If we’re being honest, the streaming app that your correspondent uses most — more than Netflix or Amazon Prime or Hulu, and more than any of the less-recognizable subscription streamers we’ve previously spotlighted here — is Plex, though for reasons owing less to its current iteration than to its humble beginnings.
Plex launched in the late 2000s as free media-server software, allowing its users to set up a client-server on either their home computer or on a network-attached storage device for their personal libraries of movies, television episodes and music. Setup and integration are fairly simple, and once the app has been directed to the user’s files, it matches titles to its database of films and shows, which can be streamed to a variety of devices (including Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire and smart TVs). Best of all, you can share your libraries with friends, and vice versa, for either individual or “watch together” viewing. It’s a nifty way to watch whatever you want, wherever you want — for free, at least in its basic form. (The paid “Plex Pass” offers additional bells and whistles.)
Of course, it’s difficult for a service to make money functioning solely as a free app for personal streaming, so Plex began expanding its offerings and utility in recent years. In 2019, the app added live TV streaming and DVR functionality, allowing its users the option of full-on cord cutting for an additional monthly fee. The following year, Plex introduced its ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) streaming service and free-to-stream live TV channels. As with Tubi, Pluto TV and other AVOD services, the automated commercial breaks aren’t always executed with finesse; the breaks sometimes fall mid-scene, or even midsentence. But it’s hard to complain when it comes with a $0 price tag.
This February, Plex launched another feature: a VOD rental service, allowing viewers to shell out a few bucks to stream new releases in the app, rather than in Amazon, Apple or Vudu. Sure, it’s a revenue-generator, but it also helps make Plex, in its own words, something of a concierge service. With the “Universal Watchlist” function, you tell the app which streaming services you use, and thereafter, whenever you add a movie or show to your watchlist, it will show you where to find it: via one of your other services, in a media library (yours or a friend’s) or through Plex’s own AVOD or VOD portals. It essentially makes the app the center of your streaming universe, and in an increasingly convoluted digital media landscape, that’s a useful function indeed.
Here are a few highlights from their current AVOD offerings:
‘Master of the Flying Guillotine’: This 1976 wuxia epic from the writer, director and star Jimmy Wang Yu is one of the era’s most beloved martial arts extravaganzas. Technically a sequel to Wang Yu’s smash “One-Armed Boxer” from the previous year, this tale of a blind warrior seeking revenge against Wang Yu’s antihero is full of clever innovations and complications in its plentiful action sequences. Most impressively, the filmmaker shoots his action scenes the way a fighter fights, up close and personal, with the graceful camera right in the middle of the bone-cracking action.
‘I’m Not There’: With the James Mangold-directed Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” hitting theaters at Christmas, here’s your periodic reminder that there’s already a fabulous Dylan movie out in the world — albeit one perhaps too experimental and elliptical for the current cradle-to-grave iteration of the form. The director Todd Haynes instead adopted an approach mirroring the chameleonic nature of his subject, casting six different actors (of varying races and sexes) to play the singer-songwriter at various points of his colorful life, in shifting cinematic styles. The result is a picture as unpredictable, exhilarating and occasionally baffling as the figure at its center.
‘BPM (Beats Per Minute)’: The 2017 winner of the Cannes Grand Prix, this fierce and ferocious docudrama tells the story of the Paris chapter of the activist group Act Up, and its actions protesting government officials, pharmaceutical executives and public apathy toward AIDS patients in the 1990s. Much of that work is planned in the group’s meetings and strategy sessions — heated, passionate and complicated combinations of brainstorming and conflict resolution. In that way, the film is a process picture, and a fascinating one, but the writer and director Robin Campillo makes room for the tender stories of what happens outside of those rooms, and how the urgency of both halves of these activists’ lives begin to blur. It’s a tense, tough, candid dramatization of a fight where the stakes are truly life and death.
‘Enemies, A Love Story’: The director Paul Mazursky capped off a spectacular run of 1980s work with this tonally complex adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel. Ron Silver (in perhaps his finest hour onscreen) stars as Herman Broder, a Holocaust survivor who has made a new life for himself in New York City circa 1949 — more than one life, in fact, as he splits time between his wife (Malgorzata Zajaczkowska) in Coney Island and his mistress (Lena Olin) in the Bronx, an arrangement further complicated by the arrival of his presumed-dead, prewar wife, played with a seen-it-all wariness by Anjelica Huston. Mazursky, who wrote the script with Roger L. Simon, mines the comedy-of-manners (and outright farce) elements with expected grace, but he also lends proper weight to the morality of the tale, conjuring an underlying melancholy throughout, which surfaces adroitly in the affecting conclusion.
‘QT8: The First Eight’: The director Tara Wood’s 2019 documentary covers, per its title, the filmography of Quentin Tarantino through “The Hateful Eight,” via behind-the-scenes footage, copious clips and an impressive array of interviews (though not with the man himself, alas). It’s not all softballs, thankfully, as she covers several of his controversies and the then-recent fall of his regular distributor and financier, Harvey Weinstein. But it offers plenty of context for fans both rabid and casual, cleverly adopting the director’s cinematic trademarks (chapter headings, animations), and informatively breaking down his process.
Read More: Seeking Free Quality Streaming? Try Plex.
