Jackie Brown

Jackie Brown (1997) — watch online on iFILM — is Quentin Tarantino's slow-burn crime thriller adapted from Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch. Pam Grier plays a middle-aged flight attendant who has been running cash across the border for arms dealer Ordell Robbie. One wrong trip and the federal agents are waiting at the gate.

The ATF wants her to flip on Ordell. Ordell wants her silenced before she talks. Jackie wants half a million dollars and a way out — and she's quietly working both sides at once. Samuel L. Jackson plays Ordell with a coiled menace, Robert De Niro wanders through the film half-asleep in the best possible way, and Michael Keaton's determined ATF agent Ray Nicolette never quite figures out who is actually running this scheme. Bail bondsman Max Cherry, played by Robert Forster, is the only one who sees Jackie as a person rather than a problem to solve.

Tarantino stripped out the velocity of Pulp Fiction and replaced it with long silences, 1970s soul on the radio, and a woman who has survived this long by being smarter than everyone in the room. The film is his only adaptation of another writer's work. Stream Jackie Brown online on iFILM.