Sophie's Choice

Sophie's Choice (1982) is a drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Alan J. Pakula from William Styron's novel and built around one of the towering performances in screen history. Meryl Streep carries it.

Brooklyn, 1947. Stingo, a young Southern writer chasing his first book, rents a room in a pink boarding house and falls in with the couple upstairs. Sophie is a Polish émigré with a faded number on her forearm and a soft, careful accent. Nathan, played by Kevin Kline, is charming, generous, and frighteningly volatile. For a while the three of them are almost happy — until Sophie's past starts bleeding through her stories: prewar Kraków, arrest, a camp whose name people lower their voice to say, and a decision she was once given no humane way to make.

Streep learned Polish and German for the part and speaks both on camera; the role won her the Best Actress Oscar, and plenty of people still call it the finest acting ever filmed. At 157 minutes this is heavy, unhurried, draining work, not a casual night in, but the kind of film that lodges itself in you and stays. Stream Sophie's Choice (1982) online on iFILM.