Corrina, Corrina

Corrina, Corrina (1994) is a gentle family drama you can watch online on iFILM. After his wife dies, jingle writer Manny Singer is left alone with his small daughter Molly, and grief leaves the girl unable to speak a single word.

Manny burns through one unsuitable housekeeper after another until Corrina Washington walks in: sharp-tongued, self-possessed, full of opinions about jazz and about how a household ought to run. Whoopi Goldberg refuses to play her as a saintly rescuer; this is a real woman with her own struggles. Little by little she draws Molly back into speech, and her growing closeness with Manny is exactly where the trouble starts. It is the late 1950s, and a white widower falling for his Black housekeeper does not sit well with the neighbors. Ray Liotta, against type, plays a soft and unmoored man, while young Tina Majorino carries half the picture with barely a line of dialogue.

Jessie Nelson's directing debut is a quiet story about a new family pieced together from two broken ones, scored with warm jazz and shadowed by the racial intolerance of its era. Stream Corrina, Corrina (1994) online on iFILM.