A Hologram for the King

A Hologram for the King (2016) is a Tom Hanks drama-comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Alan Clay flies to Saudi Arabia to pitch a cutting-edge holographic teleconferencing system straight to the king. The sale is his last shot at paying his daughter's tuition and clawing back from ruin.

His company is gone, his marriage has collapsed, and there's a strange lump swelling on his back that keeps him awake at night. Out in the desert near Jeddah, Alan and his small team wait in a stifling tent with no air conditioning and barely any WiFi for an audience with a monarch who never shows. The days drag. He befriends a wisecracking driver named Yousef and a doctor named Zahra, and the trip quietly stops being about business at all.

Director Tom Tykwer adapted the film from Dave Eggers' novel, with Sarita Choudhury and Ben Whishaw alongside Hanks. It's a small, melancholy film about a burned-out man in midlife, and it runs almost entirely on Hanks' understated charm. Stream A Hologram for the King (2016) online on iFILM.