Cookie's Fortune

Cookie's Fortune (1999) is a Robert Altman comedy-drama you can watch online on iFILM. In the small Mississippi town of Holly Springs, an elderly woman named Cookie dies and leaves behind a mess her family wasn't expecting — not grief, but panic, because her niece Camille decides the circumstances need to be covered up.

Glenn Close plays Camille with magnificent, misplaced authority; Julianne Moore is her anxious sister Cora; Liv Tyler is the younger niece who actually liked Cookie and sees no reason to lie. Charles S. Dutton is Willis Richland, Cookie's fishing buddy who ends up accused of murder simply for being the wrong kind of person in the wrong house. Patricia Neal, Ned Beatty and Lyle Lovett fill out an ensemble that Altman keeps in almost casual motion — overlapping, wandering, circling back.

This is not a whodunit that wants you on the edge of your seat. It's a warm, slightly wry picture about small-town propriety and the gap between what people say and what they actually do. Watch Cookie's Fortune (1999) online on iFILM.