A HALF-CENTURY ago, a guy given a watch for the holidays would have torn off the wrapping paper to find a modest box containing a timepiece about the size of a quarter.
It was released on April 22, 2011 and received mixed critical reviews, but was a modest box office success.
Also in 1933 Whale directed the romantic comedy By Candlelight which gained good reviews and was a modest box office hit.
A sequel, "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2", was released in 2000 to negative reviews and a modest box office performance, probably due to the fact that the film abandoned the found-footage technique that had worked so well for the original.
(His attempt at a big-budget slapstick spectacle in 1965, "The Great Race," with Tony Curtis, had been only a modest box-office success).
The movie re-created a real-life dinner between the two principals, and the plot simply consisted of a long, meandering philosophical conversation, unusual subject matter for a modest box-office hit.
Mr. Culpepper helped turn it into a modest box-office hit, in part, by taking some of the film's players on a tour of black churches, where they cultivated the audience by handing out promotional hand fans.
A critical favorite and a modest box-office success, the film was also often cited, favorably, as exemplifying a trend among the studios to experiment with the kind of harder-edged, character-driven stories more commonly seen in independent films.
It serves as a welcome reintroduction to some of Farley's best moments as a performer, but you can't help but notice that Chase was ultimately correct: Farley, in his brief life, turned in just a handful of classic sketches and one very funny movie ("Tommy Boy," a modest box-office hit turned cable-TV classic).
It was a modest box-office success and helped Haysbert win supporting roles in a succession of high-profile films: he was one of Robert De Niro's crew in Heat, Whitney Houston's married lover in Waiting to Exhale and, most recently, the LA political minder in Gurinder Chadha's What's Cooking.
There was the 2002 documentary Comedian; and there was 2007's Bee Movie, a modest box-office success, which Seinfeld co-wrote and produced, and in which he voiced the lead role of a bee outraged to learn that humans are stealing honey.
