If you don’t mind ads, free streaming services have some of the best lineups out there right now, and this week’s trio of Tubi highlights range from a certified horror classic to an underseen 2010s action-thriller to a two-for-one recommendation all romance lovers must-watch.
Check out the three best movies you can watch streaming free on Tubi this week below.
Carrie (1976)
There are a few weeks left before Mike Flanagan’s new incarnation of “Carrie” rolls out on Amazon, so if you want to revisit the original film adaptation first, now’s your chance.
Before he kicked off the “Mission: Impossible” film franchise, before his beloved wave of ’80s crime movies and psychosexual thrillers, director Brian De Palma was the first director to bring Stephen King to the screen with his 1976 film adaptation of “Carrie,” which tightened up King’s sprawling city-wide tale into an intimate, heartbreaking and horrifying portrait of the young outcast telepath Carrie White (Sissy Spacek). It’s one of those movies that’s become strangely dwarfed in pop culture by the shadow of its own legacy, and a tale that’s been told so many times that, at this point, it can be easy to forget how outstanding and well-crafted the film itself really is. So if you only know the movie for its iconic moments or you haven’t given it a watch in some time, put this on your summer watchlist.
Blade of the Immortal (2017)
For his 100th film, “Audition” and “Ichi the Killer” director Takashi Miike adapted Hiroaki Samura’s action manga, “Blade of the Immortal.” It’s a fitting piece of work for Miike’s milestone movie, blending his technical prowess behind the camera with the mischief-minded playfulness found in his most provocative (and bloodiest) films.
If you love the one-man-army trope, “Blade of the Immortal” is a powerhouse of that genre thanks to its immortal main character, a cursed samurai with Wolverine-like healing abilities, who takes down enemies by the thousands when he teams up with a young girl to help her get revenge. As Miike’s movies so often are, “Blade of the Immortal” is utterly extravagant in its bloody violence, and an unkillable main character lets him turn it all the way to eleven. While it’s not the formalist samurai masterwork that his 2010 “13 Assassins” remake was, it’s a rowdy good time.
Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004)
This one is a two-fer: Tubi has a collection of Richard Linklater films this month, and that includes the powerhouse duo of “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset,” the romantic dramas that follow Ethan Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpy’s Celine, obvious soul mates from across the world, on two wide-ranging, deep-diving conversations, 20 years apart. The original 1990s film is a charming, lively romance filled with the hope and optimism of youth. The 2000s follow-up is a just-about-perfect film, more complicated and challenging than its predecessor, but with even more potent, glorious longing. (Tubi doesn’t have the third, even more challenging film, “Before Midnight,” but you can find that on Roku’s streaming service, Howdy).
Hawke and Delpy have tangible, generational chemistry, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find better naturalistic dialogue – or more compelling, convincing delivery of it, in a romance movie. Linklater has always been one of the more interesting filmmakers in the way he experiments with the passage of time, and he’s never done it more successfully than in these two movies (though Tubi also has his acclaimed 12-year production, “Boyhood” this month). If you’re in the mood for a summer swoon, you can’t do better.
