suffering!” That’s not a whine you hear often in East Hampton, but at Guild Hall, the plaint is cause for a visit to an emotional calibration center.

    When Guild Hall decided to commission new theatrical work from young artists, the move seemed radical. Over the summer season, the state of the art East Hampton arts institution had staged readings of traditional work by Eugene Pack and Harold Pinter utilizing the talents of seasoned and local performers such as John Magaro, Tim Ransom, Harris Yulin and Mercedes Ruehl, with Matthew Broderick to join in for a Q&A. But this week, The Summit, a collaborative multi-media work from directors Christian Scheider, Tucker Marder, and a master puppeteer, Isla Hansen, transformed the jewel box of a theater into a laboratory, for a tragicomedy, and for experimental theater.

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