Free movies on YouTube: 29 that are legitimately great

It’s not the first movie about zombies ever made, but it is perhaps the first ‘zombie movie’ – a flick that solidified the tropes related to depicting a world overrun by shuffling, rotting undead into a genre all its own. Frankly, though, zombie movies never really got much better, unless we’re talking about George A Romero’s other contributions to the form. It might be slower and far less bloody than what today’s gorehounds are used to, but its stark cinematography gives it a harrowing, documentary-like feel – and its political impulses make just about every other non-Romero entry seem braindead by comparison.

🎬 Watch it here.

This impossibly cool comic thriller – directed by Singin’ in the Rain’s Stanley Dornen – stars Audrey Hepburn as a widow unwittingly sitting on $250,000 her late husband stole from a gang of thieves who’d very much like to get it back and Cary Grant as the suave American helping protect her…or is he? With a crackling script, twisty plotting and awesome Henry Mancini score, the movie lives up to its billing as ‘‘the best Hitchcock movie Hitchcock never made.’

🎬 Watch it here.

Guillermo del Toro’s remake was polished to a fine sheen, but for our money the first take on William Lindsay Gresham’s novel about a fraudulent loner’s rise and fall in the dizzying, decadent world of carnival is the more compelling watch. That’s mainly down to an against-type Tyrone Power, who charges the film not just with clammy desperation, but just enough humanity to make you care when it all goes hideously south, and Helen Walker as the duplicitous partner-in-crime who gives him a nudge in that direction.

🎬 Watch it here.

Peter Watkins’s influential docudrama applies a reportage lens to a real historical event to plunge the viewer right into the thick of the Battle of Culloden. ‘Battle’, in truth, is a misnomer: the combat was more like slaughter as the imcompetent Bonnie Prince Charlie oversaw the decimation of the highland clans of Scotland. Here, there are historians reporting on the events from the sidelines like commentators, while Watkins’ grainy, monochrome footage introduces the key players – and the bedraggled Scots lining up against their outmatched foes. It’s a unique viewing experience: forensic, yet surreal, like Apocalypse Now on CNN. 

🎬 Watch it here.

Sci-fi filmmakers have been trying for nearly a decade to get on Fritz Lang’s level, and only a relative few can claim to have made something as impressive and lasting as Metropolis. The German auteur more or less invented the genre’s cinematic language with his bank-breaking silent watermark – adapted from a novel by his wife, Thea von Harbou – which depicts the year 2000 as a dystopian class struggle. Effects-wise, it remains an astounding achievement in world-building, thanks to early SFX whiz Eugen Schüfftan’s stunningly realistic miniatures, and still looks better than most of the CGI slop it influenced. 

🎬 Watch it here.

There’s ‘doing anything for a laugh’ and then there’s Buster Keaton, who put his health on the line for the sake of comedy decades before Jackass. If you need additional confirmation that he was out of his mind, look no further than the signature stunt from this silent classic, in which he narrowly avoids being flattened by the facade of a collapsing house. Of course, there was more to Keaton than just derring-do, and his deadpan charisma is well on display here as the clumsy son of a riverboat captain in the midst of a tête-à-tête with a local rival. But if you simply want to gawk at the spectacle of his fearlessness, well, there’s plenty to go around. 

🎬 Watch it here.

Famous for a snooker ball scene that absolutely does not involve snooker, Alan Clarke’s landmark Brit drama is brilliantly acted – not least in its central turn by a young Ray Winstone. Playing borstal inmate Carlin, he looks about 16 (though was actually 22 at the time) and exudes a reined-in ferocity as he pursues alpha status in a block run by cruel, bullying screws. Somehow the film’s anger never overwhelms its craft, with Clarke’s camera always in just the right place to capture its seething undercurrent of nastiness and hurt. Bruising but essential.

🎬 Watch it here.

Even if you’ve never seen Rudolph Maté’s harder-than-hardboiled noir, elements of its plot will strike you as familiar. It begins with a man walking into a police station to report a murder – his own. Y’see, he’s been administered a slow-acting poison, and is racing against time to discover the culprit and motive. It was a wild idea back in the ‘40s, and has been lifted by other filmmakers several times over the ensuing decades, perhaps most insanely by the quite literally methed-out Jason Statham vehicle Crank. It may not be that crazy, but the original is still plenty wild, and thanks to a clerical error that caused its copyright to lapse, also very easy to find.

🎬Watch it here.

If Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton were the Michael Jackson and Prince of silent comedy, Harold Lloyd was Phil Collins, another hitmaker from the era whose legacy is far below that of the other two. But if the man has a masterpiece – his ‘Sussudio’, if you will – it’s this slapstick gag-fest, in which Lloyd portrays a country bumpkin trying to make it in Manhattan. It culminates in one of the most famous images in early cinema: Lloyd, in a publicity stunt gone wrong, dangling from the minute hand of a giant clock high above the city streets. It’s more illusory than the daring feats Keaton pulled off, but to watch it is no less heartstopping.

🎬 Watch it here.

Standing alongside The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Nosferatu as an example of early horror that can still send a tingle up modern spines, this half-documentary, half-tone poem from Danish director Benjamin Christensen examines the history of witchcraft, from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century. It confounded viewers at the time, but its genuinely creepy visual style – in particular Christensen’s way with lighting – went on to influence decades of horror directors, including Val Lewton. Even today, it’s hard not to feel like you might be cursed after watching.

🎬 Watch it here.

There have been five versions of A Star is Born, including an unoffical Bollywood remake. Most recent was Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga’s 2018 take, but that was preceded by the 1976 version starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, Judy Garland’s 1954 musical and, finally, this 1937 original with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. Gaynor stars as Esther Blodgett, a young farm girl desperate to become an actress. After moving to Hollywood, she meets Norman Maine (March), a famous actor whose career is going down the drain owing to his alcoholism. With his help, Esther adopts the stage name Vicki Lester and becomes an award-winning star. However, after the pair marry, Norman’s alcoholism threatens to derail her career, with their story ultimately leading to tragedy. 

🎬Watch it here.

A Depression-era comedy with class warfare themes that still chime, full of laughs that still land, and played by a cast as irresistible as ever (William Powell and Carole Lombard were made to run rings around each other), this lesser-known screwball is a delight from start to finish. Powell is a New York vagrant given a job by Lombard’s spoiled Park Ave heiress, he gives her some life lessons. If you haven’t discovered it yet, YouTube is here for you. 

🎬 Watch it here.

Film scholars have been studying Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet milestone, depicting a historic mutiny aboard a Russian battleship in 1905, for closing in on a century, but it does not exist merely as an academic text. Its influence is impossible to overstate, even today, and that lends the film a vitality that is practically immortal. Nearly 100 years later, the massacre on the Odessa Steps – still one of the single greatest sequences in cinema – remains shocking, stirring and tragic.

🎬 Watch it here.

📍You can visit the Odessa Stairs IRL. Here’s where to find them.

There’s nothing like a Charlie Chaplin movie to put a smile on your face and this 1921 effort is perhaps the smiliest of the lot. It pairs the Little Tramp up with an even littler sidekick: an orphan child (Jackie Coogan) he takes under his wing and trains up in the art of making a lot out of very little. It’s a direct inspiration for Paddington and we can’t think of a greater reference that than. The restored HD version is on YouTube.

🎬Watch it here.

📍The Little Tramp lived in a big house. It’s in Switzerland and you can visit it. 

Great screenwriter Ben Hecht made an uncredited contribution to classic newsroom screwball His Girl Friday, but his glorious stamp is all over a Technicolor rom-com. It pairs Carole Lombard and Fredric March as a dying young woman from the boondocks and the ambitious reporter who brings her back to New York as an inspirational story of courage and fortitude. The happy wrinkle? She’s not actually dying. If sparkling chemistry and likeable cynicism are you thing – and whose thing aren’t they? – it’s on YouTube now. 

🎬 Watch it here.

The premise is simple – an English lady vanishes aboard a train across Europe – but the execution sublime in Hitchcock’s timeless locomotive caper. Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave play two inquisitive Brits who try to uncover what has become of kindly old music teacher Miss Froy (May Whitty) when she suddenly disappears. Goes down easier than a cup of Earl Grey on a rainy day, though the Hitchcock cameo is quite tricky to spot in this one.

🎬Watch it here.

Hollywood’s answer to A Matter of Life and Death, Ernst Lubitsch’s deft and dapper comedy follows an old playboy (Don Ameche) who turns up in Hell assuming the worst. As he looks back over his rabble-rousing days, though, it turns out he’s not quite as damnable as he thought. Gene Tierney is the wife who may be his saving grace.Skip the 1978 Warren Beatty remake and watch this one.

🎬 Watch it here.

If you haven’t seen any Ida Lupino films, do yourself a favour and settle down with a sweltering road movie noir that the south Londoner wrote and directed. It takes its inspiration from the real-life crime spree of Billy Cook in 1950, with William Talman delivering an all-time study in deranged villainy as Emmett Myers, a gun man on the run with two hostages (Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy). In an inspired character tic, Myers literally sleeps with one eye open.

🎬Watch it here.

Vincent Price is spectacularly sinister as a travelling witchfinder in Cromwellian England, roaming East Anglia with a view to hanging anything warty. Up against him is a Roundhead soldier (Ian Ogilvy) who twigs that he’s actually a corrupt old sadist using his power in malevolent ways. Directed by Michael Reeves with a satisfying eye for tavern-based bawdiness and chilling violence, it’s right up there with The Wicker Man in the annals of British folk horror.

🎬Watch it here.

This classic screwball is a timeless classic with machine-gun patter provided by a pair of screenwriting giants, Charles Lederer and Ben Hecht, and Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant doing the rest as two jousting exes and colleagues on a big city newspaper. Watching Russell’s fast-talking star reporter Hildy and Grant’s exasperated editor running rings around each other is one of the purest joys of ‘40s Hollywood.

🎬Watch it here.

At a lean, mean 68 minutes, this Poverty Row noir is an enduring influence on just about every dark-edged thriller since – an exercise in economy, shot in just six days, that will leave you clammy-palmed and at least four percent more cynical. As you might expect, it’s not the most polished thing to ever reach the screen (there’s the whole shot-six-days thing), but for sheer amoral fizz this tale off a luckless hitchhiker (Tom Neal) who steals a car from a dead man and then picks up the wrong ride (Ann Savage), Edgar G Ulmer’s classic takes some beating. A bit like its antihero.

🎬 Watch it here.

A romantic comedy done the John Cassavetes way, Minnie and Moskowitz is loose and strangely lingering. The two central characters – museum curator Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands) and parking attendant Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel) – have a craving for love that pushes them together all the gentle magnetism of two out-of-control bumper cars. Less of a meet-cute, more of a collision.

🎬Watch it here.

This British thriller hardly bothers to hide its big twist, confident that its terrors lose not a wit of their power for being carried out in full view of the audience. And for that it can thank Anton Walbrook, who is all slippery menace as a man who sets about making his wife (Diana Wynyard) feel like she’s losing her mind as they settle into their new Pimlico pile. An edge-of-the-seat adaptation of a stage play, it got a starry but slightly less effective American remake four years later (though that one isn’t on YouTube).

🎬 Watch it here. 

Who knows how they would play to Gen Z, but for kids growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, it was always a delight to catch any of those old-school fantasy adventures featuring Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion monsters on Sunday afternoon TV. In this one, the titular swashbuckler finds himself battling the evil magician Grand Vizier for control of the land of Marabia – but the true stars, as always, are Harryhausen’s jerky creations, which include a griffin, centaur, and Kali, the multi-armed Goddess of Death.

🎬 Watch it here.

Silent film peaked just as it was about to end. FW Murnau’s romantic melodrama took the form about as far as it could go before the sound era took over, telling a simple story in the most ravishing, dreamlike fashion as the tech at the time would allow. A rural couple (George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor) find their loyalties tested by an outsider from the big city (Margaret Livingston). As noted: simple. But Murnau’s gliding camera, among other visual innovations, make the film feel more alive than many that had come before. A century later, it still has the capacity to enrapture.  

🎬 Watch it here.

Few filmmakers can spin an epic yarn like Japanese master Kenji Mizoguchi and he’s at his absolute best in a family saga that spans decades in the feudal, war-torn 11th century. It follows a boy who watches his noble father dragged off into exile and his mother enslaved and sent to work as a prostitute, before he ends up in the service of a cruel bailiff. It’s a redemption story that plumbs the depths before finally emerging into the light, and it’s told with the utmost craft and compassion.

🎬 Watch it here.

Horror directors have been chasing FW Murnau’s bestial vision of Dracula for over a century now with Robert Eggers being the latest to try his hand at a remake. But measuring up to the original is impossible: modern filmmakers simply have too much at their disposal to effectively recreate the creeping menace Murnau achieved with lighting and inventive makeup that turned Max Schrek into the insect-like Count Orlock – the inherent graininess of 100-year-old film almost makes it look like archival footage of an extinct animal. Movie vampires would get more debonair over time, but never more frightening.

🎬Watch it here.

You could watch the disappointing remake on Netflix or just head straight for the timeless first version here. Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel has four stars: Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, Judith Anderson, and the big, foreboding Cornish mansion of Manderley (actually built on a Hollywood soundstage). The old pile hosts a gothic thriller that will have you gripped right from its famous opening line (‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’).

🎬Watch it here.