It’s the depths of summer, which means there’s not a ton of interesting stuff being released at the moment. In theaters, you could go see David Wain’s funny but patchy Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, another of his absurdist comedies which sadly doesn’t reach the heights of Wet Hot American Summer. Or, that movie’s Sundance classmate The Invite is expanding to more theaters. On TV, you’re basically screwed, save for two shows I wrote about this week: Proud and The Five-Star Weekend. (One is about a hot gay Polish model, the other is about a hot gay Nantucket weekend.) 

If those aren’t to your liking, what will you do? Go outside?? Absolutely not! It’s a million degrees (depending on where you are) and the streets are teeming with children mad with summertime freedom. No, what you will do is head over to the Tubi app and watch some free movies. Yes, free: Tubi is a little like the library, if the library put ads in the middle of the books and was owned by a media conglomerate. It is actually a pretty great resource, especially if you’ve already scraped the bottoms of the HBO Max and Netflix barrels. And it’s not all B-movie junk. No, in fact there are some bona fide art-house gems on the service, ten (well, nine—you’ll see) of which I’ve recommended below. 

Under the Skin

Before his film The Zone of Interest won an Oscar (and everyone was chill about everything he said on stage that night), the director Jonathan Glazer made this eerie sci-fi about a man-eating alien, played by Scarlett Johansson, stalking around Scotland luring men to their deaths. The film is about empathy, otherness, sex, loneliness, and lots of other things, in subtle and elusive fashion. It’s a real knockout, and certainly among the most interesting things Johansson has done in her now quite franchise-stained career. If you like this one and want more Glazer, you could then watch his unsettling grief drama Birth, which has maybe the greatest opening credits sequence of any movie this century. 

High Life

Perhaps only singular French filmmaker Claire Denis would put movie stars in space and then have them do this. A moody and shape-shifting meditation on sexuality and life itself, Denis’s film is quite a departure from the rest of her decidedly more earthbound (though, still odd) work. Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche star, playing a convicted felon and a sort of mad scientist, respectively, headed toward a black hole as part of a research mission. There’s also what is commonly referred to as a “fuck box” onboard the ship, a masturbatorium where many of the crew spend their time getting themselves off. It’s a funky, ponderous movie, but could be a nice thing to watch when you need a break from your own jury-rigged jerk-off room. You spend way too much time in there, and you know it.