Gloria

Gloria (1980) is a New York crime drama written and directed by John Cassavetes — watch online on iFILM. Gena Rowlands' performance earned her a Palme d'Or nomination at Cannes and remains one of the sharpest portraits of female toughness in American cinema.

Gloria Swenson is not the kind of woman who takes in strays. She's a mob ex-girlfriend who's learned to keep her distance from everything soft. Then the family across the hall gets wiped out, and a six-year-old Puerto Rican boy named Phil ends up at her door holding a ledger the mob wants back. Gloria takes him. Not out of warmth — out of stubbornness, and maybe out of something she won't name. From that moment, the two of them are running across the five boroughs with organised crime on their heels.

Cassavetes frames it as a thriller but shoots it like a character study. The chase is real, the danger is real, but what holds the film together is the way these two unlikely people wear each other down into something like a bond. Stream Gloria (1980) online on iFILM.