5 Flights Up

Watch "5 Flights Up" (2014) online on iFILM — director Richard Loncraine's low-key New York drama with Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton as Ruth and Alex, a long-married couple who have spent decades in a Brooklyn walk-up apartment and are finally trying to sell. Fifth floor, no elevator. They've been meaning to leave for years.

Selling turns out to be its own kind of ordeal: open houses, pushy brokers, buyers with strange contingencies, and a city simultaneously locked down over a terror threat that has snarled every bridge and tunnel. Alex's aging dog picks this week to take a turn for the worse. None of it is dramatic in the conventional sense — it's the particular exhaustion of trying to close one chapter of your life while the world refuses to cooperate.

Freeman and Keaton are the reason to watch. The film belongs to the category of quiet adult dramas that Hollywood mostly stopped making — one that trusts its audience to find the stakes in a conversation rather than a plot twist. Stream 5 Flights Up in full on iFILM.