Rules Don't Apply

Rules Don't Apply (2016) is a period romance laced with comedy that you can watch online on iFILM. Warren Beatty wrote it, directed it, and stars as eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, stepping behind the camera for the first time in nearly two decades.

Hollywood, late 1950s. Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins) arrives to chase a screen career as one of Hughes' contract actresses, handed a mansion, a salary, and a promise of screen tests that never seem to come. Her driver is young Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich), saving up to launch a business of his own. The two fall into something they're flatly forbidden to feel, while up above, the reclusive Hughes pulls strings and tangles work, faith and his own whims together. The longer it runs, the tighter the three lives knot.

Beatty spent decades developing this portrait of Hughes, and he packed the edges around the young couple with heavy hitters: Annette Bening, Matthew Broderick, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Martin Sheen. It opened soft at the box office and split the critics, but for lovers of old Hollywood it's a tender, oddball piece about people the rulebook was never written for. Stream Rules Don't Apply (2016) online on iFILM.