The Women of Brewster Place (1989) is a movie I recently watched on Tubi. The storyline follows a lady who becomes pregnant young and decides to move to the city from the country to raise her son. She goes through the trials and tribulations of being a black single mother with little to no help to make it. As she gets older she helps other people like her who are suffering the struggles of living in the streets in the same neighborhood she raised her son in...

This movie is directed by Donna Deitch (Heroes) and stars Oprah Winfrey (The Color Purple),Robin Givens (Boomerang),Cicely Tyson (The Help),Paul Winfield (The Terminator),Lynn Whitfield (Eve's Bayou) and Phyllis Yvonne Stickney (New Jack City).

This is a very entertaining story that isn't as dramatic and impactful as similar films like The Color Purple. The acting and script are very good and the circumstances while predictable at times are well though-out and delivered. The storyline starts off with a brutal father/daughter scene. The conversations at the hair stylists were hilarious. The son in this is annoying and the baby sequence is as sad as it gets. The depiction of the ghetto and challenges within are very well delivered.

Overall this is a very well done film that isn't perfect but is definitely worth a viewing. I would score this a 8/10 and strongly recommend seeing it once.

It's hard to see the poverty of Brewster Place when everyone looks pretty middle class with nice clothes. Also what year is it? Oprah's in the 50s, the drug dealers from the 80s and Robin Givens, I'm not sure. There's slot of speeches and "performances" in BP edited together to make a movie. I do like the movie well enough but it should have been more fleshed out. Characters like Cora Lee are basically explained to you in a time saving effort.

This movie deals with each and every controversial topic you could think of during that time period. Abuse. Teenage pregnancy. Lesbianism. Rape. Ciel had an abortion. The husband that she had was hateful. Then the baby she already had suddenly died. Oprah's character was beat horribly by Paul Winfield's character until mother Mary Alice tried to shoot him. Then Oprah's son got sent to jail. There was a lady who had a house full of children with no father. The lesbian woman almost beat an innocent old man to death for no reason. There were many other controversial topics in this movie, but there were too many to list here.