A Brief History of Time

A Brief History of Time (1991) is an Errol Morris documentary you can watch online on iFILM. It centers on Stephen Hawking — a physicist who, by the time of filming, could speak only through a voice synthesizer yet kept turning over how the universe began and how it might end.

Morris braids two stories together. One is the science: black holes, the arrow of time, the question of whether the cosmos had a first moment at all. The other is the man — his childhood, the ALS diagnosis in his early twenties, the slow shutdown of a body paired with a mind that only sharpened. Hawking's mother and sisters speak on camera, alongside classmates and fellow physicists like Roger Penrose and Kip Thorne, and what emerges is a stubborn, dryly funny person rather than a marble icon.

The film grew out of Hawking's bestselling book, but it retells the author, not the chapters. Morris works in his signature style — staged lighting, subjects looking dead into the lens, a Philip Glass score — and makes a conversation about quantum gravity land without a physics degree. It's for anyone who likes a thoughtful documentary and wants the physics straight from the person who worked it out. Stream A Brief History of Time (1991) online on iFILM.