Jay Brooks Movies

Jon Avnet's The War is set in the rural south and brimming with lessons on social consciousness, much like his previous effort, Fried Green Tomatoes (1991). During the summer of 1970 in backwoods Mississippi, Stephen Simmons (Kevin Costner) is struggling to be a breadwinner for his family while still suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from his service in the Vietnam War. His wife Lois (Mare Winningham) provides most of the family income. Stephen gets a job in a mine and saves a friend who has been injured, helping him erase his guilt over abandoning another friend during a firefight in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Simmons children, Stu (Elijah Wood) and Lidia (Lexi Randall) are feuding with an even poorer family of neighbors, the Lipnickis, over access to a tree fort that Stu and Lidia built. Mr. Lipnicki (Raynor Scheine) is drunken and abusive and helps escalate the disagreement into a major battle for the fort. ~ Michael Betzold, Rovi

Jonathan Younger (Donald Sutherland) runs his offbeat storage facility as if it were an odd amalgam of a nightclub for the rich and famous and a pied a terre for The Addams Family. He greets each customer and potential customer with the flair and sinister graciousness of Bela Lugosi at the door of Castle Dracula. From time to time, mysterious organ music audibly emanates from the basement. His wife (Lolita Davidovich) has the messy business of making sure that this very ordinary business pays the bills. Both of them are hoping that their son (Brendan Fraser) will come back from his pricey college studies in England and take over the business. Things take a sharp left turn when some of his customers become media celebrities, suspected of killing the man in their family. This quirky black comedy was made by the director of the sublimely zany Baghdad Cafe. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

In this bizarre thriller, based on a true story, a family moves into their dream house and are appalled to discover that they are not alone when strange things begin to happen. It soon becomes apparent that the special tenants are angry spirits out to destroy the family and their neighbors who have built their homes on top of a graveyard. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

A landmark independent film, Nothing but a Man is the first dramatic story featuring a largely black cast created for an integrated audience (the work of black filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux was intended for audiences who patronized black-only theaters). White filmmakers Michael Roemer and Robert M. Young traveled through the South in 1962 in search of ideas for a fiction feature set during the growing turbulence of the civil rights era. Their story, based in Alabama but shot in southern New Jersey, is only tangentially related to the movement toward equality. Duff, an itinerant black railroad laborer (Ivan Dixon), romances and marries Josie, a small-town preacher's daughter (Abbey Lincoln). Duff insists on being treated with respect, but his stance is personal rather than political. After he settles down in the town with Josie, he comes up against white bosses who want to make sure he knows his place and black men such as Josie's father who don't want to rock the boat for fear of losing what little advantage they have. Duff's relationship with his own father (Julius Harris), a broken-down drunk living in Birmingham, teaches him valuable lessons about dignity and self-worth. The film was lauded at both the New York and Venice festivals but received limited release in theaters specializing in foreign and independent film. However, word of mouth in the black community (where Nothing but a Man was for years a staple on the 16 mm rental market, in the days before VCRs) and continued attention by film historians have ensured the status of Nothing but a Man as a pioneering and enduring work. ~ Tom Wiener, Rovi

Just before filming All About Eve, Bette Davis starred in the marital melodrama Payment on Demand. Davis plays Joyce Ramsey, the wife of David Ramsey (Barry Sullivan), who one fine morning demands a divorce. Most of the film is in flashback, recounting the events leading up to the marital schism. After David takes up with a school teacher (Frances Dee), Joyce heads for a Haitian vacation, hoping to spark a few affairs of her own. But after a chance meeting with an old friend (Jane Cowl) who's become hard and cynical since her own divorce, Davis heads back to the States and attempts to patch up her marriage. Director Curtis Bernhardt was particularly proud of the opening scene in Payment on Demand, wherein Barry Sullivan requests a divorce as calmly as if he were ordering breakfast. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi