FreeMoviesFull: movies of 2012 to 2019, from About Time, Paddington and Lion to Wonder, Crazy Rich Asians and Mary Poppins Returns, and where to watch them

What changed between 2012 and 2019

At the start of this period, a film reached its audience as films always had: a run in cinemas, then a disc, then television. By the end, that order had been overturned. Netflix released its first original feature in 2015 and by 2018 was producing romantic comedies and family films at a pace the old studios had abandoned. Disney launched its own service in November 2019 with new films made for it, among them Togo, Noelle and a fresh Lady and the Tramp. A viewer could now see a brand-new film at home on the day it appeared.

The cinemas, meanwhile, filled with larger and larger spectacles, and the middle-sized film found two refuges. One was streaming. The other was the true story or the adaptation of a well-loved book, which came with an audience already attached. That is why so many films on FreeMoviesFull carry the words based on: based on a memoir, a novel, a play, a newspaper article, a life. The decade trusted stories that had already proved themselves, and many of the results are excellent.

There was a third current, and it was British. The success of a certain television series about a country house, together with a run of warm comedies starring Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy and Hugh Grant, made the gentle British film a dependable export. About Time, Paddington, The Lady in the Van, Florence Foster Jenkins and the Downton Abbey film itself all belong to that family. The British and Irish page gathers them, and the finding titles page lists every route into the catalogue.

2012 to 2014

Fifty-six films open the catalogue. The best loved of them is About Time, written and directed by Richard Curtis. On his twenty-first birthday a shy young man learns from his father that the men of the family can travel back within their own lives. He uses the gift to win the woman he loves, and then discovers what it is really for. Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams and Bill Nighy make it one of the most rewatched films of its decade, and it holds one of the highest ratings on the site.

Paddington arrived in 2014 and surprised everyone who expected a routine children's film. Paul King gave Michael Bond's bear a London of dolls' houses, steam trains and marmalade, and a message of welcome to strangers that adults felt as keenly as children. Ben Whishaw supplies the voice, polite to a fault. The same year brought Chef, which Jon Favreau wrote, directed and starred in between far larger projects: a restaurant cook loses his job, buys an old food truck and drives it from Miami to Los Angeles with his young son, selling Cuban sandwiches along the way.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty has Ben Stiller as a picture editor at a famous magazine who has daydreamed his whole life and finally leaves his desk, for Greenland, Iceland and the Himalayas, in search of a missing photograph. The Way Way Back spends a summer with a fourteen-year-old who finds his confidence working at a water park, under the wing of a manager played by Sam Rockwell. The Kings of Summer follows three boys who build a house in the woods and declare themselves free.

The dramas of these years were quiet and precise. In Nebraska, filmed in black and white by Alexander Payne, an old man sets out to walk from Montana to Lincoln to collect a prize he believes he has won, and his son gives in and drives him. Still Alice won Julianne Moore the Academy Award as a professor of linguistics facing the loss of her own words. Enough Said is a romance between two divorced parents, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini with great tenderness. Frances Ha, with Greta Gerwig, follows a young dancer in New York from one borrowed room to the next.

True stories were already plentiful. Big Eyes tells how the painter Margaret Keane reclaimed her work from the husband who had signed it. Hitchcock watches the director and his wife, Alma Reville, gamble their house on a small thriller. Jobs gave the co-founder of Apple his first screen biography, Big Miracle recalls the week in 1988 when the world watched three whales trapped under Alaskan ice, and Million Dollar Arm follows two young men from India who had thrown only cricket balls to professional baseball contracts.

The lighter shelf of the period includes The Hundred-Foot Journey, where an Indian family opens a restaurant across the road from a celebrated French one; Hope Springs, with Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones as a long-married couple at a counselling retreat; Ruby Sparks, in which a novelist's invented heroine appears in his kitchen; The Vow; Austenland; and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, which moves the living exhibits to the British Museum. All fifty-six are on the 2012 to 2014 shelf.

2015 and 2016

Forty-four films come from the two middle years, and they include several of the finest on the site. Lion tells a story that would be unbelievable if it were invented. A five-year-old boy in central India falls asleep on a stationary train and wakes a thousand miles from home, in Calcutta, unable to name his village. He is adopted by a couple in Tasmania. Twenty-five years later, using satellite maps on a laptop, he traces the railway lines back until he recognises a water tower. Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman lead the cast, the child actor Sunny Pawar carries the first hour alone, and the film received six Academy Award nominations.

From New Zealand came Hunt for the Wilderpeople, written and directed by Taika Waititi. A city boy in foster care and his gruff new uncle, played by Sam Neill, vanish into the bush and become the subject of a national manhunt, to the boy's great pride. It is the funniest film of its year and one of the kindest. From Ireland came Sing Street, in which a Dublin schoolboy of 1985 starts a band for the oldest of reasons, to impress a girl, and the songs are good enough that viewers go looking for the album.

Disney's programme of live-action retellings took shape in these two years. Kenneth Branagh's Cinderella, with Lily James, played the story straight, with a butterfly-blue ball gown and a simple motto: have courage and be kind. Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book placed one real boy among animals and forests created entirely in the computer and won the Academy Award for visual effects. Pete's Dragon replaced the cartoon dragon of 1977 with a great green furry creature of the Pacific Northwest, and Steven Spielberg brought Roald Dahl's The BFG to the screen with Mark Rylance as the giant.

The true stories of the period are varied. Steve Jobs, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Danny Boyle, is built like a play in three acts, each set backstage before a product launch. The Founder has Michael Keaton as the salesman who turned a single California hamburger stand into a global chain. Joy follows the inventor of a self-wringing mop from a crowded Long Island house to a television shopping channel. Eddie the Eagle cheers on Britain's lone ski jumper at the Winter Olympics of 1988, and The 33 goes underground with the Chilean miners rescued in 2010 after sixty-nine days.

Three films about remarkable minds deserve to be better known. The Man Who Knew Infinity takes the self-taught mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan from Madras to Cambridge on the eve of the First World War. Queen of Katwe, directed by Mira Nair, follows Phiona Mutesi from a poor district of Kampala to international chess tournaments. Genius portrays the editor Max Perkins, who shaped the novels of Thomas Wolfe from crates of manuscript.

The period also has its small masterpieces of the everyday. Paterson, by Jim Jarmusch, spends one week with a bus driver in New Jersey who writes poems in his lunch break, and finds his routine quietly beautiful. Maudie is the life of the Nova Scotia folk painter Maud Lewis, played by Sally Hawkins, who covered the walls of a tiny house with flowers and birds. The Lady in the Van gives Maggie Smith the part of the woman who parked in the playwright Alan Bennett's drive for fifteen years, and Love & Friendship turns an early Jane Austen story into the wittiest costume comedy in years. The 2015 to 2016 shelf holds all forty-four.

2017 to 2019

The last three years are the fullest, with seventy-five films. Wonder leads them. Auggie Pullman, ten years old and born with a facial difference, starts school for the first time, and the film follows the year from his point of view, then his sister's, then his classmates'. Jacob Tremblay, Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson play it with humour, and its request to choose kindness reached classrooms around the world. The Big Sick, written by Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon from the story of their own courtship, is a romantic comedy in which the heroine spends the middle of the film in hospital while the hero gets to know her parents; its screenplay was nominated for the Academy Award.

The summer of 2018 belonged to Crazy Rich Asians. An economics professor from New York travels to Singapore for a wedding and learns that her boyfriend's family is among the wealthiest in Asia. Directed by Jon M. Chu with dazzling sets and a scene-stealing Michelle Yeoh, it was the first Hollywood studio film in a quarter of a century with a largely Asian cast in a present-day story, and its success opened doors. The same summer Netflix released To All the Boys I've Loved Before, in which a teenager's private love letters are posted by mistake, and the romantic comedy found a new home.

Musicals returned in strength. Mary Poppins Returns sends Emily Blunt back to Cherry Tree Lane a generation later, with Lin-Manuel Miranda as a lamplighter and Dick Van Dyke, in his nineties, dancing on a desk. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again tells how the young Donna, played by Lily James, first came to her Greek island. Aladdin of 2019, with Will Smith as the Genie, took more than a billion dollars around the world.

The period closes with a run of true and tender films. Togo recounts the 1925 relay that carried medicine across Alaska by dog sled, and honours the lead dog who ran the longest and hardest stretch. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, the first film directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor, tells how a Malawian schoolboy built a windmill from scrap to water his village's fields. The Peanut Butter Falcon sets a young man with Down syndrome and a drifting fisherman on a raft through the Carolina marshes, bound for a wrestling school. Stan & Ollie, Breathe, Blinded by the Light and The Upside are drawn from life as well. All seventy-five are on the 2017 to 2019 shelf, and the year by year page picks four from each period.

True stories

Twenty-nine films are drawn from real lives, more than on almost any shelf of comparable size. The decade's appetite for them had a simple cause: a true story is its own advertisement. It also produced a recognisable shape. The film opens on an ordinary person with an unlikely plan, follows the setbacks, and closes with photographs of the real people beside the actors who played them. Audiences came to wait for those photographs.

The inventors and builders form one group. Steve Jobs and Jobs approach the same man from opposite directions, one through dialogue, one through chronology, and they make an instructive double bill. The Founder is a story of ambition that leaves the viewer to decide how to feel about its hero. Joy and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind are about making something useful with whatever is at hand, in a suburban garage or a village junkyard.

The performers form another. Florence Foster Jenkins gives Meryl Streep the role of a New York heiress who loved singing more than singing loved her, and who hired Carnegie Hall in 1944; Hugh Grant, as her devoted partner, has seldom been better. Stan & Ollie follows Laurel and Hardy on a tour of British theatres in 1953, long after their fame had peaked, and becomes a portrait of a friendship. One Chance tells how a mobile-phone salesman from Wales with a love of opera won a television talent contest.

Sport provides the stirring ones. McFarland, USA follows a teacher who notices how fast the sons of farm workers can run and founds a cross-country team that wins a state title. When the Game Stands Tall is about a high-school football team with a winning streak of 151 games and what happens when it ends. Brittany Runs a Marathon is the comic, clear-eyed story of a New Yorker who starts with one block and finishes in Central Park. Togo may be the greatest sporting feat of all, though its athlete had four legs.

And some true stories are simply about endurance and love. Breathe, the first film directed by Andy Serkis, portrays Robin Cavendish, who was paralysed by polio at twenty-eight and, with his wife Diana, helped to design the wheelchair with a built-in respirator that freed thousands of patients from hospital wards. Goodbye Christopher Robin looks at the family behind Winnie-the-Pooh. The Lady in the Van is, in its author's words, a mostly true story. The true stories page lists all twenty-nine with the people behind them.

From the page to the screen

Forty-six films began as books, and the range of sources is wide. The Victorian novel is well served. Far from the Madding Crowd gives Carey Mulligan the part of Bathsheba Everdene, a farmer in her own right with three suitors, against the green hills of Thomas Hardy's Dorset. Great Expectations, directed by Mike Newell, has Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham among her stopped clocks. The Personal History of David Copperfield, from Armando Iannucci, races through Dickens with a cast chosen for talent alone and Dev Patel in the title role; it is the sunniest Dickens ever filmed.

Children's literature supplies the family favourites. Michael Bond's bear, Roald Dahl's giant, Rudyard Kipling's man-cub, A. A. Milne's toys in Christopher Robin and Madeleine L'Engle's travellers in A Wrinkle in Time all reached a new generation in these years. Wonder was a classroom bestseller before it was a film, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days, from Jeff Kinney's cartoon journals, found the audience that had grown up with the books. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children gave Tim Burton a house of unusual wards hidden inside a single repeating day of 1943.

Modern bestsellers account for many of the romances. Kevin Kwan's novel became Crazy Rich Asians; Jenny Han's became To All the Boys I've Loved Before; Nicholas Sparks supplied The Longest Ride and The Best of Me; Maria Semple's comic novel became Where'd You Go, Bernadette, with Cate Blanchett as an architect who disappears towards Antarctica. The Light Between Oceans, The Mountain Between Us, The Art of Racing in the Rain and The Bookshop began on the fiction shelves too.

Memoirs lie behind some of the strongest films here. Lion follows Saroo Brierley's own account, and Queen of Katwe grew from a magazine article and the book that followed. The pleasure of an adaptation is double: the film can be enjoyed alone, and it sends many viewers back to the book. The from books page groups the shelf by kind, and the shelf itself holds all forty-six.

Family viewing

Forty-four films suit the whole household, and the largest group is Disney's series of live-action retellings. Cinderella and The Jungle Book set the standard. Dumbo, directed by Tim Burton, expands a sixty-four-minute cartoon into the story of a circus family. Aladdin keeps the songs and adds a new one for its princess. Lady and the Tramp uses real dogs, several of them adopted from shelters, and Christopher Robin imagines the boy from the Hundred Acre Wood grown into an overworked Londoner who needs his old friends more than he knows. Mary Poppins Returns and The Nutcracker and the Four Realms belong to the same tradition of lavish craftsmanship.

Paddington stands a little apart, as the family film that critics rank among the best comedies of its decade. Its slapstick, a flooded bathroom, a chase by skateboard and umbrella, is timed like silent comedy, and its heart is a family learning to make room. Pete's Dragon has a similar gentleness, and The Odd Life of Timothy Green tells of a couple who bury their wishes for a child in the garden and wake to find a boy with leaves on his ankles.

For children who like adventure, Dora and the Lost City of Gold turns a pre-school cartoon into a jungle quest with a wink, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island rides giant bees with Dwayne Johnson, and Jumanji: The Next Level returns its players to the video game with the grandfathers along by mistake. Alpha goes back twenty thousand years to imagine the first friendship between a boy and a wolf, and Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle offers a wilder reading of Kipling for older children.

School life has its own corner. Wonder is the centrepiece. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days and Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul carry Greg Heffley through a summer and a road trip, and Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life arms its hero with a sketchbook. The Disney Channel contributes the surfing musical Teen Beach Movie and its sequel Teen Beach 2, the snowboarding story Cloud 9, Zapped, Frenemies, Invisible Sister and a new Adventures in Babysitting. Troop Zero, set in rural Georgia in 1977, follows a band of misfit scouts who want their voices recorded for a space probe. The family page sorts the shelf by age.

Romance

Sixty-seven films are love stories, and they show a genre in transition. The first years still have the studio romance in its classic form: The Vow, in which a husband must win his wife a second time after an accident erases her memory of him, and the Nicholas Sparks adaptations, with their coastal towns, old letters and long separations. The Age of Adaline adds a touch of fantasy, with Blake Lively as a woman who stopped ageing in the 1930s and has kept moving ever since.

Then the form moved online and grew younger. To All the Boys I've Loved Before, The Kissing Booth, Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, The Perfect Date and Tall Girl were made for viewers who watch on a laptop with friends on the other end of a message thread, and they revived the high-school romance for a new generation. When We First Met borrows the trick of the repeated day, Falling Inn Love sends a San Francisco designer to restore a country inn in New Zealand, and Little Italy sets a love story between two rival pizzerias.

The romances for grown-ups are among the best films on the site. About Time turns out to be about fathers and sons as much as lovers. Enough Said understands the caution of a second chance. Hope Springs has the courage to look at a marriage of thirty-one years. The Big Sick and Crazy Rich Asians both set love against family expectation and resolve it with respect on both sides. What If, Man Up, Home Again and Second Act are lighter, and The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel proves that the genre has room for people in their seventies.

Three unusual films complete the shelf. Ruby Sparks asks what would happen if a writer could edit the woman he loves, and answers honestly. In Your Eyes connects two strangers on opposite sides of America who can see through each other's eyes. The Last Five Years is a musical for two voices in which her story runs backwards and his runs forwards, meeting once in the middle. The romance page arranges them by mood, and the romance shelf holds all sixty-seven.

Music

Twenty-one films sing, dance or follow a band. The big musicals are sequels and retellings, and they treat their sources with affection. Mary Poppins Returns has an entirely new score in the style of the old one, an animated sequence drawn by hand and a finale of balloons. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again finds a second set of ABBA songs and lets Cher arrive by helicopter to sing Fernando. Aladdin restages Friend Like Me and Prince Ali with a cast of hundreds, and Cats brings Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage show to the screen with a company of dancers and singers from every corner of show business.

The films about making music are smaller and often better. Sing Street understands exactly how a teenager's taste changes week by week, from one band's haircut to the next. Ricki and the Flash, the last feature directed by Jonathan Demme, gives Meryl Streep a guitar and a bar band and sends her home to the family she left for the road. Blinded by the Light tells of a British Pakistani teenager in Luton in 1987 who hears Bruce Springsteen for the first time and finds his own life described in the lyrics. Teen Spirit follows a shy girl from the Isle of Wight into a singing contest.

The a cappella comedies Pitch Perfect 2 and Pitch Perfect 3 take the Barden Bellas to a world championship and then on a tour of military bases, with arrangements that are a pleasure in themselves. Dance has Step Up All In, which gathers favourites from the whole series in Las Vegas, StreetDance 2, High Strung, which pairs a ballet student with a violinist who plays in the subway, and Cuban Fury, in which Nick Frost rediscovers the salsa talent of his youth. The music page suggests where to begin, and the music shelf holds all twenty-one.

Comedy

Ninety-seven films are comedies, and the best of the decade share a quality that might be called generosity. Hunt for the Wilderpeople, The Peanut Butter Falcon, The Way Way Back and Chef are all about an awkward person and an unexpected mentor, and all of them like their characters too much to mock them. Eighth Grade, the first film by Bo Burnham, follows a thirteen-year-old through her last week of middle school with such accuracy that parents and children both recognise themselves.

Family comedy remains the broadest strand. In Daddy's Home, a mild stepfather played by Will Ferrell competes with the children's dashing father, played by Mark Wahlberg, and in Daddy's Home 2 their own fathers arrive for Christmas. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 revisits the Portokalos clan fourteen years on. Delivery Man gives Vince Vaughn several hundred grown children he has yet to meet. Life of the Party enrols Melissa McCarthy at her daughter's university, and Uncle Drew puts a team of basketball veterans back on a street court.

A drier humour runs through the independent films. Love & Friendship delivers Austen's sharpest lines at speed. Liberal Arts and Brad's Status are comedies of looking back, Table 19 seats the least wanted guests at a wedding together, and The Rewrite sends Hugh Grant, as a screenwriter with one old hit, to teach in a rainy university town. Paterson has more quiet jokes than many outright comedies. The comedy page picks a dozen to start with.

Animal stories

Twenty-one films give a leading part to a creature. Dogs come first. A Dog's Purpose follows one canine soul through several lives and owners, narrated by the dog, and its companion A Dog's Way Home sends a lost pet four hundred miles across Colorado. The Art of Racing in the Rain is told by a golden retriever who has studied his racing-driver owner and formed opinions. Togo is the truest and the grandest. Beverly Hills Chihuahua 3: Viva la Fiesta! is there for the youngest viewers.

The wild is well represented. Alpha is nearly a silent film, a boy and a wolf crossing an Ice Age plain. Holiday in the Wild spends Christmas at an elephant sanctuary in Zambia, Big Miracle gathers a whole town to cut breathing holes in the ice for stranded whales, and Dolphin Tale 2 returns to the Florida aquarium of the first film. The Rider, directed by Chloé Zhao, casts a real rodeo cowboy and his own horses in a story close to his life, and the scenes of him training a nervous colt are documentary truth. The animal stories page groups them by species.

Adventure, fantasy and space

Fifty-two films leave the everyday behind. Space has two. Passengers wakes two travellers, played by Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, ninety years before their starship is due to arrive, with a robot bartender for company. Star Trek Beyond strands the crew of the Enterprise on an unknown planet and lets them think their way off it. On Earth, Arctic is a tale of survival told almost wordlessly by Mads Mikkelsen, and The Mountain Between Us sets Kate Winslet and Idris Elba down in the high Rockies.

Fantasy takes many forms here: the time loops of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, the tesseract of A Wrinkle in Time, the toy kingdom of The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, and the Indian street magician who crosses Europe inside a wardrobe in The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is the fantasy of an ordinary man who discovers that the real world outdoes his daydreams. The adventure page maps the shelf.

Ten films worth discovering

The famous titles need little help, so this section is for films that many viewers passed by. Sing Street had a brief run in cinemas and has been gathering admirers ever since. Maudie is as modest as its heroine and as hard to forget. The Kings of Summer captures the particular freedom of being fifteen in July. What If, set in Toronto with Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan, is a romantic comedy with real conversation in it, and Man Up compresses a whole courtship into one eventful London night.

Please Stand By follows a young woman with autism, played by Dakota Fanning, who travels alone to Los Angeles to deliver her four-hundred-page script to a writing contest. Troop Zero is a comedy with a great deal of heart and Viola Davis as a reluctant scout leader. Candy Jar sets two rival school debaters on a collision course and lets them find out how alike they are. The Bookshop, with Emily Mortimer and Bill Nighy, is for anyone who has ever loved a small shop in a small town. And A Royal Night Out imagines the evening in May 1945 when two young princesses slipped out of the palace to join the crowds. Each is a short search away.

Where the stories happen

These films travel well. London is home to Paddington, Man Up, The Lady in the Van and Mary Poppins Returns, while the English countryside frames Far from the Madding Crowd, Downton Abbey, Goodbye Christopher Robin and The Bookshop. Cornwall gives About Time its family house by the sea. Ireland has Sing Street, set among the terraces and ferry piers of Dublin.

Further off, Lion moves between the railway platforms of India and the beaches of Tasmania. Crazy Rich Asians shows Singapore at its most spectacular, from hawker stalls to rooftop pools. The Hundred-Foot Journey settles in a village in the south of France, To Rome with Love strolls the Italian capital, and Queen of Katwe and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind were filmed where their stories happened, in Uganda and Malawi. Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Falling Inn Love show two faces of New Zealand, and Togo and Big Miracle two of Alaska.

The American films range as widely: the food-truck route of Chef through Miami, New Orleans and Austin; the plains of Nebraska and of The Rider; the Outer Banks of The Peanut Butter Falcon; the Brooklyn of 5 Flights Up and the Manhattan of Wonder. An evening with FreeMoviesFull can be a way of going somewhere.

Films for every stage of life

One strength of these years is that they made films about people of all ages. Childhood has Wonder, Paddington and Pete's Dragon. The early teens have Eighth Grade, The Way Way Back and the Disney Channel titles. The years of first love have To All the Boys I've Loved Before, Everything, Everything and The Sun Is Also a Star, and the uncertain twenties have Frances Ha, What If and Brittany Runs a Marathon.

Middle life is the subject of Chef, Brad's Status, Enough Said, Home Again and Where'd You Go, Bernadette, all of them about people who pause to ask what they want from the second half. Later life has some of the warmest films of all. And So It Goes and 5 Flights Up both star Diane Keaton, the first with Michael Douglas as a difficult neighbour, the second with Morgan Freeman as a husband of forty years deciding whether to leave their walk-up flat. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel returns to its residents in Jaipur, Hope Springs and Nebraska look at long marriages and old fathers, and Stan & Ollie at a partnership in its final act.

That breadth makes the catalogue easy to share. A grandparent, a parent and a child can each find a film that speaks to their own years, and, with Paddington, Mary Poppins Returns or The BFG, one that speaks to all three at once. The family page is a good place to start such an evening.

Made for the living room

A good number of the later films were made for streaming services, and they have a character of their own. They are shorter, brighter and built for company on a sofa. Netflix supplied The Christmas Chronicles, Tall Girl, The Perfect Date, Candy Jar, Falling Inn Love, Holiday in the Wild and the films set in Aldovia, along with the more ambitious The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle. Disney's service opened with Togo, Noelle and Lady and the Tramp, three films that would once have filled cinemas at Christmas.

Seen together, they mark the moment when the comfortable middle-sized film, the kind this guide loves best, moved house. The romantic comedy, the family adventure and the inspiring true story all live on, a press of a button away. FreeMoviesFull lists them beside their cinema cousins and makes little distinction between the two: a good story is a good story, wherever it first appeared.

Christmas

Eleven films belong to December, and most were made for streaming, where the Christmas film has found a second life. The Christmas Chronicles casts Kurt Russell as a Santa Claus with a sense of humour and a blues band. Noelle gives Santa a daughter, played by Anna Kendrick, who has to find her brother before the sleigh leaves. The Knight Before Christmas drops a medieval knight into an Ohio town, and the two A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding and A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby sequels return to the small kingdom of Aldovia. Love the Coopers gathers four generations around one table. The Christmas page puts all eleven in order.

Drama

A hundred and eleven films are dramas. Beyond those already named, a few deserve a line. I, Daniel Blake, which won the top prize at Cannes for Ken Loach, follows a Newcastle carpenter and a young mother who help each other through hard months; it is a serious film and a humane one. The Last Black Man in San Francisco is about a young man's devotion to the house his grandfather built. Wonderstruck tells two stories fifty years apart, one of them as a silent film. Promised Land, Trouble with the Curve and Draft Day are solid American dramas of work and conscience. The drama page groups the shelf by theme.

Directors and stars

A hundred and sixty-two directors made these films. Lasse Hallström has three: The Hundred-Foot Journey, A Dog's Purpose and The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. Tim Burton also has three, Big Eyes, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children and Dumbo. Jon Favreau moved from the small scale of Chef to the vast one of The Jungle Book, and Andy Serkis directed both Breathe and Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle. Steven Spielberg, Richard Linklater, Jim Jarmusch, Ken Loach, Danny Boyle, Taika Waititi and Chloé Zhao each appear once.

Among the actors, Meryl Streep has five films, and in four of them she sings. Dev Patel grows from the hotel manager of the Marigold to Saroo, Ramanujan and David Copperfield. Lily James is Cinderella and the young Donna. Hugh Grant, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Bill Nighy thread through the British titles, and Dwayne Johnson, Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon through the American ones. Type any name into the search field and the films appear at once.

What the ratings say

The green star beside each year is the average score given by viewers on TMDB, out of ten. Sixty-one of the 175 films stand at seven or higher and form the Top rated shelf. Its upper end is led by Wonder, About Time, Lion, Togo, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Sing Street and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Notice how many of these are true stories or adaptations: the decade's caution about original ideas had a happy side effect, since the stories it chose had already moved readers.

Using FreeMoviesFull

The home page is built around its search field. Under the green mark and the name sits a wide white box; type a title, an actor, a director or a year and matching films appear as you type. The round green button beneath it opens the complete list. Further down come eight white panels, each introduced by a heading with a green dot and closed by a View all button that shows the size of the shelf. On other pages a smaller search field sits in the white bar at the top.

A film page shows the poster, the title, the year, the running time and the rating, then the director, the leading cast, the genres and the summary. Choose your country, press Watch now, and JustWatch opens with the services that offer the film there. The Add to My List button keeps a film for later; My List, reached from the white bar, shows what you have saved, each with a Remove button. The shortlist lives in your own browser on your own device, and the list page can save a copy as a file. The My List page describes each step.

Eight evenings, eight years

For a tour of the period, take one film from each year. Begin in 2012 with Ruby Sparks, then About Time for 2013 and Paddington for 2014. Give 2015 to Far from the Madding Crowd and 2016 to Lion, with Hunt for the Wilderpeople as an encore if the evening allows.

The second half begins with Wonder in 2017. Crazy Rich Asians is the natural choice for 2018, and Togo closes the tour in 2019. Eight evenings will take you from a novelist's kitchen in Los Angeles to the frozen coast of Alaska by way of London, Dorset, Tasmania, the New Zealand bush, a New York classroom and Singapore. The panels on the home page will suggest what to see next.

Questions and answers

The questions below are those most often asked about FreeMoviesFull, with short answers. Fuller help is on the help pages named throughout this guide, including the how to watch page.

Questions