Moonlight and Valentino
| Moonlight and Valentino | |
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Original poster
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| Directed by | David Anspaugh |
| Produced by |
Tim Bevan Eric Fellner Alison Owen |
| Written by | Ellen Simon |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Howard Shore |
| Cinematography | Julio Macat |
| Edited by | David Rosenbloom |
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Production
company |
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| Distributed by | Gramercy Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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105 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $2,484,226 |
Moonlight and Valentino is a 1995 comedy-drama film directed by David Anspaugh. The screenplay by Ellen Simon is based on her semi-autobiographical play of the same title.
Rebecca Lott is a thirtysomething poetry teacher who is widowed when her husband is killed while jogging. Helping her cope with her grief is a support system consisting of her sister Lucy Trager, a chain-smoker still trying to deal with their mother's death from cancer fourteen years earlier; her best friend Sylvie Morrow, who is trapped in an unhappy marriage to Paul; and her former stepmother Alberta Russell, a high-powered Wall Street executive so caught up in the financial world she has difficulty relating to anyone not involved with it. Romance finds its way back into Rebecca's life when a flirtatious handsome younger man hired to paint the house takes an interest in her, and his presence affects the other women as well.
The film earned mostly negative reviews from critics and currently holds a 15% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
In his review in The New York Times, Stephen Holden called the film "a genteel, buttoned-up soap opera" and added it "wants to be a grand, pull-out-the-stops tearjerker like Terms of Endearment or Beaches. But its situations are so awkwardly contrived that you can almost hear the machinery creaking.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described the film as "very sincere, very heartfelt and very bad . . . Watching it, I felt trapped in an advice column from one of the women's magazines. I have no doubt many of the heartfelt statements in the film are true (actually, I have many doubts - but never mind). What bothered me was that the story never found a way to make them dramatic, or illustrate them with incidents. The movie is slow, plotless and relentless - one of those deals where you find yourself tapping your watch, to be sure it hasn't stopped."
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Wikipedia