Vanya on 42nd Street

Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) is Louis Malle's quietly radical drama, and you can watch online on iFILM. A company of actors gathers in a crumbling New York theater — no sets, no costumes, plaster falling from the ceiling — to run through Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, and the rehearsal slowly turns into the play itself.

In street clothes, under the hum of Manhattan traffic, the performers slip into the story of a country estate where Vanya realizes he has wasted his best years serving a pompous fraud. Wallace Shawn is Vanya, Julianne Moore plays Yelena, with Larry Pine and Brooke Smith alongside them. Theater director Andre Gregory had rehearsed David Mamet's lean adaptation for years; Malle simply set down a camera and caught the instant the line between actor and character dissolves.

This was Malle's final film, and one of the strangest, most intimate routes anyone has taken to Chekhov on screen — no stagey gestures, just faces in close-up and grief that sounds startlingly current. It's for viewers who love talky, hushed cinema and want to hear a classic spoken as if for the first time. Stream Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) online on iFILM.