Reality

Reality (2012) is an Italian-French dark comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Matteo Garrone — best known for Gomorrah — turns his camera from the Neapolitan mob to a different kind of obsession: reality television. Aniello Arena plays Luciano, a fish merchant and natural showman who agrees, half as a joke, to audition for Italy's Big Brother.

The audition goes nowhere in particular. But Luciano can't let it go. He starts seeing producers everywhere — on the street, in church, at the dinner table. His wife and children watch him slowly reconfigure his whole life around a spotlight that may never come. The film never mocks him for it, which makes the descent far more unsettling than satire would.

The jury at Venice gave it the Grand Prix, and it holds up as one of the sharpest portraits of fame-hunger put on screen in the last decade. Stream Reality (2012) online on iFILM.