Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle

"Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle" (1994) is a biographical drama you can watch online on iFILM. Director Alan Rudolph reconstructs the Algonquin Round Table lunches of 1920s New York — the daily gatherings where Dorothy Parker's one-liners moved faster than any column she wrote, and where alcohol, envy, and mutual admiration kept everyone coming back.

Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Parker as someone who is razor-sharp in company and quietly coming apart on her own — a performance that resists easy sympathy. Campbell Scott, Matthew Broderick, Peter Gallagher, and a very young Gwyneth Paltrow fill out the circle of writers and wits who orbit her across two decades: New York in the twenties, Hollywood in the thirties and forties, the same crowd slowly dispersing. The film tracks not just the brilliance but what it costs — the failed marriages, the drinking, the gap between the public wit and the private wreck.

Rudolph doesn't rush any of it. The film moves at the pace of a long lunch that turns dark without anyone noticing, which is either the point or a problem depending on your patience. Watch "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle" (1994) on iFILM.