Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009) — watch online on iFILM. This US drama-comedy marks John Krasinski's directing debut, adapted from David Foster Wallace's short fiction collection of the same name. Julianne Nicholson plays Sara Quinn, a doctoral candidate whose boyfriend walks out one night without a word.

To make sense of what happened, Sara throws herself into her research — recording confessions from men she interviews. One regrets a betrayal. Another is strangely proud of his. A third has convinced himself that emotional manipulation is a form of honesty. Will Arnett, Bobby Cannavale, Timothy Hutton, Christopher Meloni and a dozen others each get a single extended monologue. There is no traditional plot threading them together — only an accumulating portrait.

Krasinski keeps Wallace's fragmented, vignette-based structure intact, which makes this a genuinely unusual adaptation: less a film about a woman looking for answers and more an anthology of male self-justification delivered straight to camera. Stream Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009) online on iFILM.