The Associate

The Associate (1996) is a Hollywood comedy starring Whoopi Goldberg that you can watch online on iFILM. Financial analyst Laurel Ayres is the sharpest mind in her firm — and the one whose ideas keep ending up in her colleague Frank's presentations. When it becomes clear that Wall Street's old-boy network won't move aside, she quits and starts her own operation.

To land clients, Laurel invents a partner: Robert S. Cutty, a shadowy but influential financier. The fiction works until every client demands a face-to-face meeting with Cutty, and Laurel has to go further than she planned to keep the whole thing from collapsing. Diane Wiest and Eli Wallach round out the cast; Donald Petrie directed.

The film is light 1990s comedy — it isn't trying to dissect corporate culture so much as wring laughs from an escalating disguise situation. Goldberg's timing is the reason it holds together: she commits to the absurdity completely. Stream The Associate (1996) online on iFILM.