Amazon is full of movies and TV shows for its Prime Video subscribers, but you don’t have to pay a single cent to watch some titles. Anyone can stream movies on Amazon’s Freevee, an ad-supported streaming service that exists on the same platform as Prime Video. Given that the standard Prime Video plan now includes ads, Freevee seems like even more of a bargain, a free plan that carries only marginally more commercials than the paid version.
If you’re looking to give Freevee a try, you’ll find tons of options available, from classic films to recent Amazon Studios originals. Here are three great movies, featuring major stars working with brilliant filmmakers, to get you started.
'Reservoir Dogs'
Quentin Tarantino’s first feature film is an impressive accomplishment for a debut, with the same kind of distinctive dialogue, visual inventiveness and mesmerizing performances as his later, higher-budget movies. Tarantino packs all of those elements into a movie that takes place largely in a single location, a warehouse where a group of criminals meet up following a heist gone wrong. One of them has betrayed the crew to the police, and they quickly turn on each other, leading to a series of violent confrontations.
Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi and Michael Madsen play the four robbers who make it out of the botched heist alive, and Keitel and Roth are excellent as wary allies who have every reason not to trust each other. “Reservoir Dogs” is a keystone for Tarantino’s subsequent work, but it’s also a great movie on its own.
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'The Night of the Hunter'
Charles Laughton had a long career as an actor, but this is the only movie he ever directed. It still beats the entire filmographies of some directors, with its disturbing story about an itinerant preacher and serial killer who terrorizes a woman and her two young children in pursuit of a hidden cache of stolen money.
Robert Mitchum is absolutely chilling as one of the scariest villains in cinema history, effortlessly shifting from the ingratiating, friendly man of God to the cold-blooded killer, while making it clear that those two sides are part of the same continuum within a single person. Laughton’s evocative, eerie visual style, influenced by German expressionism, is just as powerful as the story and the performances. He made the most of his one chance behind the camera.
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'Thelma & Louise'
Everyone knows about the famous ending of Ridley Scott’s road-trip thriller, but this movie is more than just its iconic final freeze frame. Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon have wonderful chemistry as the title characters, two best friends who take to the open road as a way to escape their dreary lives for a few days and end up on an odyssey of crime, sex and self-discovery.
Scott and screenwriter Callie Khouri capture a freewheeling sense of fun as their characters rebel against the patriarchy in the only way they know how. It’s an empowering movie with a dark message, as Thelma and Louise can ultimately only defeat the corrupt system by opting out of it entirely. At least they have plenty of fun along the way.
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