Five free movies to stream now

“Ghost World” (2001)

By BRANDON YU

September introduces another school year, and another chance to debut a new self.

This month’s films revolve around coming-of-age, and characters who are straining to reveal another side of themselves or resist roles foisted upon them. In either case, they emerge from their chrysalises with the chance to keep trying.

‘Ghost World’ (2001)

When Enid (Thora Birch) graduates high school, there is little ahead of her. Her every word is laced with the acidic teenage brew of apathy and cynicism, but how else should she be? All around her is ugly American sprawl populated by Neanderthals obsessed with “sports and guitar” and the so-called losers and creeps she at once mocks and identifies with.

One of those outcasts is Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a middle-age loner whom Enid pranks but then befriends, perhaps because he actually cares about things, even if they’re dusty 45 vinyls. He becomes an antidote to Enid’s all-consuming irony, but their connection in Terry Zwigoff’s movie, based on Daniel Clowes’ graphic novel, makes way for a quietly devastating assessment of the alienating choices a teenager actually faces.

There is either the conformity she sees her best friend, Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson), drifting into, or the isolation inhabited by Seymour, who finds solace in niche novelties. This dismaying insight makes for a work of sneaky genre subversion. Enid’s brighter future isn’t so much about getting out of her small town — life’s prospects are just as bland anywhere else — as it is about managing the desires to be whisked away to some other ghost world. (Stream it on PlutoTV.)

‘Petite Maman’ (2022)

Like a wondrously simple and yet utterly profound magic trick, Céline Sciamma’s “Petite Maman” weaves a tale of mothers and daughters, of grief and love, that is as heart-rending as it is healing.

After her grandmother dies, young Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) spends the next few days in the woman’s house as her parents clear it out. But when Nelly’s bereft mother, Marion (Nina Meurisse), leaves unexpectedly, Nelly meets a young girl (Gabrielle Sanz) in the nearby woods who is strangely familiar to her.

Time and space are bent, but Sciamma doesn’t rely on any technical tricks to create this magical realism — no fireworks of form or sweeping sentimentality, just two twin child actresses and a remarkably restrained 72 minutes that also brims with emotional urgency and complexity. The result is a spare, hopeful work that cuts to the visceral core of life’s sadnesses and the child in us that forever remains. (Stream it on Tubi.)

‘I Like Movies’ (2024)

Hours after he’s shuddered through a panic attack in a video store break room, Lawrence is left sitting on a curb waiting for his mother to pick him up, haunted by the coldest teenage revelation known to man: “I have to go through the rest of my life as like, just, me,” he laments weakly.

The me in question in Chandler Levack’s sharply funny feature debut is a bratty, belligerent cinephile played by Isaiah Lehtinen who mistreats his single mother, calls his best friend a “placeholder” and is a snob to everyone who doesn’t understand the majesty of Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. Living in early aughts suburban Canada, Lawrence is singularly focused on going to New York University to study directing.

Great trauma is buried underneath Lawrence’s dismissive exterior, but Levack is smart enough not to treat it as the answer. Lawrence is unrelentingly solipsistic, and the film is equally unrelenting in indicting him as the source of his own failures. He’ll have to move through life as himself, but he can change, too. (Stream it on Tubi.)

‘Columbus’ (2017)

An unassuming American mecca of modernist architecture, the city of Columbus, Indiana, provides comfort to Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a young architectural enthusiast. Maybe it’s for the buildings’ tranquil solidity and clean constructions, whereas life seems so variable and liable to rupture.

She tours through these structures after striking up a friendship with Jin (John Cho), the son of a renowned architecture scholar who has arrived in the city after his father has fallen ill. Contemplative and wistfully humanistic, the feature debut from Kogonada sees Casey’s coming-of-age story unfolding mostly on walks — just one way that it stealthily elides the tones and tropes of the genre.

The pair form a flip of each other: Casey, afraid to leave her vulnerable mother and move onto her own life; Jin, indignant that he must pause his for an ailing father who never did the same for him. As they consider the messiness of their own stories, they look up at these hulking, beautiful structures, captured here with a quiet compositional grace.

For all of its formal precision, though, the film possesses ineffable, soulful moments: a snapshot of Casey’s cigarette in the humid night, or the mournful feeling of summer’s liminal space, when you have too much time to think about how lost or stuck you are. (Stream it on Tubi.)

‘The Worst Person in the World’ (2022)

Even as she flails from one career to the next, even as one relationship is ruined by a forbidden tryst, even as she, clad in a beautiful dress looking out on an even more beautiful expanse of Oslo at dusk, finds herself inexplicably crying, nothing ever really goes wrong for Julie (Renate Reinsve, magnificent). Unlike other stunted-adult antiheroes, Julie is no broke failure, and there are no great conflicts or explicit crises in Joachim Trier’s coming-of-age film, which is by turns stylishly sentimental and piercingly true.

Instead, there is malaise: abandoned dreams, boyfriends that don’t make the cut and the quiet, gnawing sense that self-actualization is impossible. Julie’s animating anxiety is that there is no central force, good or bad, in her life. She simply doesn’t know what she wants, which, in her late 20s, means she doesn’t know herself at all.

Trier does save a major shift for the final act, one that sets the stage for a shattering turn from Julie’s ex, played by Anders Danielsen Lie. But it’s hard to say if it will spur Julie onward in her journey. Self-change is rarely so linear. (Stream it on Tubi.)