If you haven’t heard, Dune: Part Two is coming out. The sci-fi film is sure to be a spectacle, and deserves to be seen on premium screens like IMAX. But doing that can be quite costly, and if you factor in gas and refreshments, that’s already a lot of money devoted to one feature that’s still weeks away.
A good way to save money this weekend, yet still watch some good movies, is to stream them for free. Several platforms like Amazon Freevee, Tubi, and YouTube offer movies for no monetary charge. All you need to do is watch a few ads here and there, and that’s it. The three movies we’ve selected this weekend are definitely worth it.
No Country for Old Men (2007)
More often than not, the Academy Awards frequently honor the wrong film when they hand out their Best Picture statuette. In 2007, voters got it right when they selected No Country for Old Men as their best film of the year. The Coen Brothers’ action-thriller is the rare movie that earned highly favorable critical and commercial consensus, and along the way, produced one of the most iconic villains to grace the silver screen.
That villain is one Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem in an oscar-winning performance), a hit man with an air-powered bolt gun who is in hot pursuit of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a hunter who stumbles upon a bag of drug money and decides to take it and run. Bad idea, as Anton is as relentless as the T-1000 and will kill anyone, depending on a toss of a coin, who gets in his way. No Country for Old Men works well as an action movie, yes, but it’s also a great meditation on greed and masculinity. Plus, it has one of the most haunting endings in modern movie history.
No Country for Old Men is streaming for free on YouTube.
Stephen King’s It (1990)
The late 2010s saw a two-part feature film adaptations of Stephen King’s horror novel It, but as good those films were, they still couldn’t equal the power and horror of the 1990 miniseries, which was originally shown on ABC in November, 1990. Unlike the movies, the miniseries didn’t separate the story into the past and the present, and instead remained faithful to the novel’s narrative of cutting back and forth between the children of Derry, Maine, as they confront an ancient evil and the grown versions of those kids who must battle that evil again.
Pretty much everyone knows the story by now: a group of outcast preteens band together to take down Pennywise the Dancing Clown, and are brought back together again decades later to face their childhood traumas and kill their enemy once and for all. Clue actor Tim Curry created one of the most memorably creepy villains with his take on Pennywise, who is goofy, funny, and completely terrifying.
Stephen King’s It is streaming for free on Tubi.
Old (2021)
M. Night Shyamalan’s movies usually play better with time; what is initially perceived as just “OK” becomes better with some perspective. One such movie is Old, which came out in 2021 to mostly polite reviews, but is quickly earning a reputation as one of the most underrated thrillers of the last five years.
Old‘s premise is deceptively simple: vacationers stumble upon an isolated tropical beach and decide to enjoy the cool blue waves and warm sand. It quickly becomes apparent that something is seriously wrong; everyone seems to be aging, and fast, until they die. This being Shyamalan, it’s not quite as simple as that, and yes, there’s a climactic twist that borders on the absurd, but it all works, and Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps are terrific as the lead parents.
Old is streaming for free on Amazon Freevee.
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