Maybe Big Tech hasn’t delivered on its disruptive promise for movies after all: We’ve cut our cable cords for price and convenience only to pay just as much (if not more) to jump through hoops and across platforms, with diminishing returns in quality.
But there’s always good work being made. This new column, then, is not about free stuff, but about discovery. It’s a curation of good and great films on free, ad-supported platforms like Tubi, Plex and Pluto TV that often fall through the cracks of our numbingly plentiful, overly content-ified entertainment complexes.
This inaugural column’s picks take us from a small farm to a cramped Japanese apartment, from a restaurant kitchen to an urgent historical record of memory. These are movies that you can watch, contend with and ponder for free.
‘Gunda’ (2020)
An undersung trend in recent movies is the artful animal picture, from “EO” (about a donkey) to “First Cow” (a cow) to “Cow” (you get it). “Gunda” is perhaps the simplest and quietest of them all, but somehow contains a stirring, stealthily profound inquiry into human and animal nature.
The Russian documentarian Victor Kossakovsky trains a plainly meditative eye on the titular mother pig and her litter of newborns, watching the piglets quiver in their sleep, or climb over one another for milk. It’s a patient film, lyrical in its slowness, but also undemanding: You might find yourself drifting off as if napping in a pasture, then come back to the sight of a thirsty pig peeking out a barn door, biting at the rain.
And yet, hovering over these idyllic tableaus is a question chased by an almost spiritual urgency — what will happen to these pigs? Or perhaps more acutely: What will we do to them? The purity of the film builds to a suffocating conclusion that seems to contain the whole world and our human capacity to act within it.
‘Shoplifters’ (2018)
In the aisles of a supermarket, a frumpy dad and his young son exchange glances, twiddle their fingers and are off with the loot: just chocolates and a couple of packets of ramen. It’s an opening that might suggest a cheeky film about a band of ragtag hustlers. But what “Shoplifters” ultimately becomes is a heart-wrenching parable wrapped inside a soap opera and enlivened by Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda’s lovely sensitivity.
Father and son aren’t exactly that: They’re part of a chosen family who, we slowly gather, aren’t connected by blood but by a crafty will to survive in a mundanely harsh world. As the pair walks home, they find a young girl abandoned, and soon she’s brought into their fold.
The story of the family (a knockout ensemble, headlined by Sakura Ando’s gutting performance as the mother) is one of such delicate humanism and tenderness, your heart is left almost physically aching by the end. Life is hard, but a croquette dipped in ramen never tasted so good, a trip to the beach never felt so joyful, a mother’s hug never felt so safe.
‘Farha’ (2021)
Since the war started in 2023, thousands of the children of Gaza — where children account for nearly half the population — have been killed. To watch “Farha” is to see the past ripple into the present. In the Palestine of 1948, young Farha’s greatest wish is to go to school. But when violence invades her small village, her only hope is to survive. When she asks her friend Farida what she wants to be when she grows up, the shock of a bomb interrupts their conversation. They flinch and run, their tree swings left swaying.
Based on a real Palestinian’s experience, the Jordanian director Darin J. Sallam’s harrowing film witnesses this childhood innocence abruptly cut short. It is spare and claustrophobic, taking place primarily inside a storage cellar, where Farha’s father has shut her amid the sudden chaos, with the promise he’ll return. Through the slivers of the cellar door, we get a faint glimpse of what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba — Arabic for “catastrophe” — when 700,000 people fled or were forced out by Zionist paramilitaries and eventually by the newly formed Israel Defense Forces. But mostly we witness the breathtaking violence of the period as reflected on the face of Farha, the child, who, by the film’s end, has become something quite different.
‘Boiling Point’ (2021)
This British film is like “The Bear” (and debuted months before it), but with a little more vérité grit and a little less hard-earned hope. “Boiling Point” is shot entirely in one take, twisting through the corners of a high-end restaurant and the gradually simmering crises of its head chef, Andy (Stephen Graham), during one busy night in the kitchen. It’s hell in there, but what’s left of Andy’s life outside is also an escalating nightmare.
The movie is a technical feat in its single-shot tableau of turmoil. Graham is the fulcrum here, but his performance is not built upon Gordon Ramsay-esque explosions; rather his perpetual clenched-jaw stoicism hides a mournful mess underneath.
‘I Am Not Your Negro’ (2017)
Raoul Peck’s documentary on James Baldwin was vitally urgent when it was released eight years ago, and it remains so now. Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson and structured loosely after an unfinished book by Baldwin, the film is not so much a biographical portrait of one man as it is a fragmented picture of a brutally racist nation, revealed through the writer’s bracing words.
It is a relatively impressionistic work, shuttling between various pieces of archival footage and skipping across Baldwin’s reflections; you will be unsatisfied if expecting to get a legible view of his inner life. Yet every moment Baldwin appears onscreen is a lightning bolt, and you’re instead left with a disquieting confrontation — of the Black realities he laid so painfully and rousingly bare, and how starkly present it all is today.
“What can we do?” Baldwin wonders. “Well, I am tired.”
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