The Aviator

The Aviator (2004) is Martin Scorsese's biographical drama — watch it online on iFILM. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Howard Hughes: filmmaker, record-breaking pilot, airline magnate, and a man whose obsessive compulsive disorder quietly dismantled everything he built.

The film opens in the late 1920s with Hughes pouring his inherited fortune into the most expensive war film of the era. The pace accelerates: Hughes sets air-speed records himself, romances Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale), locks horns with Pan Am chief Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) before a Senate subcommittee, and works against his own increasingly ungovernable mind. The story covers roughly two decades — from Hollywood ambition to the slow confinement of a man who could no longer cross a room without counting his footsteps.

Scorsese shot different years of Hughes's life in different color palettes, mimicking two-strip and three-strip Technicolor to give each era its own visual texture. At the 77th Academy Awards, the film took five Oscars — including cinematography for Robert Richardson and Supporting Actress for Blanchett. Stream The Aviator (2004) on iFILM.