Robert Modica Movies
Amos Kollek directs this quiet, understated comedy about lonely hearts and empty pockets in New York. Pushing 40, Bella (Anna Thomson) works as a waitress at small downtown diner in Manhattan. Her elderly regulars include Paul (Robert Modica), a lovelorn retiree who scours the personal ads and his ill-tempered buddies Seymour (Victor Argo) and Graham (Mark Margolis), who are more than a little disparaging toward Paul's attempts at finding love. Involved in a 12-year relationship with married Broadway theater director George (Austin Pendleton), Bella craves marriage and children. On a blind date set up by her mother, Bella meets Bruno, a divorced cabbie and fledgling novelist with two young children. Meanwhile, Paul meets ready-and-willing widow Emily (Louise Lasser), while Seymour shacks up with Wanda (Valerie Geffner), a stripper with a master's degree. This film was shown in competition at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Anna Thomson, Jamie Harris, (more)
Shakespeare's Macbeth is transplanted to a '90s New York gangland in this 1991 film. A hit man (John Turturro) is convinced to murder his boss (Rod Steiger) after his future as the head of the organization is ensured by three fortune-tellers. With the help of his domineering wife (Kathie Borowitz), the hit man murders his way to the top, but then faces the consequences. ~ John Bush, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- John Turturro, Katherine Borowitz, (more)
In director Arthur Hiller's hit tearjerker -- based on Erich Segal's novella -- Ryan O'Neal plays Oliver Barrett IV, a comfortably off Harvard pre-law student who falls in love with Radcliffe music student Jenny Cavilleri (Ali MacGraw), a freewheeling, delightfully profane product of a blue-collar Italian-American family. Oliver's father (Ray Milland) heartily disapproves of the subsequent marriage and cuts off his son's allowance. Despite financial travails (the pampered Oliver actually has to go to work!), the couple is blissfully happy....until Jenny is diagnosed as having an unnamed disease that consigns her to an early death. The movie's tagline "Love means never having to say you're sorry" became an iconic American catchphrase, the film's theme a number one hit. One of the early products of Paramount guru Robert Evans, Love Story grossed more money than any Paramount production before it. This enormously successful film inspired a 1978 sequel, Oliver's Story. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ali MacGraw, Ryan O'Neal, (more)
- 1969
- R
Despite an effort by the Warner Bros. publicity mills to turn The Rain People into an instant cult film upon its first release (the ad campaign stressed the intimacy and humanity of the story), this early Francis Ford Coppola effort would have to wait several years to find its audience. Shirley Knight stars as Natalie, a housewife who, unable to cope with being "trapped" by impending pregnancy, deserts her husband and takes to the road. Eager to start life over, Natalie attaches herself to hitchhiker Kilgannon (James Caan). She is fully aware that Kilgannon, a former football pro, has incurred so much brain damage that he's practically a child but insists upon sticking with him. Along the way, she has a variety of offbeat experiences with such eccentrics as a snake-farmer (Tom Aldredge) and a widowed traffic-cop (Robert Duvall). An unexpectedly violent turn of events, triggered by the traffic cop's troubled daughter (Marya Zimmet), leaves Natalie virtually back where she started. Director Coppola was still laboring under the influence of the French New Wave in The Rain People; there are so many flashbacks and flashforwards that soon even the actors don't know where they stand. Yes, it's an example of youthful cinematic excess, but there's a streak of genius in The Rain People that is impossible to miss. Coppola based his screenplay on his own short story "Echoes." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- James Caan, Shirley Knight, (more)
