Barbarians at the Gate

"Barbarians at the Gate" (1993) is an HBO dark comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Directed by Glenn Jordan and drawn from the bestselling book by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, it stars James Garner as RJR Nabisco CEO F. Ross Johnson and Jonathan Pryce as the unyielding dealmaker Henry Kravis.

Johnson's plan is simple: buy out his own company quietly, at a price that suits him. Then Kravis hears about it. The bidding escalates into something neither man fully controls — lawyers camp in hotel suites, bankers work through the night, and the final figure lands north of $25 billion, the biggest leveraged buyout its era had seen.

Garner plays Johnson as a man too charming to notice he's losing until it's over. The film gets the language and the look of 1980s boardroom excess exactly right, and it's funnier than a corporate story has any right to be. Stream "Barbarians at the Gate" (1993) online on iFILM.