Hollywoodland

Hollywoodland (2006) is Allen Coulter's crime mystery, and you can watch it online on iFILM. In the summer of 1959, the actor America knew as TV's Superman turns up dead in his own bedroom with a bullet wound. The police call it suicide. Almost nobody believes them.

Small-time private eye Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) takes the case partly for the paycheck, partly to make a name for himself, and starts pulling threads everyone wants left alone. The deeper he goes, the murkier it gets: George Reeves (Ben Affleck) had a long affair with the wife of a powerful studio fixer (Diane Lane), and his young fiancee behaved oddly the night he died. The film runs on two tracks, Simo's investigation now and flashbacks to Reeves himself, an actor the Superman suit made famous and then quietly ruined.

Coulter refuses to hand you a verdict. Three versions of that night play out, and each one holds up. Affleck works against his own image here and took the acting prize at the Venice Film Festival for it. Pieced together from one of old Hollywood's shabbiest unsolved deaths, it's a slow, sad noir about what fame costs. Stream Hollywoodland (2006) online on iFILM.