Shadowboxer

Shadowboxer (2005) is an American crime thriller you can watch online on iFILM — the directorial debut of Lee Daniels, who would later make Precious. Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr. play Rose and Mikey: professional assassins, long-time lovers, and somewhere in their backstory, stepmother and stepson.

A mob boss hires them to eliminate his own pregnant girlfriend. Rose gets there first — and doesn't fire. She delivers the baby instead, then talks Mikey into sheltering the mother and child. Stephen Dorff, Mo'Nique, and a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt fill out the rest of the web. Rose is also dying of cancer, which gives the whole arrangement a ticking clock that nobody mentions out loud.

Daniels shoots the film like a fever dream — explicit and operatic where a genre film would be mechanical. The Mirren-Gooding pairing is genuinely unsettling, and the film leans into that discomfort rather than explaining it away. Stream Shadowboxer (2005) online on iFILM.