Local Hero

Local Hero (1983) is a Scottish-set comedy-drama you can watch online on iFILM, written and directed by Bill Forsyth and featuring Burt Lancaster alongside Peter Riegert and a young Peter Capaldi. A Houston oil company dispatches a rep named Mac to a tiny coastal village in Scotland — the brief is simple: buy the place, build a refinery, get out.

Mac arrives expecting resistance and finds something stranger: the villagers are perfectly happy to sell, money in hand, futures secured. It's Mac himself who slows down. The bay, the Northern Lights, the pub that doubles as everything, a local hotelier who turns out to own a surprising amount of the land — it all gets under his skin. Back in Texas, his eccentric billionaire boss Happer (Lancaster) scans the sky for comets and wants one named after him.

Forsyth builds his comedy out of understatement and affection rather than jokes, and the result has aged far better than most films of the era. Stream Local Hero (1983) online on iFILM.