100 Best Movies on Tubi Canada Right Now

Based on a true story, Darin J. Sallam’s controversial debut feature Farha is, at heart, a brutal coming-of-age film. Set in 1948, the film is about a girl who gets locked into her family’s storeroom at the start of the Nakba, the Palestinian Catastrophe. Sallam’s choice to limit most of the film’s perspective to that small storeroom is brilliant – in some ways, it echoes the surrounding discussion about the conflict. Most of what the world knows of Palestine is limited due to having to deal with censorship, lost records, and only hearing word-of-mouth stories from ancestors who just barely survived. But what we see is already too horrific to begin with. And what the film knows is the tragedy of losing your home – having to leave childhood, leave your dreams, and leave a vibrant and living culture in order to survive.

There’s more than a touch of Louis Theroux to this engrossing documentary — fronted by New Zealander pop-culture journalist David Farrier — about an innocuous-seeming Internet phenomenon: the actually-sinister subculture of “competitive endurance tickling”, in which young men undergo “tickle torture” for money on camera. When Farrier unassumingly requests an interview with an American producer of tickle content, it kickstarts a bizarre campaign of harassment and opens up a rabbit hole of unbelievable twists and turns. The wild places this documentary goes are best left as unspoiled as possible, but it’s no spoiler to say this emerges from its seemingly lighthearted premise as a deeply unnerving story about money, power, sex, and shame in the Internet age.

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 room on New York’s hottest day.

There are some key differences, though: namely, in a few of the characters (most notably Mykelti Williamson’s ex-Nation of Islam member Juror #10, who helps update the story to the ’90s) and the intensification of the ensemble’s star power. The all-star quality of the cast is never wielded to call attention to itself, though; everyone, from James Gandolfini and William Petersen to Tony Danza and Edward James Olmos is on fine character acting form here. Replacing the unforgettable Henry Fonda is Jack Lemmon (exuding warmth and good sense) as the principled lone dissenter who calmly wages a war of words with George C. Scott’s bigoted Juror #3 to give real justice a chance. The 1957 version is admittedly a timeless classic, but Friedkin’s version isn’t very far off from reaching its predecessor’s dazzling heft — plus, this stands as a compelling argument that every era should have its own 12 Angry Men.

While the mixed reception of its near-faithful American remake Vanilla Sky might make some viewers pause, there’s an intuitive brilliance in the Spanish original Open Your Eyes that isn’t easy to translate. Sure, the apparent differences help– it’s shorter and less complicated, and Cesar’s face turns more grotesque than David’s does. But what’s startling about Open Your Eyes is the way writer-director Alejandro Amenábar guides the camera through its various shifts, creating a more subtle and gradual realization that something is wrong, and thus, a more terrifying dream turned nightmare. Amenábar has later deemed the film as his worst, saying it was written when he didn’t know much about life, but, in our opinion, Abre Los Ojos still holds up as a groundbreaking existential sci-fi simulation, one that still puzzles and captivates years after.

The manic pixie dream girl unexpectedly entering a young man’s life is the subject of plenty of romance films, to the point that this plot has become somewhat overdone, stereotypical, and overly unrealistic. However, there are moments in cinema when this archetype is portrayed well– Jab We Met is one of them. It’s joyful without being unrealistic, it’s realistic without being too jaded, and as two lost souls share the same train, writer-director Imtiaz Ali creates a feeling of freedom every time then-lovers Shahid Kapoor and Kareena Kapoor save each other from the prisons of their different, day-to-day lives. And it all comes with the song numbers as fun as the film’s leading lady.

You know how many films depict the magic and wonder of cinema in such gorgeous, magnificent scenes? Peeping Tom does the opposite. Sure, it has director Michael Powell’s signature flair, with excellently framed and colored shots, but he takes a much more violent route here, swapping spectacular fantasy with the psychological terror of how the act of filming and watching can be. Given the title, it won’t be a surprise that the film involves voyeurism, but rather than of the sexual kind, Powell hones into the morbidity of the camera gaze, the twisted pleasure that’s felt when the audience sees someone terrified, despite the violence done upon them. It’s because of this that the film was so controversial, but eventually, Peeping Tom garnered critical acclaim for breaking ground as the first slasher film ever made.

Little England is one of those rare cases in small-nation cinemas, where a film was equally appealing to mainstream and arthouse audiences. Upon its release, it was box office success and 2013’s Oscar submission for Best International Feature. Festival darling Pantelis Voulgaris equipped this interwar romantic drama with the attributes of an epic: it’s two hours and a half long, spans across decades, and is based on a novel of a notable size. Written by renowned author Ioanna Karystiani, who is also Voulgaris’s wife, “Little England” the novel was adapted in a riveting screenplay where love, jealousy, passion, and betrayal sizzle in a dangerous mix. As any good period drama, the emotional range is high, and the beauty in the premise—forbidden love—is a gift that keeps on giving. The film features two stellar lead performances, as Pinelopi Tsilika and Sofia Kokkali make their acting debuts as the two sisters, the latter being the face of a new, even more daring phase of Greek cinema today. 

Murdering your spouse is bad, so it’s slightly bizarre how Drowning by Numbers has an unbothered, even amused, attitude towards its murders. Moments seem randomly placed, like the first scene of a girl jumping rope while listing the stars by name, and the film can be hard to follow, even if the production design and cinematography keep you drawn in. But as the film progresses, and Madgett’s son Smut enumerates the fictional games as if he was a historian of sorts, writer-director Peter Greenaway meticulously crafts a quirky, twisty crime comedy, where, like children’s games and the men in their lives, the murdering wives do what they do because they can get away with it. Drowning by Numbers cleverly plays with the way we treat folklore, structure, and rules, even down to the very medium Greenaway works with.

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 the border, but Park Chan-wook crafts a compelling mystery not caused by international politics, but rather by friendship between soldiers in the lower ranks, a unity and brotherhood that’s tragically hidden and forced to separate because of lines made by their higher ups. It may not compare to Park’s more famous films, but Joint Security Area hinted at the filmmaker that was to come.

At the first few moments, Song Lang seemed to be something akin to Farewell My Concubine– the film takes a snapshot of a communist Asian country in a different time, through the lens of a regional opera form with painted faces, elaborate costumes, and captivating tunes. But there’s more to Song Lang than this. Tragedy isn’t prophesized through songs of an already existing opera (in fact, the film features all new tunes), but instead, it occurs because Dung, the loan shark, didn’t reflect on the past early enough for him to reclaim the art form his family once loved, a concern shared with cải lương as a declining genre. Song Lang is a moving drama, but it’s also a nostalgic time capsule of 1980s Saigon and cải lương as a whole.