Days of Heaven

Days of Heaven (1978) is Terrence Malick's drama you can watch online on iFILM. In 1916 Chicago, a steel-mill worker kills his foreman in a fight and runs for the Texas panhandle with his girlfriend and kid sister, hiring on for the wheat harvest.

To keep tongues from wagging, Bill and Abby pose as brother and sister. When the wealthy young farmer who owns the land falls for Abby, Bill nudges her to accept his proposal — the farmer is dying, and the couple plans to wait him out and inherit everything. Then the farmer starts to suspect, and a plague of locusts brings fire to the fields. Richard Gere, Brooke Adams and Sam Shepard play three people whose quiet scheme curdles into something none of them can control.

Malick shot most of the film during the "magic hour," the brief window after sundown when the sky glows and the ground goes dark. Cinematographer Néstor Almendros took home the Oscar for it. At barely ninety minutes, the picture plays less like melodrama than a hushed visual poem, and it still turns up on lists of the most beautiful American films ever made. Stream Days of Heaven (1978) online on iFILM.