Vincent Curto Movies

Screenwriter Larry Golin made his directorial debut with this coming-of-age story set in New York. Four friends move in together in a ramshackle apartment in the Bronx as they try to figure out their next move while they finish up their senior year in high school. Schiek (Nashawn Kearse), star of the baseball team, wants everyone to think he's had a successful tryout with a major-league ball club, when the truth is he's washed out of his best shot with the minors. Vivo (Jerry Ferrara), who comes from a family of bush-league gangsters, wants to join the mob, but has a hard time becoming the tough guy he thinks he's supposed to be. Ike (Max Greenfield), who has talent as a wrestler, needs to get his own demons in check if he's to make anything of himself. And Rob-O (Badge Dale) wants to be an artist; he thinks he's found both a business manager and a girlfriend in the attractive woman who lives upstairs, Elizabeth Keener, but he isn't sure how to tell her that he's a good bit younger than she thinks. Cross Bronx was screened as part of the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Alan Rudolph wrote and directed this typically off-beat drama. A brief romantic liaison between a wealthy European and an American ballet dancer results in a pair of identical twins, who are separated and raised by others shortly after birth. Henry (Matthew Modine) was adopted by Pete (M. Emmet Walsh), an auto mechanic, and Henry grows up to follow in his Pete's footsteps. Emotionally fragile, Henry is in a relationship with Beverly (Lara Flynn Boyle), a rich but painfully shy woman who is terrified by sex. Henry, however, finds his own sexual appetite increasing, and he becomes involved with Rosie (Marisa Tomei), a prostitute living in his neighborhood. Meanwhile, Henry's brother, Freddy (also played by Matthew Modine), lives in the same city, though they've never met. Freddy is a gangster and hired killer working for crime kingpin Mr. Paris (Fred Ward). While Freddy is cool and confident on the surface, deep down he hates his job and tells his wife, Sharon (Lori Singer), that he wishes he had enough money to quit and move away. As fate would have it, Freddy and Henry's mother, who sank into a severe depression after losing her children and her lover, has died, leaving a substantial fortune to her two sons, who must now meet in order to collect their inheritance. Equinox premiered at the 1992 Seattle Film Festival, though it would not open theatrically until a year later. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

A hybrid cross-pollination of a Martin Scorsese and Frank Capra film, this feel-good comic fantasy is loosely based on the real-life story of a New York lottery winner. Anthony LaPaglia stars as Frank Pesce Jr., a New Yorker with a good-luck streak that is unmatched in his Little Italy neighborhood. When Frank throws a pair of dice in a game of chance, he doesn't just toss a winning hand, the dice land on top of each other. When he's stabbed in the chest by a girlfriend's brother, his doctors find a pre-cancerous tumor. Although he tries again and again to get rid of a vehicle he no longer wants, it is retrieved every single time by the authorities. So when New York announces its first statewide lottery in 1976, Frank buys one ticket and immediately becomes everybody's best friend. Unfortunately, Frank's good luck is matched by the equally bad luck of his hard-working father, Frank Sr. (Danny Aiello), who has run up a gambling debt to a local mobster. The wise guy is willing to forgive the note if Frank Jr. will just hand over his sure-to-be lucky ticket, leaving the city's luckiest Italian-American in a bit of a moral quandary. The real Frank Pesce Jr. executive produces and co-stars in 29th Street as his own police officer brother, Vito. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide

Not to be confused with the oft-filmed Fannie Hurst yarn Back Street, Backstreet Dreams is a contemporary drama of Humanity vs. the Streets. Jason O'Malley plays a New York hoodlum who doesn't trust his wife Sherilyn Fenn as far as he can throw her (and for good reason). The only person O'Malley truly cares for is his autistic son Shane, played by twin children Joseph and John Viezzi. Brooke Shields (who's better than you might think) enters the scene as a PhD candidate who hopes to get through to Shane. Now it is the unfaithful Fenn's turn to seethe with jealousy as Shields applies her "force holding" theory to Shane, she and O'Malley draw closer together. O'Malley is so taken by Shields' compassion that he severs his mob ties--but Big Boss Burt Young won't let him off so easy, and uses Shane as a "bargaining chip." Backstreet Dreams appears at times to be three films jumbled together; every time a story element starts rolling, it is exiled to the back burner in favor of another gratuitous subplot. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Al Capone's imprisonment opened the way for mobster Frank Nitti to become the underworld king of Chicago as related in this true story. (AKA Nitti) ~ All Movie Guide