High Art

High Art (1998) is Lisa Cholodenko's debut drama, available to watch online on iFILM. Syd, a junior editor at a glossy photography magazine, climbs upstairs to complain about a leaking ceiling.

She finds Lucy Berliner, a photographer whose work once mattered and whose name has since dissolved into a heroin haze she shares with her girlfriend Greta, a faded star of Fassbinder's films. Syd smells the story that could lift her career; Lucy smells a way back in. Each means to use the other. Both fall in love instead.

Cholodenko's first feature took the screenwriting prize at Sundance, and Ally Sheedy gives the finest performance of her career — burnt-out, magnetic, quietly wrecked. One for anyone who loves the small, smoky indie dramas of the late nineties, where ambition and desire refuse to come apart. Stream High Art (1998) online on iFILM.