Finetuning the streaming experience, from Coppola and Gene Hackman to David Lean and Juliette Binoche

Subscription streaming services are the obvious way to seek out new movies, but there are other options that don’t cost a thing.

Juliette Binoche in a scene from Let The Sunshine In.

Playing now on SBS on Demand is one of the great movies of the 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, a paranoid thriller about surveillance, guilt and the unreliability of evidence.

Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, an expert in audio surveillance who’s given a demanding assignment: to capture the words of a young couple walking through the midst of a crowded city square. Harry — a man who cultivates isolation and distance — claims no interest in or responsibility for what happens as a result of recording this exchange.

READ MORE: Streaming small-screen essentials

Gene Hackman in scene from The Conversation.

Yet there are reasons, it turns out, why he becomes involved, in the story behind this assignment and its potentially dangerous consequences, It’s a haunting, resonant work, cold and compelling, a brilliant exercise of sound and sense.

The big-screen cinema experience might be on hold, but there are all kinds of ways to to seek out movies on a smaller screen. Subscription streaming services are the obvious way to go, but there are other options that don’t cost anything, including free-to-air TV, platforms such as Vimeo, YouTube channels and online archives of various kinds.

Also on SBS on Demand, a story of an expert, a mission and a mystery, of a very different kind: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin (2015). It is set in ninth-century China, and stars Shu Qi as a skilful assassin who is given the task of taking out a target with whom she has a complicated past. The storytelling is elliptical, the images ravishing, the martial artistry restrained yet potent.

Another On Demand feature — punctuated, like the others, with occasional ads — is David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), a black-and-white feature that makes a fascinating virtue of restraint, and of the remarkable expressiveness of Celia Johnson in close-up. There is an occasional voiceover in which her character, Laura, reflects on what happened when she, a married woman with two children, fell in love with a doctor (Trevor Howard), whom she met at the local railway station: their paths cross, every Thursday, as they take the train in opposite directions.

Brief Encounter, adapted from a play by Noel Coward, is the tale of an explicitly ordinary life depicted in heightened, almost expressionist detail, a story of the ache of longing and the weight of duty and expectation.

Juliette Binoche, in Claire Denis’ Let The Sunshine In (2017), is a woman from a very different place and time, an artist, divorcee and mother caught up in a restless succession of relationships with men, all of them doomed in some way to collapse or become untenable. The men are, for the most part, unbearable or impossible; Binoche is, as always, a ferociously adventurous performer; and a final scene, featuring Gerard Depardieu, is disconcertingly inspired.

Vimeo

Online, there are ways to explore the early films of a range of filmmakers, often shorts or documentaries, rarely seen or seldom screened. Pawel Pawlikowski, best known for his two austere, searching black-and-white dramas, Ida and Cold War, was a documentary maker before he turned to features. On the Vimeo platform, you can find four of his much-acclaimed documentaries from the 1990s; they are complex works, made for the BBC, in which a literary premise allowed him to explore highly charged political and cultural issues in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in the 1945 film Brief Encounter.

Charlie Shackleton (formerly Lyne), is a filmmaker who has a good deal of work available on Vimeo. The collection includes Fear Itself (2015), an enveloping meditation on and unnerving experience of horror and dread in cinema, which consists almost entirely of movie clips and the voice of a female narrator who speaks of “watching horror movies, night after night”, and being unable to “stop thinking about the way these films are made”.

Shackleton has also made his 2014 documentary, Beyond Clueless, available for free rather than purchase. It’s an engaging essay film, composed of clips, about the evolution of the teen movie between Clueless (1995) and Mean Girls (2004) and the themes they reflect, narrated by The Craft star Fairuza Balk, shaped by structuring elements of the teen movie narrative, and with a special soundtrack from Summer Camp. Click on the Vimeo.com link to the film and the password idlehands will give you access.

For people interested in exploring a specific cinema history, the Korean Film Archive has a YouTube channel called Korean Classic Film that is well worth a visit. It hosts hundreds of subtitled Korean movies from the 1930s to the 1990s.

UbuWeb and more

You can find a much more sprawling, offbeat array at the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library that collects all sorts of material, including movies, TV shows, audio recordings, magazines and websites. Exploring the holdings is like falling down the rabbit hole, and the quality can be variable. But there’s plenty there: for example, if you’re a fan of film noir, it’s worth finding your way online where you can check out examples both classic and obscure.

And, if you’re interested in the avant garde and the experimental, UbuWeb is a collection that includes film and video work from (and about) a range of artists, filmmakers and musicians, collected for educational and non-commercial purposes.

There’s an acknowledgement that most material is not of good technical quality and it’s in no way comprehensive: sometimes the videos are accompanied by helpful notes, sometimes there’s a single, unannotated work. The selection ranges from a 40-minute feature, L’invitation au voyage, from silent film pioneer Germaine Dulac to a Lenny Bruce animation to a several short pieces from filmmaker and artist Christian Marclay, including Telephones (1995), a minute collage of telephone scenes in the movies that’s a forerunner to his remarkable 24-hour installation, The Clock.