Bob Penny Movies

Robert Hall's drama Lightning Bug concerns a young man trapped in a small southern town with an abusive stepfather. The young man has developed a remarkable facility at creating make-up effects for horror films, and he hopes these skills will get him out of the town were his work is unappreciated by the religious zealots in the town. However his relationship with a pretty girl who wants to stay right where she is may be the one thing to keep him from following his dream. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi

When sweet Northern college kid Bill (Ralph Macchio) and his buddy Stan (Mitchell Whitfield) are picked up and thrown into the slammer in a hick Southern town, at first it looks like no big deal. Then they are informed that they are accused of murder. Penniless and without a single friend in the area, Bill decides to call his goofy cousin Vinny (Joe Pesci), who has somehow recently become a lawyer. Full of family feeling and bravado, Vinny, who has never tried a criminal case in his short life as a lawyer, rides south to defend his trusting relative. He's an expert motormouth and street-level logician from the wilder reaches of metropolitan New York, complete with a thick accent and the attitude to go with it. Otherwise, he's much less well qualified than your average public defender. When he arrives on the scene with his equally brassy girlfriend Lisa (Marisa Tomei), Bill is fairly sure he's going to be sentenced to death. His buddy Stan is even less confident of his legal representative, if that's possible, and the first thing Vinny has to do is to regain the consent of his clients to represent them. The local judge doesn't seem any too sympathetic to Vinny's verbal shenanigans either, and even the most optimistic supporter of the boys would begin to have doubts at this point -- and Vinny's no exception. With the insistent moral encouragement of his girlfriend, Vinny somehow accomplishes the impossible and wins grudging (if very irritated) respect from all concerned, for once studying as if his life depended on it. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

A woman learns the value of friendship as she hears the story of two women and how their friendship shaped their lives in this warm comedy-drama. Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates) is an emotionally repressed housewife with a habit of drowning her sorrows in candy bars. Her husband Ed (Gailard Sartain) barely acknowledges her existence, and while he visits his aunt at a nursing home every week, Evelyn is not permitted to come into the room because the old women doesn't like her. One week, while waiting out Ed's visit, Evelyn meets Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy), a frail but feisty old woman who lives at the same nursing home and loves to tell stories. Over the span of several weeks, she spins a whopper about one of her relatives, Idgie (Mary Stuart Masterson). Back in the 1920s, Idgie was a sweet but fiercely independent woman with her own way of doing things who ran the town diner in Whistle Stop, Alabama. Idgie was very close to her brother Buddy (Chris O'Donnell), and when he died, she wouldn't talk to anyone except Buddy's girl, Ruth Jamison (Mary-Louise Parker). Idgie gave Ruth a job at the cafe after she left her abusive husband, Frank Bennett (Nick Searcy). Between her habit of standing up for herself, standing up to Frank, and serving food to Black people out the back of the diner, Idgie raised the ire of the less tolerant citizens of Whistle Stop, and when Frank mysteriously disappeared, many locals suspected that Idgie, Ruth, and their friends may have been responsible. Evelyn finds herself looking forward to her weekly visits with Ninny, and is inspired by her story to take a new pride in herself and assert her independence from Ed. Fried Green Tomatoes was based on the novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by actress-turned-author Fannie Flagg, who makes a cameo appearance as the leader of a self-help group. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

John Lithgow sets aside his patented drooling villainy to play the sympathetic title character in Traveling Man. Beset by business and marital problems, salesman Lithgow feels as though he's at the end of his rope. But it's at this point that he avoids the Willy Loman syndrome by realizing that there's more to life than a smile and a shoeshine. Fade-out salvation arrives in the lovely form of Margaret Colin. Jonathan Silverman co-stars as Lithgow's eager-beaver assistant, while John Glover is slime personified as the sales manager. Written for television by David Taylor, Traveling Man debuted June 24, 1989, over the HBO Cable service. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

This crime drama tells the story of the man behind the terrible Kansas City massacre, Verne Miller. Miller started out as a South Dakota sheriff and during the 1920s became a notorious gangster hit man. He started out doing jobs for Al Capone in Chicago and was so good at his job that Capone appointed him head of his Kansas City operation. The trouble begins when Miller thinks he has more power than he actually does and defies his boss to save two captured gangsters. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi