Metropolis, too, is a great reminder of just how difficult it is to judge an incomplete film. Fritz Lang filled his parable with all the sci-fi/adventure tropes he could: the mad scientist, the robot, the rooftop chase, the catacombs and, as it turns out, a devious henchman. Metropolis never slows as it delivers a constant stream of iconic images. Stars: Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge That Battle Royale II sets out to up the stakes of the first film, especially given the first film’s crazy success in Japan, is to be expected, but stick to the first: Battle Royale will make you care about kids murdering each other more than you (probably) would anyway. What the director can do with such a tenuous premise (which The Hunger Games takes multiple films to do, and without a single ounce of levity) is astounding-plus, he wrangled Beat Takeshi Kitano to play the President Snow-type character, which Kitano does to near-perfection.
(There are even regular island-wide announcements of the day’s dead as the sun sets on the remaining children.) Yet, Battle Royale is so lean in its exposition, so uninterested in dragging out its symbolism or metaphor, that one can’t help but marvel at how cleanly Fukasaku (who had a full career behind him when he made this, only three years before he died) can lend depth to these children, building stakes around them to the point that their deaths matter and their doomed plights sting. Battle Royale, like the immensely successful four-film crash course in crafting an action star who is really only a symbol of an action star, chronicles a government-sanctioned battle to the death between a group of teens on a weird, weapon-strewn island. It’s OK to compare Battle Royale to The Hunger Games movies-or, rather, to find how the lasting accomplishments of the latter franchise were essentially done better and with so much more efficiency by the former-because you probably will anyway. Stars: Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Tarô Yamamoto In fact, try to blink as little as possible. Don’t even think about checking your phone while you’re watching this. Hilariously acted and expertly filmed, His Girl Friday derives much of its comedic impact from the incredibly clever and lightning-fast banter of the characters. What puts you on the edge of your seat in this film is how you get there. The minute Russell’s Lindy Johnson stalks into the newspaper office run by her ex-husband Walter Burns (Grant), you know it’s to tell him she’s getting remarried and leaving journalism to raise a family, and you know that’s not how it’s going to end. This amazing, dizzyingly paced screwball comedy by Howard Hawks stars Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, and takes us back into two of the decade’s hallmark preoccupations: The “remarriage comedy” and the intrigue and obsessiveness of the newspaper world. Special effects have become so sophisticated that many of us have probably forgotten how much pure amazement you can wreak with a great story and a script that doesn’t let up for one second. Stars: Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy
Here are the 10 best movies on Redbox Free On Demand: In addition to Redbox Free On Demand content, you can also check out our guides to the best movies on Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Hulu, Disney+, Showtime, and Cinemax.
You can access Redbox Free On Demand on Roku, iOS, Android mobile and TVs, and Vizio devices-with LG, Xbox, Samsung, and Google Chromecast support on the way. And it couldn’t be easier to start watching, with no account sign-up necessary. Supplementing our larger free and On Demand lists, the former of which collects plenty of other AVOD (ad-based video on demand) services, this Redbox streaming list highlights the best of what the streamer has to offer if sitting through a few advertisements is more worth it to you than paying a rental fee. This list is up to date as of August 2021. Now that the service has launched desktop support (it was mobile-only at launch), it’ll be even easier to check out. Following the strategy of its rental offerings (the best of which you can find here), the commercial-driven streamer has plenty on offer-spanning everything from indie fare to the kind of horror and action films that’ll please hardcore genre devotees. Redbox, known best for its quick-and-easy rentals of new and classic movies, has also launched its own free streaming platform: Redbox Free On Demand.