Five Movies to Watch When You're Entering Your Film Person Era
From Before Sunrise yearning to Blue Velvet weirdness, five must-watch movies on Tubi to upgrade your Letterboxd watchlist.
At some point, watching movies stops being a casual activity and becomes a personality trait. Suddenly you're exploring directors you've always meant to watch. Your Letterboxd watchlist has somehow reached triple digits. Or maybe you just want to venture beyond your usual movie-night rotation and finally understand why people won't stop talking about that one movie.
Either way, Tubi has must-watch movies for just about every kind of budding cinephile. We're talking one-night romances, quarter-life crises, punk-rock love stories, candy-colored camp, and the kind of David Lynch nightmare that sends you straight to the internet afterward. You can find even more movie-night homework (fun homework, promise) in Tubi's For the Cinephiles collection.
Five movies. Five completely different flavors of cinema. Whether you're filling out your Letterboxd diary or simply looking for a great movie to watch on Tubi, consider this your next watchlist upgrade.
Before Sunrise
Two attractive strangers meet on a train, get off together in Vienna, and spend the night walking around talking. That's basically Before Sunrise. And somehow, Richard Linklater turns that into one of the defining romance movies of the '90s. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy play Jesse and Céline with such natural chemistry that their conversations about love, death, relationships, and everything in between start feeling less like scripted dialogue and more like you're accidentally eavesdropping on two people falling for each other in real time.
If you're looking for a romance movie that lives and dies by chemistry, start here. No elaborate meet-cute. No giant romantic gesture. Just Vienna, one night, and the increasingly dangerous realization that maybe the hottest thing two people can do onscreen is actually enjoy talking to each other. Your dating standards have been warned.
The Worst Person in the World
Joachim Trier's The Worst Person in the World follows Renate Reinsve's Julie through several years of relationships, career changes, and increasingly complicated attempts to figure out what she actually wants from her life. Despite the title, Julie isn't some grand cinematic villain. She's simply messy, indecisive, and occasionally selfish in the painfully recognizable way people can be when they're still becoming themselves.
Come for the gorgeous Oslo backdrop and inventive filmmaking; stay because at some point Julie will make a decision that has you thinking, girl..., immediately followed by the uncomfortable realization that you understand exactly why she made it. There's a reason this Norwegian romantic dramedy became such a favorite among younger cinephiles: if your twenties have ever felt like repeatedly clicking “maybe later” on life's software update, Julie understands.
Dinner in America
Simon is an abrasive punk musician on the run. Patty is an awkward outsider obsessed with a mysterious local band. Dinner in America puts them together and somehow discovers a deeply sweet romance underneath all the suburban rage, deadpan weirdness, and punk-rock attitude.
Kyle Gallner and Emily Skeggs don't give you polished rom-com chemistry; they give you two strange people gradually realizing oh no, you might actually understand me. That's considerably better. The movie is loud, funny, crude, and unexpectedly tender, with the kind of outsider energy that explains why the punk-rock romance has become a cult favorite for viewers discovering it years after release.
But I'm a Cheerleader
But I'm a Cheerleader takes conversion therapy, one of the bleakest possible subjects, and puts it inside a world so aggressively pink and blue that subtlety never even made it through the front gate. Natasha Lyonne plays Megan, a cheerleader whose family sends her to conversion camp after deciding she's a lesbian, which is news to Megan, at least initially. Then Clea DuVall's Graham enters the picture and self-discovery gets considerably harder to ignore.
The camp is part of the point. Jamie Babbit turns rigid ideas about gender and sexuality into something visually ridiculous, while Lyonne and DuVall give the satire an actual romantic heartbeat underneath all that production-design perfection. Add RuPaul, Melanie Lynskey, and Michelle Williams to the mix and you have an LGBTQ+ cult classic that proves a movie can have something serious to say while looking like somebody turned the saturation all the way up.
Blue Velvet
David Lynch's Blue Velvet begins with Kyle MacLachlan's Jeffrey returning to an idyllic small town and finding a severed human ear in a field. Most people would probably contact the authorities and continue with their day. Jeffrey instead starts investigating, meets Isabella Rossellini's mysterious nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens, and discovers that the perfectly manicured suburb around him has something much uglier hiding underneath.
This is the movie-night equivalent of realizing the door you just opened probably should have remained closed. Lynch moves between beautiful, disturbing, surreal, and darkly funny without giving you a neat little map for how you're supposed to feel about any of it. If you reach the credits thinking, “I don't know if I liked that, but I absolutely need to talk about it,” welcome to the wonderful problem of watching David Lynch.