Smoke

Smoke (1995) is Wayne Wang's gentle Brooklyn drama, written by novelist Paul Auster, and you can watch it online on iFILM. A corner cigar shop becomes the spot where a handful of strangers' lives quietly tangle together.

Auggie runs the smoke shop and photographs the same street corner at eight o'clock every morning, four thousand near-identical pictures in which nothing is ever quite the same. One of his regulars is Paul, a writer who lost his pregnant wife to a stray bullet. A teenager named Rashid pulls Paul out of the path of a bus, then drifts into his apartment while running from his own past. From there the threads reach toward a woman who walks back into Auggie's life and a father Rashid has never stopped looking for. Harvey Keitel plays Auggie, William Hurt is Paul, Harold Perrineau is Rashid, with Stockard Channing and Forest Whitaker rounding out the cast.

This is a film built from conversation, pauses and curling smoke, where the plot adds up out of small moments and chance encounters. It won a prize at the Berlin Film Festival and still stands as one of cinema's warmest portraits of 1990s New York. Stream Smoke (1995) online on iFILM.