8 ½ Women

"8½ Women" (1999) is an art-house comedy from Peter Greenaway that you can watch online on iFILM, co-produced across Germany, Britain, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. John Standing plays Philip Emmenthal, a wealthy Geneva architect whose wife dies suddenly, leaving him unmoored.

His son Storey, played by Matthew Delamere, arrives from Kyoto — where he manages a chain of pachinko parlors — and steers his father away from grief toward something far stranger. Together they fill the family estate with eight-and-a-half live-in companions: a nun, a gambler, a Kabuki student, a horsewoman with a pet pig, and several women from Japan. Toni Collette, Polly Walker, Amanda Plummer and Joan Chen make up part of an international ensemble.

Greenaway's interest is the catalogue: he frames the whole arrangement as a kind of taxonomy — types, rules, symmetries — until the women quietly dismantle the system from the inside. Demanding, deliberately provocative, and exactly what you'd expect from this director. Stream "8½ Women" (1999) online on iFILM.