Max may be adding the “HBO” back into its name, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that streaming is getting any better for classic film fans in 2025—great movies older than a few decades are still hard to come by on popular subscription services like Hulu and Netflix.
Sure, you could sign up for The Criterion Channel, the streaming service from the boutique media label dedicated to highlighting the best in classic and contemporary films (if you are any kind of film history geek, it’s practically a moral imperative). But you actually don’t need to pay anything at all to enjoy a substantial library of Criterion-approved gems: As spotted on Reddit (and possibly inspired by a Redditor and Letterboxd user who goes by the handle “Geekstache”), Tubi now has a category page collecting all the movies in the Criterion Collection that you can watch for free on the ad-supported service.
Of course, Tubi can’t come right out and say it has curated its own little Criterion corner (Criterion would probably take issue with that; plus, it’s not like it’s the blessing from Criterion that makes a movie great). Instead, it classifies these 150+ films—from old Hollywood screwball farces like Bringing Up Baby, to imported epics like Akira Kurasowa’s Ran, to recent indie darlings like Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha—as being “For the Cinephiles.” (I’m sure it is just a coincidence all of them have been released on Blu-ray and DVD in fancy Criterion editions.)
The category includes a ton of movies I’ve long been meaning to see—and you too, probably. There are even a few I own on Criterion DVD that I haven’t gotten around to actually watching yet (It Happened One Night, All That Jazz). Of course, streaming on Tubi isn’t exactly equivalent to watching in high definition on a feature-packed disc, or even on The Criterion Channel itself—you’ll have to sit through commercial breaks, for one thing, and its unlikely Tubi will be offering up the same pristine restored prints. But you also won’t be paying for the privilege, and you can save yourself the time you’d otherwise spend endlessly scrolling for something good to watch.
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