Awakenings

Awakenings (1990) is a drama directed by Penny Marshall that you can watch online on iFILM. Neurologist Malcolm Sayer — quietly played by Robin Williams — takes over a ward of patients who have been motionless since a 1920s sleeping-sickness epidemic swept through New York. They are alive but unreachable, frozen mid-gesture, mid-thought.

Sayer convinces the hospital to try an experimental compound called L-DOPA, and Leonard Lowe becomes the first to receive it. Robert De Niro plays Leonard's re-entry into the world — the first steps, the first words, the pure shock of being present again — with a physical precision that earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. The film is drawn from neurologist Oliver Sacks' 1973 account of his actual patients at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx.

Nominated for three Oscars including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, the film sits at an unusual intersection: medical procedural, quiet comedy, and grief. Director Marshall keeps the camera close and lets the two leads carry everything. Watch Awakenings (1990) online on iFILM.