Starlet

Starlet (2012) is a quiet Los Angeles indie drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Sean Baker. Jane is twenty-one, works in adult films, and shares a cramped house with two other women somewhere in the Valley. At an old woman's yard sale she buys a thermos for a few dollars — and finds a roll of hidden cash stuffed inside.

She doesn't return it. But she keeps coming back anyway, inventing reasons to spend time with Sadie, the eighty-something widow who sold her the thermos without knowing what was in it. Baker's film has no villain and no tidy arc — just two people from entirely different lives quietly orbiting each other. Dree Hemingway carries Jane without a word of explanation, and Besedka Johnson, making her screen debut at eighty years old, is the kind of presence you don't forget. Stream Starlet (2012) online on iFILM.