Roberta Wallach Movies

Mad Matthewz makes his feature debut as a writer/director with Men Without Jobs. Ish (Ishmael Butler, formerly of the jazz-influenced rap group Digable Planets) and Oz (Bonz Malone of Slam) are roommates scrounging by in Brooklyn, barely scraping the rent together each month, and ignoring their bills. They spend their days hanging out, smoking, drinking, and playing video games. Ish wants to make it in the music biz, while Oz watches daytime cooking shows and puts his culinary skills to work impressing the grandmother of his young daughter, in hopes that his little girl will eventually come to live with him. Occasionally they visit their favorite record store, where Ish plans to buy rare R&B records when he gets some money, and peppers the proprietor with potential band names. Their pal Junie (Andre Royo of HBO's The Wire) frequently pops by, begging to be in their as yet unformed band, bragging about his beats, and lying about meetings with famous producers. Ish makes regular visits to his parents' house, but only when they aren't home. He raids the fridge and borrows his dad's (Reg E. Cathey) old records. One day, Ish meets Veronica (Anita Kopacz), a pretty young woman who shares his interest in graffiti and music. Veronica encourages Ish's creative ambitions, but his reluctance to take the next step -- to actually follow through on his dreams -- threatens their relationship. Oz, meanwhile, gambles his way into trouble with some local thugs. When he goes on the run, Ish and Veronica decide to go with him. Men Without Jobs had its world premiere at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

Detectives Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) and Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) investigate when a teenager is wounded. The trail of clues leads to the mysterious death of a young woman. Ultimately, a vicious drug operation enters the picture, at which time the detectives fade into the background and the D.A.'s office, represented by A.D.A.'s McCoy (Sam Waterston) and Carmichael (Angie Harmon), take over. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A threatening phone call leads to censure proceedings against Joel Thayer (David Groh), a prominent New York judge. When the case arrives at the office of D.A. Adam Schiff (Steven Hill), his subordinate Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy) surprises him by resigning. It seems that Kincaid once clerked for Judge Thayer -- and there is talk that a romance developed, one that may have been decidedly (and injuriously) one-sided. Future Malcolm in the Middle star Jane Kaczmarek appears as Janet Rudman. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In a humorous look at a serious subject -- life and death on a small remote farm in New Zealand -- the underdeveloped characters in the story sometime lean toward a full parody, and sometimes are just simply funny. Alwyn (Roberta Wallach) runs a farm with her son Henry (Dean Moriarty) while many of the men are away fighting in World War I. After Major Martin Hudson (Marshall Napier) comes back at the end of the war, he takes up residence in Alwyn's farm as a hired hand. She certainly needs the help, especially since a local cattle baron is after her holdings. To make matters worse, she has been threatened with a Maori curse since her land is considered by the Maoris to belong to them. Martin and Alwyn have their work cut out for them as they tackle the threats to her farm and their own feelings for each other at the same time.
~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Written for television by Allan Sloane, Family Reunion stars Bette Davis as an ageing New England schoolteacher who is given an "unlimited" bus ticket as a retirement present. She uses this gift to visit the farthest-flung members of her long-estranged family. In her absence, Davis' small town falls prey to corruptive influences, but with the help of her more honest relatives (four generations' worth, including Bette's real-life grandson J. Ashley Hyman), everything is resolved at the annual Founder's Day gathering. Family Reunion originally aired in two parts, on October 11 and 12, 1981; the preponderance of Davis' family members and unresolved plot strands would seem to suggest that this 4-hour film was intended as a series pilot. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Successful character actor Barry Primus spent seven years trying to get financing for his feature debut as a writer-director, Mistress. In the film, a once-promising writer-director, Marvin Landisman (Robert Wuhl), who now directs instructional videos, is sitting home one night, watching his own print of Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion, when he gets a strange phone call. A producer, Jack Roth (Martin Landau), formerly a bigwig at Universal, tells Marvin he was cleaning out his office when he came across Marvin's old script, "The Darkness and the Light." Jack claims he can get financing to make the film, and agrees to Marvin's stipulation that he be attached to direct. They "take a meeting" at a low-rent diner, and Jack brings along a gung-ho novice screenwriter, Stuart (Jace Alexander), to help Marvin polish the script. They meet with three potential backers, played by Eli Wallach, Danny Aiello, and Robert DeNiro, each one more meddlesome than the last, and each with a girlfriend (played by Tuesday Knight, Jean Smart, and Sheryl Lee Ralph, respectively) whom they demand be cast in the film. At first, Marvin adamantly resists changing his serious, downbeat, and very personal script, about an painter who commits suicide, rather than betray his ideals. But eventually, Marvin gets caught up in the momentum of actually getting his dream project made, and starts compromising. He agrees to cast the three women; he agrees to make the script funnier and sexier; he even agrees to change the painter to a photographer to please his backers. Laurie Metcalf plays Marvin's long-suffering wife, and Christopher Walken has a cameo as a tortured actor. Mistress was the first film produced by DeNiro's independent production company, Tribeca Films. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

Fran Drescher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Tony Danza are the most notable aspects of this forgettable teen drama that features a gang of youths in a car club who decide to battle it out with the establishment in Beverly Hills. It seems their favorite haunt, the last drive-in restaurant in the neighborhood, has been forced to close. Their rebellion is marked by tactics that might be embarrassing to any serious rebels: they turn a high school banner into an X-rated statement, sabotage a police car, ruin a manicured garden, and urinate in a punch bowl. These shenanigans take place on Halloween in 1965, a time when practical jokes are usually in the hands of elementary school kids -- and that level of maturity is maintained here. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Paul Zindel, this is a joint effort of husband and wife team Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. Produced and directed by Newman, Woodward portrays the eccentric young widow who is raising her two disparate daughters in an atmosphere of bitterness, hatred and over-protection that threatens their very growth and development. Embittered and misandristic, she raises her daughters in an atmosphere of hate that leaves them as depressed and neurotic as she is. The title of the movie comes from her anger at her daughter's science teacher for encouraging her to expose marigolds to gamma rays as a science project. Her experiment shows how radiation sometimes kills growing marigolds, but sometimes it causes them to grow even more beautiful. This experiment becomes a metaphor for her own life, as she struggles to bloom in a household deadened by her mother's alcoholism and her sister's lethargy. ~ Tana Hobart, All Movie Guide