Kill the Messenger

Kill the Messenger (2014) is Michael Cuesta's investigative drama, and you can watch online on iFILM. Jeremy Renner plays a California reporter who stumbles onto the kind of story that gets a man buried. It actually happened.

Back in the nineties, journalist Gary Webb runs a series of articles connecting the cocaine flooding Los Angeles streets to Nicaragua's Contra rebels — with the CIA standing somewhere behind them. The scoop lands hard, and then the backlash lands harder. Webb's name gets picked apart piece by piece, and you're never quite sure who is leaning on him more: the agencies he exposed, or rival newsrooms that would rather sink his reporting than admit they missed it. Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ray Liotta, Andy Garcia, Oliver Platt and Barry Pepper fill out the ranks around him.

Cuesta builds it less as a takedown thriller and more as a quiet record of a man being broken by silence and ridicule. Renner, far from his action roles here, plays him jittery and stubborn and cornered. One for viewers who loved Spotlight or The Insider. Stream Kill the Messenger (2014) online on iFILM.