Boiler Room

Boiler Room (2000) is a crime drama you can watch online on iFILM, following a college dropout who trades a back-room casino for a brokerage floor. Seth Davis runs an illegal card game out of his apartment until a rich client points him toward a firm where rookies clear more in a month than he made all year.

J.T. Marlin looks like a temple of fast money — tailored suits, mansions, Ferraris, and a script everyone barks into the phone. Giovanni Ribisi plays Seth as a kid desperate to win the respect of his judge father. Vin Diesel and Ben Affleck are the senior sharks who teach the new hires that closing the sale beats keeping a conscience. Slowly Seth figures out the firm is pushing worthless stock, and every call he makes leaves a wrecked family on the other end.

Writer-director Ben Younger made this eight years before The Wolf of Wall Street, and his lean, sour portrait of phone fraud plays like that film's drier older sibling. Affleck's "new American dream" monologue has been quoted ever since. Stream Boiler Room (2000) online on iFILM.