Tubi, one of my go-to free-to-watch platforms, has a reputation as the internet’s junk drawer of streaming. Filling space are schlocky horror flicks, forgotten sitcoms, and straight-to-video oddities that may as well have been ripped from VHS tapes. But wade through the sea of B-movies, and you’ll actually find great films from around the world and in every genre. This is what the video store used to feel like!
While Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu keep shrinking their film libraries, Tubi’s lawless library overflows with surprises. It’s the rare platform where you might stumble from a ‘70s noir to a Cannes Palme d’Or winner in the same scroll. But let’s cut to the chase and find you something to watch: here are three genuine masterpieces you can watch right now.
Fans of David Fincher who stick to Hollywood output have a gruesome and bleakly funny treat waiting for them in the depths of Tubi. Bong Joon Ho, who won an Oscar for Parasite and released this year’s Mickey 17 to tragically deaf ears, made a serial-killer movie that’s as good as Zodiac four years before Zodiac. And like Fincher’s slow-burn crime masterpiece, it’s as much about the failure of systems to rise to a moment as it is about hunting clues and pinning down a killer.
Set in 1980s rural South Korea, Memories of Murder centers on Detective Park Do-man (Parasite’s Song Kang-ho), an impulsive local cop, and Detective Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyung), a more methodical investigator from Seoul, as they solve a string of brutal murders terrorizing the countryside. Inspired by a real unsolved case, Bong’s crime drama depicts not just the increasingly desperate hunt for the killer, but the rot within the police force itself. Almost inevitably, based on how shitty the job of hunting a murderer is, Park and Seo’s uneasy partnership unravels under the weight of guilt and futility.
Memories of Murder is a tough watch. I recently showed the film to a group of friends and half likened the experience to dunking their heads in the toilet. The other half bowed at Bong’s altar, knowing they had just witnessed a masterpiece. The gnarled character work, captured with a desaturated cinematography that seems to be sucking the life out of the landscapes, fits right at home with the director’s fascination with genre extremes. He is a meticulous storyboarder, and each frame has the power of a microscope. Plus, a lot of people get dropkicked. What’s not to like? I don’t understand my friends.
We are mere months away from Send Help, a brand-new Sam Raimi-directed horror movie about a bad boss and his tortured employee getting stranded together on a desert island. Maybe this isn’t the worst timeline after all. To get hyped, I will be returning to one of the great horror masterpieces of the modern age: Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell.
After wrapping up three Spider-Man movies, the Evil Dead director turned his attention to what he does best: freaking audiences the eff out. (That’s no shade to his time spent on superhero action, which is also something he does very well.) Drag Me to Hell is a nasty dollop of hagsploitation that starts with an elderly woman gumming Alison Lohman’s chin and only gets weirder and more violent from there. Christine (Lohman) denies the wrong black-magic-wielding old lady a bank loan, as she realizes a curse born from the demon Lamia hangs over her head.
Drag Me to Hell is rated PG-13 though Raimi’s penchant for devilish setpieces and dramatic curveballs never feel restrained. Our “hero” Christine is complicated and, frankly, makes terrible choices as she attempts to shake Lamia from her tail. A universal fable in 2009 that feels even more biting in this era of greed and the cutthroat pursuit of the American dream, Drag Me to Hell stands right up there with the obvious masterworks of a filmmaker who will always go a little underappreciated, just because he’s a horror guy.
There are a number of ways to put Tubi’s free library of movies to use as come down from Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, including streaming The Battle of Algiers, the 1966 Italian-Algerian war film which Leonardo DiCaprio’s ex-revolutionary character watches high out of his mind on the eve of his worst day ever. But after leaving another hyper-detailed, ornately constructed PTA world with my own high, I proceeded directly to a rewatch of The Master. Anderson’s 2012 film is almost the polar opposite of this year’s nonstop, ensemble-driven odyssey — for most of the runtime, it’s two titans, warring with words.
The Master follows Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a volatile and alcoholic World War II veteran adrift in postwar America, who collides with Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), a charismatic leader of a budding philosophical movement called “the Cause.” Though Dodd, modeled after Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, claims to be a writer, doctor, and philosopher, his magnetic pull over Quell is what drives the story. Intense “processing” sessions resembling Scientology’s auditing allow PTA to do what he does best: write blistering dialogue for two actors to just absolutely tear into. Amy Adams works in the shadows of the film, pulling strings. Shot on 70mm, The Master looks like a theatrical event even on the worst TV.
The 2010s saw PTA cranking out enigmatic character studies, and The Master might be his most Rorschachian. I am fond of the analysis that it has become the quintessential movie for the manosphere moment. Whatever you see in it, I am ready to guarantee you see something.
