Special Correspondents

Special Correspondents (2016) is a British-Canadian comedy written and directed by Ricky Gervais, available to watch online on iFILM. Gervais plays a radio journalist; Eric Bana is his hapless sound technician. The two are sent to cover a rebel uprising in Ecuador — and somehow lose both their tickets and their passports before reaching the airport.

Rather than come clean, they hide in a flat above a Spanish restaurant in Manhattan and keep broadcasting, fabricating on-the-ground reports from a conflict they are watching on TV. The segments go viral. Now people want to rescue them. Vera Farmiga plays the journalist's wife and Kelly Macdonald is her friend; both land their comic beats more reliably than the leads. The film is based on a novel by French author François-Olivier Rousseau.

The media satire never gets heavy — this is a light caper that works best when the lie snowballs past the point the characters can manage. Stream Special Correspondents (2016) online on iFILM.