By the Sea

By the Sea (2015) is a slow, aching drama about a marriage running on empty, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Angelina Jolie wrote, directed and stars opposite Brad Pitt. The setting is France in the mid-1970s, where former dancer Vanessa and her husband Roland, an American writer, pull into a sleepy seaside town and stall there alongside their own silence.

Roland spends his days drinking at the village café, unable to put a word on the page. Vanessa barely leaves the hotel room, dulling herself with pills and watching other people's joy through the glass. Then they discover a small hole in the wall to the next room, where newlyweds are honeymooning, and spying on that happiness becomes a strange shared ritual — the one thing still binding the couple together. Behind the beautiful surface sits an old wound neither of them will name out loud.

The film leans openly on Antonioni and 1970s European art cinema: shimmering coastline, silk peignoirs, cinematography by Christian Berger. It's deliberately cold and unhurried, made for viewers who prize mood and silence over plot. Stream By the Sea (2015) online on iFILM.