Over the past several months, we’ve examined and recommended several streaming services for the discriminating movie lover — sites and apps for those whose tastes run toward titles a bit more esoteric than the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Our latest entry spotlights a robust film and television streamer with a throwback feel.

Much like Plex, one of the streaming platforms previously featured in this space, Pluto TV began as a different kind of service before moving into the ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) space. The streamer primarily offered up blocks of Internet-originated programming when it launched in 2014, before expanding the next year to nearly 100 channels of categorized, curated movies and television shows in a manner that sought to remind viewers (especially older ones) of terrestrial television.

Even the look and layout of its “Live TV” section are driven by nostalgia, utilizing the kind of live, channel-guide grid that became familiar to viewers in the 1990s, when the capacity of even basic cable services exploded, allowing more choices than could be contained by the weekly TV listings. The throwback nature of the enterprise is further augmented by the element that makes Pluto TV a free service: commercial advertisements, inserted during existing break spots for the service’s copious television offerings, and at regular intervals for movies.

In 2017, Pluto added a more traditional video-on-demand library; like those of Plex, Shout TV, Tubi and their ilk, those films are also played with ad breaks to keep the service free. To their credit, Pluto uses ads sparingly and carefully, dropping in two or three minutes of spots at 10 to 20 minute intervals (the rotation varies from film to film), and taking pains to insert them at scene breaks, unlike some of the more careless streamers, who’ll cut to ads midscene (or even middialogue).

Their library is impressive, boasting a fine array of mainstream hits (December’s new additions included “Interstellar,” “John Wick,” “When Harry Met Sally” and “Pulp Fiction”), indie favorites (“Fast Color,” “Frida,” “The Crying Game”), genre movies (“Evil Dead 2,” “Studio 666,” “The Mist”) and classics (“Harold and Maude,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” “Repulsion”), although the discovery aspect of the interface leaves something to be desired; discerning cinephiles may prefer to use a third-party aggregator such as JustWatch to build a watchlist.

But Pluto excels in another kind of discovery: the decidedly 20th century thrill of stumbling upon some random thing you’ve never seen, and locking in. The movie channels of the Live TV vertical offer up selections from the expected genres (comedy, horror, romance) — but also a fine rotation of classics, video store-style “staff picks,” a “Flicks of Fury” channel for martial arts mayhem and a showcase for cult films. Our viewing habits these days tend to be so destination-driven that there’s a real throwback pleasure in just seeing what’s on, even in progress, and going wherever it takes you.

Here are a few highlights from their current AVOD offerings:

“At Close Range”: Those who only know Christopher Walken in his current iteration, as a charming, self-aware character actor (and occasional song-and-dance man) may be startled by the sheer depravity he displays in this 1986 drama from director James Foley (“Glengarry Glen Ross”). Walken plays Brad Whitewood Sr., a career criminal who lets his troubled teen son, Brad Jr. (an electrifying Sean Penn), join the family business — to their eventual regret. Nicholas Kazan’s screenplay is based on the true story of a Pennsylvania crime family, and that authenticity gives it a burning, doom-laden intensity, aided considerably by the soulful work of Penn (and his real-life brother Chris, wonderful as Brad Jr.’s brother Tommy) and Walken’s terrifying turn.

“Mickey One”: Before they reunited to shake up the entire art of cinema with “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), director Arthur Penn and actor Warren Beatty teamed up for this wildly, delightfully experimental 1965 drama. Beatty, already futzing with his persona just four years after debuting in “Splendor in the Grass,” stars as a nightclub comic who goes underground when he finds himself targeted by the Detroit mob, fleeing to Chicago and trying to make a new start. That would make for a fairly standard neo-noir, but Penn’s cockeyed vision folds in art film existentialism, surrealist gags and winking metatextual commentary, resulting in a crime film unlike any other.

“The Hours and Times”: This hourlong drama from writer and director Christopher Munch is a fascinating piece of speculative pop culture fiction, taking a real-life footnote in the history of the Beatles — a 1963 holiday in Barcelona, Spain, shared by the group’s gay manager, Brian Epstein, and John Lennon, to whom he was deeply attracted — and dramatizing what might have happened between them. Munch replicates the crisp, black-and-white cinematography of “A Hard Day’s Night,” but the tone is closer to the New Queer Cinema that was developing around the time that “The Hours and Times” debuted, offering a frank examination of a fraught, complicated relationship.

“Fresh”: Writer and director Boaz Yakin (“Remember the Titans”) made his feature directorial debut with this 1994 drama that was praised by critics but mostly ignored by audiences who mistook it for yet another “hood” action-drama in an era lousy with them. But Yakin’s script is no imitation; this is a smart, sensitive story of a young drug runner (Sean Nelson) who uses the chess strategies taught to him by his absentee father (Samuel L. Jackson) to double-cross his employer (Giancarlo Esposito). Jackson and Esposito are unsurprisingly excellent, carefully shading in the grays of their complex characters, but the star performer is Nelson, quietly devastating as a kid who has learned, the hard way, how to think on his feet.