Looking for the best movies to watch for free on YouTube? With 2010’s True Grit, Total Recall, Train to Busan, and more, here are the best free movies to stream on YouTube.
There are a ton of streaming services to choose from nowadays. There’s arguably never been a better time to watch a good movie from the comfort of your home, with platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Max, Criterion Channel, and more offering a cornucopia of new releases and classic titles every month.
YouTube happens to be one of these. Despite not getting nearly the same amount of attention as those aforementioned services when it comes to movie libraries, YouTube actually has wealth of great movies that are available to (legally) stream for free.
We’ve combed through the platform’s library of available titles to bring you the very best free movies on YouTube. Let’s dive in and see what they have to offer!10 Things I Hate About You
Director: Gil Junger
Cast: Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, Joseph Gordon-Levitt
There are far more than 10 things to love about this quintessential teen romantic comedy. A soundtrack full of earworms. Breakout roles for Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Cameos from the bands Letters to Cleo and Save Ferris. And all of it in a modern Shakespeare retelling.
Cameron (Gordon-Levitt) falls for Bianca (Larisa Oleynik), but her overprotective father won’t let her start dating before her proudly outcast sister, Kat (Stiles), does. Lovelorn Cameron hires secretly sensitive bad boy Patrick (Ledger) to win Kat’s heart, but what happens when everybody in the movie catches feelings? Experience the cream of the crop of ’90s teen movies and watch 10 Things I Hate About You. —Susana PoloThe Dark Crystal
Directors: Jim Henson, Frank Oz
Cast: Stephen Garlick, Lisa Maxwell, Billie Whitelaw
Jim Henson is known for puppeteering, but to be into film puppeteering at all, you’ve got to be pretty open to out-there filmmaking. It doesn’t get more “out there” than leaping from puppet-driven musical comedies to an original fantasy film where half the cast speaks a constructed language and there are no human characters at all. Yeah, the Skeksis language played so poorly in test screenings that the lines were redubbed in English, but you get the point.
The story of Jen the Gelfling’s quest to heal the Dark Crystal and prevent the cruel Skeksis from ruling the world forever was a product of Henson’s post-Muppet ambitions of proving that film puppetry could be a true medium, not merely a novelty. Is The Dark Crystal good? That’s a complicated answer. Is it the product of an incredibly skilled production, led by a once-in-a-generation creative talent, that could not be made today? That’s certain. —SPAlien
Director: Ridley Scott
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright
Alien’s greatness probably doesn’t need to be restated. But even if you know how good it is, or think you’ve seen it plenty of times, you probably owe this Ridley Scott masterpiece a rewatch. It’s the kind of movie that miraculously builds on its own legacy with each subsequent viewing, and only grows in impressiveness with each passing year.
So rewatch Alien again. Compare every element of the movie against something sci-fi films (or any genre, for that matter) have done since, and marvel at how far ahead Alien comes out. In the nearly 45 years since that movie was released, no film has come close to matching how well it communicated the idea of being trapped in space with something more horrible than you knew could exist. No cast has ever had such perfect grizzled-trucker energy or crackly faces. It’s easy to look at movies from the 1970s and say they don’t make ’em today like they used to, and it’s true. But it’s also true that no one before or since has ever made ’em like Alien, and we should all probably appreciate that a little more often than we do. —Austen GoslinWillow
Director: Ron Howard
Cast: Val Kilmer, Joanne Whalley, Warwick Davis
It may seem impossible now, but there was a time when Star Wars was new, and Hollywood was dying to do more stuff like it. Enter George Lucas and his buddy Ron Howard, who said: Let’s do Star Wars for medieval fantasy.
The result, Willow, is a loosely structured fantasy adventure comedy with cutting-edge special effects that’s fun for the whole family (give or take a couple of black magic scenes that absolutely seared into the brains of young viewers). Star Wars’ Warwick Davis plays the titular hero — a hapless but hopeful basically-a-Hobbit — on a quest to save a baby from an witch, with the help of himbo swordsman Madmartigan, in maybe Val Kilmer’s most delightful role.
Willow is, frankly, phenomenally silly, but also phenomenally fun. There’s a magic wand and a fairy queen and a sorceress who’s been turned into a kind of Australian possum. Give it a watch. —SP Silence
Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Tadanobu Asano
Of all Martin Scorsese’s many terrific films, it’s hard not to feel that his 2016 adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s novel Silence is one of his most personal and important. The film follows two Jesuit priests, Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver), on a mission to find another priest who is said to have renounced his faith in 17th-century Japan. At the time, Christians in the country were largely forced into hiding at the risk of torture and death, making the priests’ journey particularly difficult.
While the movie serves as a fascinating look at this period in Japan, it’s even more affecting as a crisis-of-faith movie for Rodrigues. Garfield’s performance is absolutely haunting, as we see Rodrigues slowly lose not just his faith in God, but in everything he’s ever stood for or known himself to be.
