Great Expectations

Great Expectations (1998) is Alfonso Cuaron's romantic drama you can watch online on iFILM. It reworks the Charles Dickens novel, lifting the story out of Victorian England and dropping it into modern-day Florida and New York.

As a boy, Finn meets Estella, a cool and unreachable girl from a grand decaying house, and the encounter marks him for life. He grows into a painter. An anonymous patron suddenly pulls him into the New York art scene, and there Estella turns up again, as alluring and as out of reach as ever. Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow play this years-long pull, surrounded by Chris Cooper, Anne Bancroft, Hank Azaria, and Robert De Niro as an escaped convict whose shadow stretches across the whole story.

Cuaron shoots it in cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's green, almost underwater palette, so longing seems to tint every frame. This is no stiff costume piece but a sensual riff on Dickens. Stream Great Expectations (1998) online on iFILM.