Emperor

Emperor (2012) is a historical drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Peter Webber and starring Tommy Lee Jones and Matthew Fox. A US-Japan co-production running 105 minutes, it is set in the days right after Japan's surrender ended World War II.

General Bonner Fellers — Japan expert, now part of MacArthur's occupation staff — gets ten days to answer one question: should Emperor Hirohito be tried as a war criminal and hanged? The wrong answer could destabilize the occupation before it begins. The right answer is impossible to find when every Japanese official speaks in careful omissions. Threading through the investigation is Fellers' search for Aya, a Japanese woman he knew years earlier in the United States.

Jones plays MacArthur as a man entirely comfortable with authority and entirely unprepared for a culture that does not negotiate the way he expects. The film is less about victory than about what comes after — the murky, unglamorous work of deciding who gets punished and who gets protected for the sake of what comes next. Stream Emperor (2012) online on iFILM.