5 free movies to stream now

By Brandon Yu

Spring, with its blooms and many unfurlings, is a time of awakening. Yet birth and renewal also means being confronted with the cold light of day.

The early seconds of Josephine Decker’s 2018 film “Madeline’s Madeline” opens on a theater exercise that doubles as a kind of transformation for its teenage protagonist. “What you are experiencing is just a metaphor,” she’s assured. But what it represents will prove to be confusing and brutal; growing into the world often is.

Spring, of course, also welcomes the budding of new romance. In the films from this month, you’ll recognize the sudden possibilities of love, in its wonder and its terror, along with the prickly realities of coming of age. For these (mostly) young characters, it’s a season of change. Watching them, one can only hope they make it out the other end intact.

‘Weekend’ (2011)

The fleeting encounter is an age-old archetype kept alive by the most romantic, and perhaps idealized, corners of our imagination. But in this story of a two-night stand by Andrew Haigh (“All of Us Strangers”), a brief connection is rendered achingly deep and real.

Across a weekend, a hookup slowly deepens between Russell (Tom Cullen), a soft-spoken lifeguard throbbing with discomfort as he moves through the world, and Glen (Chris New), a confident aspiring artist indignant at an oppressively straight world. Gradually, they tease out each other’s inner lives, hash out gay politics and, as the night gets hazier, interrogate what exactly the other is running away from.

The progression of their connection is wonderfully organic and subtle thanks to Cullen and New’s inspired chemistry. Their performances transform a fling into an affecting sketch of two people — dissatisfied, wounded and defensive in ordinary but tangible ways — itching for comfort and understanding before the sun is forced to rise. (Stream it on PlutoTV.)

‘Welcome to the Dollhouse’ (1995)

Youth is hell. Forget the blissful innocence we associate with it. For many, it’s an endless torment against which we are powerless, as depicted in Todd Solondz’s hilarious and bleak coming-of-age horror show. The film follows Dawn (Heather Matarazzo), a bespectacled seventh grader who just can’t catch a break. She is bullied by everyone at school, blotted out as the middle child in her family and has her first kiss with the same boy who is violently threatening her.

The terror of growing up is universal, but it’s made memorable here by Solondz’s distinct sensibility of cosmic despair. But the movie also captures a larger picture of a kind of suburban American drabness — not a done-up or stylized one, but one that is simply frumpy, a future that Dawn wouldn’t even want to grow up into.

There is no exact arc here, just as you certainly wouldn’t feel one while living youth in real time. Sometimes it doesn’t get better — at least not by the end of the school year, and maybe not for a long while after that. (Stream it on Tubi.)

‘C’mon C’mon’ (2021)

A chorus of young voices answer big questions throughout Mike Mills’ film: What will the future look like? Will it be better or worse? Their answers are wise and pure, as they try to find the right words that bridge their idealism with their understanding of the world’s colder realities.

Mills, whose past films includes “Beginners” and “20th Century Women,” gravitates toward the space between innocence and the messiness of life, which is another way of saying, between being a child and being a parent.

Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) is a radio journalist traversing the country to ask young people these questions for a project. But after his sister (Gabby Hoffman) must travel to assist her unstable husband, Johnny steps in to temporarily watch over his spunky and inquisitive nephew, Jesse (Woody Norman). Naturally, Johnny stumbles through parenting Jesse, who increasingly struggles with the trickiness of the situation.

Their growing bond is seen through Mills’ trademark warmth, offering another tender rendition on the director’s consistent preoccupations: the life cycle of parent and child, the ever-spinning wheel of learning, loving and trying. (Stream it on PlutoTV and Plex.)

‘Madeline’s Madeline’ (2018)

At the center of this film’s experimental haze is Madeline (Helena Howard), the troubled teenage girl whose coming-of-age is as freeing as it is precarious. We mostly see her either rehearsing with a theater group whose director (Molly Parker) has deemed her an acting prodigy or at home butting heads with her mother (Miranda July).

Her world is seen through alternatingly intimate and disorienting camerawork that, we realize, comes to personify Madeline’s wavering mental state. Soon, the chaos of her inner world becomes fodder for the director’s work, a process that becomes increasingly dubious.

Decker’s film can be as challenging as it is audacious; do not expect an entirely straightforward work, in form or narrative, a reflection of the film’s interests in unreliable authors, the unraveling mind and the blurry line between art and personal life. What is plainly brilliant is Howard’s breakout performance (her screen debut, no less!); her feverish emotional complexity brings to mind the great Gena Rowlands and her erratic figure in “A Woman Under the Influence.” (Stream it on Tubi.)

‘Two Lovers’ (2008)

Most romance movies wouldn’t dare to start as bleakly as this one does. That’s perhaps because James Gray’s film, despite its title, is not so much a romance as a melancholy tale about how fractured and desperate the search for love can be among broken people.

Here we see Joaquin Phoenix as a sweet loner named Leonard, grieving his last relationship and living with his parents in Brooklyn. But his life is shaken suddenly by two love interests: Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the stable daughter of a family friend; and Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), the chaotic neighbor stuck in an affair with a married man.

They are familiar tropes that become richly human in the performances and in Gray’s assured direction, creating a portrait of how connection can often be about finding solace away from the past and from ourselves. (Stream it on Tubi.)