The Best Social Issue Dramas Movies to Watch on Tubi
At first, Marmalade just seemed like a good ol’ fashioned Bonnie and Clyde story being told by one inmate to another. As Baron tells Otis about his titular Bonnie in Joe Keery’s Southern drawl, there’s a charming bittersweet romance about a man pushed into crime because of healthcare costs and a compelling Camila Marrone as […]
Amidst the chaos that occurred when South Sudan split from the nation, a man is shot dead. To make up for the family’s loss, Northern ex-singer Mona hires his South Sudanese widow as her househelp, a widow unaware of her husband’s true fate, without an actual body. This widow is who Goodbye Julia is named […]
Golda Meir was Israel’s only female Prime Minister and that’s already reason enough a biopic celebrating her historical importance would be made. Oscar-winning Israeli director Guy Nattiv rose to the task and Meir’s own grandson requested British actress Helen Mirren to play the role of his grandmother (a decision that was not left undisputed). However, […]
You’ll probably never find a film like The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic. The camera is blurry, with lead Petri Poikolainen’s face the only image we see clearly. The audio sometimes goes in and out. There’s even a section that turns completely dark. While this would usually mean that something is […]
There is a version of Moon Students that solely focuses on the students of color themselves, victims of racial profiling and injustice, instead of their white teacher and his overbearing white guilt. That would’ve been a slightly better movie to watch, but even then, Moon Students seems broken beyond repair. The film is riddled with […]
Education is a human right, but for many girls around the world, this isn’t necessarily guaranteed– especially if they want to learn past the required years of basic education. Yuni is a coming-of-age drama that depicts a girl in West Java, Indonesia who wants to go to university, but due to the marriage and virginity […]
When Mikey Saber’s porn career takes a dip in California, he returns to an estranged wife in Texas, where he meets new and old friends alike and attempts to rebuild his life through a couple of odd jobs. Though Mikey eventually earns his keep, his vanity and eagerness to succeed at all costs threaten to […]
On his first day of class in the remote village of Lunana, the city teacher Ugyen asks his students what they want to be when they grow up. One of the children, a young boy named Sangay, answers that he aspires to be a teacher “because a teacher touches the future.” Lunana: A Yak in […]
Organized crime and drug dealing has been a topic of many a film, sometimes even glamorizing the whole endeavor, but rarely do these depictions acknowledge the weight it can do to a culture, particularly indigenous cultures. Birds of Passage is a film about drug dealers, but it’s a much more distinct take, tackling Colombia’s reputation […]
When striving towards your life goal, some concessions have to be made in order to get there, e.g. you would forgo some wants in order to fulfill that higher purpose. But how much are you willing to sacrifice? Mario is a sports drama about an aspiring football player that wants to make it higher up […]
Robin Hood might be a centuries old folk hero, but his reincarnations seem to pop up in real life, including the true story behind Dying to Survive. Alternatively translated as I’m Not A Medicine God, the modern day Chinese iteration is initially less concerned over the common good and more concerned with money. It makes […]
What does a filmmaker do when you’re banned from making movies? For their safety, they might move abroad or switch professions altogether. For director Jafar Panahi, it means doing things differently. Taxi was made in the titular vehicle, with a camera simply placed on the dashboard as Panahi poses as a driver. It’s a simple […]
Remarkably for a movie about women being shunned and exploited by those more powerful than them, I Am Not A Witch is often wryly funny. That’s because this satire about Zambia’s labor camps for “witches” is told with a matter-of-fact-ness that brings out both the heartbreak and absurdity of the film’s events. The bitter gravity […]
This is a hilarious political comedy starring the ever-great Steve Buscemi. Set in the last days before Stalin’s death and the chaos that followed, it portrays the lack of trust and the random assassinations that characterized the Stalinist Soviet Union. Think of it as Veep meets Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator. Although to be fair, […]
In Fatih Akin’s In the Fade, Katja is seeking justice after the killings of her Turkish husband and their young son in a terrorist bomb attack. Diane Kruger in the role of Katja delivers a powerful and rather grueling performance, for which she was awarded Best Actress at Cannes Film Festival. Her grief is vivid […]
Frozen River won’t be the most uplifting film to watch this Christmas, but it’s a stark reminder of how different Christmas is like for those down on their luck. After she’s abandoned by her gambler husband, that’s certainly Ray Eddy’s case. With bills left to pay and two children to feed, it’s no wonder she’s […]
Given the time period, it’s easy to see The Teacher as a satirical critique of the communist regime. Through the parent-teacher conference in a small high school, director Jan Hřebejk depicts a community shaken by the placement of a new teacher aligned with the Party. The new hire in question is nasty. While outwardly amiable, […]
Cheerfully outrageous yet heartwarmingly tender, the Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was ahead of its time, daring to dive into drag and transexuality, when the rest of the world was still coming around to accepting homosexuality. On the bus which the title is named after, two drag queens and a trans woman have […]
Not many places are worse to find a dead body than in the border of North and South Korea. The tensions are high, the trust is low, and the conflict between them hasn’t been resolved in more than half a century. Joint Security Area is centered on a whodunit surrounding two North Korean soldiers at […]
Even a director of William Friedkin’s caliber had his work cut out for him with this remake of the towering 1957 drama tracking a jury’s fraught deliberations in an apparently open-and-shut murder trial. Wisely, he changes little: most of the incisive dialogue remains the same, and the film still only takes place in one sweltering […]
So far, chemical waste hasn’t mutated amphibious creatures enough to create giant monsters large enough to swallow people whole… yet. This sort of monster film premise is familiar, especially for fans of 1950s sci-fi movies, but in the hands of director Bong Joon-ho, The Host transforms what could have been B-movie schlock into a drama […]
FBI agents Rupert and Alan (Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe) visit Jim Crow-era Mississippi to investigate the disapperance of three civil rights activists. They find out soon enough, however, that answers won’t come easy when local officials and police have ties with the KKK. There’s no shortage of films like Mississippi Burning, but it stands […]
While zombies weren’t new in film, it wasn’t until writer-director George A. Romero’s Living Dead saga that the zombie as we know it today was created. Day of the Dead is the third in the franchise, and like Night and Dawn, Romero was more interested in the way humans were the threat, more so than […]
The Children’s Hour was one of the few sympathetic depictions of a lesbian character at a time when same-sex relationships were illegal. That being said, the film doesn’t really focus on forming a couple. It’s also about how destructive the rumor mill can be, but really, the film is mostly an indictment of how terrible […]
Despite how the title sounds like, the horror of Bedevilled isn’t a devil, a demon, or a spirit. It isn’t even the way childhood friend Bok-nam snaps, taking up a scythe and going on a murderous rampage to kill all the people that wronged her. No, the actual horror of Bedevilled is that everyday people […]
Part documentary yet part surreal daydream, director Derek Jarman’s final film is one last rallying cry into a blue void. Against an unchanging screen of International Klein Blue, most of the film is Jarman’s voice, drifting through various subjects, from day-to-day complications of AIDS to contemplations about the color blue. Some of his frequent collaborators […]
No one likes to be replaced. Even when it gets difficult, hardwork and years put in effort to take and keep these roles makes it feel precious, and that’s exactly how househelp Raquel feels in The Maid. It’s a funny domestic comedy, with a scowling Catalina Saavedra ready to protect the role she’s held onto […]
This is a low-scale, intimate, almost minimalist movie that speaks volumes about the misconceptions that westerners have regarding the Middle-East. And the performance of Richard Jenkins is absolutely exceptional (earned him a nomination for the Oscars). He plays a professor who comes back to his New York apartment only to find two immigrants living in it. What […]
When a regime falls, what follows isn’t a clean slate– it lingers, and it haunts those that were able to survive, part due to what was done to them and part to what they have done. Marshland ostensibly is a police procedural investigating a series of women murdered in rural Spain, but it’s also a […]
This teenage crime drama contains enough grit to stand on its own, but The Tribe’s real hook is in the way it’s told: entirely in Ukrainian sign language, without subtitles. Set in a boarding school for deaf students, new arrival Sergei must contend with an institution that’s run like a gang. His journey through the […]
This is Kristen Stewart’s proof that she is more than a lip-biting, vampire-loving teenager. Reactive and emotive, she will not disappoint you here. Rather, expect an electrifying and exceptional performance. Paired with Payman Moaadi, they both make of this work an emotionally poignant movie that questions the notion of freedom in the unlikeliest of places: […]
Anthology films aren’t for everyone, but it’s a fitting choice for 4 Moons. With each moon phase representing the stage in the couples’ respective relationships, the film gets to explore gay relationships in such a comprehensive way, creating a bird’s eye view of how lovers like the couples in the film live and love. It’s […]
Known for his horror films, Kiyoshi Kurosawa shifts gears and presents a family drama in Tokyo Sonata. In the film, father Ryuhei, who’s expected to be the breadwinner, loses his prestigious job and chooses to hide his firing from his family. While this premise isn’t overtly scary, the film understands the terror of being unable […]
Precious is the devastating story of how teen student Precious (Gabourey Sidibe), a victim of every kind of abuse possible, grabs a chance to turn her life around when she enrolls in an alternative school. She learns to read and write, eventually hopeful for a better future, but standing in her way is her violent […]
Ask yourself how many Palestinian movies you have seen before. You will want to give this smart and twisty Academy Award nominee by Golden Globe winning director Hany Abu-Assad a chance to change your answer. Omar, a Palestinian baker, climbs the West Bank Wall to see his lover, Nadia, whom he wants to marry. When […]
When David and his sister Jennifer fight over the TV remote, they are suddenly transported to David’s favorite sitcom, Pleasantville. They’re told by a spirit guide that their best bet at getting out is fitting in, but their modern sensibilities prove to be too much for the genteel ‘50s town. Soon, the residents learn about […]
This is a great movie to watch on say a Sunday. The story of three homeless people who find a newborn baby while foraging through trash on Christmas eve and decide to care for the baby and track down its parents. Middle-aged Gin, aging Hana and teenage runaway Miyuki form a makeshift family haunted by […]
I watch many movies and the great majority of them leave little impression on me. They are fun and entertaining, but quickly forgettable. Not Disconnect, though. This is a powerful and provocative film that not only keeps you pinned to your seat but also makes you think about the consequences of your actions. It should certainly […]
