North

North (1994) is a family comedy-adventure directed by Rob Reiner — watch online on iFILM. Elijah Wood plays North, an eleven-year-old who excels at everything except getting his parents to notice him. He takes the logical next step: files a lawsuit and wins the right to find a better set.

The search takes him across the planet — Texas ranchers, Hawaiian royalty, Alaska, Paris, New York suburbs, African jungles. At each stop a new set of prospective parents tries to impress him, played by Dan Aykroyd, Kathy Bates, Reba McEntire, John Ritter, and others. Bruce Willis turns up in several forms throughout, the film's own running joke on itself. The tone is somewhere between a fairy tale and a sketch show.

Critics were not kind in 1994, and the film never quite found its footing between satire and sincerity. That tension is also what makes it genuinely strange to revisit — a big-studio studio oddity that commits fully to its own weird logic. Stream North (1994) on iFILM.