PlayTime

PlayTime (1967) is Jacques Tati's comedy you can watch online on iFILM. His usual figure, the gangly Monsieur Hulot, gets lost in a Paris no postcard ever showed: glass towers, endless office corridors, and gleaming furniture a person can wander through like a maze. There's barely a plot in the usual sense. There's a single day in a sterile city of the future.

Hulot keeps trying to make a business appointment and keeps missing it, while a group of American tourists drifts through the same glass-and-steel Paris. Their paths cross again and again without quite meeting, until a newly opened restaurant pulls everyone together for an evening that falls gloriously apart, and out of that collapse comes something warm and genuinely human.

Tati built an entire set for the shoot, nicknamed "Tativille," filmed it in 70mm, and nearly dispensed with dialogue altogether; the comedy lives in sounds, reflections, and dozens of small gags scattered across the whole frame at once. Watch closely, because half the jokes hide in the background and a second viewing turns up new ones. This isn't a film for background noise but one of the high points of visual comedy. Stream PlayTime (1967) online on iFILM.