Credit: The Color Purple/Warner Bros.
HBO was, for at least a couple of generations, the home of movies on cable. No one else could quite compete. So the rise of HBO Max seemed like it could well have been the ultimate streaming destination for movie lovers—a designation that the jury’s still out on, especially given the decision to drop the “Home Box Office” portion of the name in favor of the simpler, but more generic, Max. Still, Max maintains a collaboration with TCM, giving it a broad range of classic American and foreign films, as well as much of its catalog from HBO itself. It’s the primary streaming home for Studio Ghibli and A24, so, even though Max hasn’t been in the business of making many originals, it still has a solid assortment of films that you won’t find anywhere else.
With all that in mind, here are some of the best of Max’s more recent exclusive offerings.
The Color Purple (2023)
It was a tall order, following up the beloved 1985 version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, but this adaptation of the subsequent Broadway musical clears those hurdles and then some. If it can’t quite replace previous iterations, it offers up a unique, lively, and colorful vision of the story of hard-working, hard-pressed Miss Celie (Fantasia Barrino) surviving and, ultimately, thriving despite being “poor… Black…and ugly” in the rural south of the early 20th century. Danielle Brooks, as Sofia, was nominated for an Academy Award.
Dicks: The Musical (2023)
You have no idea what you’re in store for if you haven’t seen this genuinely raucous musical about a couple of separated-at-birth twins (Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson), both misogynistic jerks, who take to impersonating each other in order to reconcile their long-separated parents (Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally). It’s a simple, silly premise—but things quickly get more and more wild. Mom Evelyn’s vagina fell off years ago, newly out dad Harrison keeps a couple of mutant “sewer boys” in a giant birdcage in his apartment. It’s all wonderfully, jaw-droppingly weird.
Class Action Park (2020)
The dark, and darkly comic, real-life history of Vernon, New Jersey’s once-popular Action Park is jaw-dropping. In 1978, stockbroker Eugene Mulvihill set out to create a theme park with as few restrictions as possible, and as cheaply as possible. The result was a local attraction that drew in teens with promises of a rule-free good time; the hint of danger in the park’s shoddiness likely making it more of a draw—at least until the shady deals with local government made it clear that not only injuries, but deaths, were being hushed up.
Barbie (2023)
What’s left to say about the movie of 2023? Oppenheimer might have won the Oscars, but Barbie owned the discourse—and the box office, with the pink candy-colored pro-feminist raking in more money than any other movie. Margot Robbie is perfect as the fish-out-of-water doll stranded in the real world, Ryan Gosling is more than Kenough, and it’s the third triumph in a row from director Greta Gerwig.
Wonka (2023)
The horrifying Willy Wonka Chocolate Experience might have stolen the spotlight from Timothée Chalamet’s turn as our favorite vaguely threatening chocolatier, but that’s no reason to sleep on Wonka. An old-school musical with modern production values, Wonka feels like a thoroughly refreshing throwback to a less cynical time, with some memorable songs and emotional beats that really land.
Dream Scenario (2023)
One of the latest from A24 didn’t make quite the splash of some of the distributors other recent offerings, but it still pulled in very good reviews and a couple of awards and nominations for lead Nicholas Cage. Here he plays college professor Paul Matthews, who starts appearing in the dreams of dozens of unconnected people, but as a dull and passive observer. Until he isn’t, and the appearances start taking on a more menacing, nightmarish quality. The whole thing winds up being an impressively unhinged meditation on fame, A24-style.
Priscilla (2023)
The great Sofia Coppola wrote and directed this biopic based on Priscilla Presley’s own memoir about her young life and troubled, troubling romance with the older Elvis Presley. Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi offer up great performances, and the result is the portrayal of a relationship that’s tender, in its way, but also complicated and deeply unbalanced.
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023)
I’m not here to make the case that Aquaman 2 is high art, nor that it’s even entirely memorable—but it is a charmingly goofy bit of superhero fun, pairing Jason Momoa and Patrick Wilson as a pair of mismatched super siblings on a quest to save the planet from some greenhouse-gas spewing villains. The stakes are high enough to keep things interesting, but the movie lacks the self-seriousness that plagues so many other super-movies, particularly the DC-adjacent ones.
Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)
The second, and last, Wonder Woman movie helped by Patty Jenkins (following a break with the Zack Snyder-era DC universe) takes Diana out of the trenches of World War I and into the shopping malls of the 1980s. Given all the technology-based villains in these types of movies, it’s nice to see antagonists Kristen Wiig and Pedro Pascal come at our heroine with mythological magic as a nod to WW’s history. A little sad, though, about the post-credits cameo who we won’t see more of.
Unpregnant (2020)
Travel way, way back to the year 2020, when a young pregnant woman might have to travel across several states in order to secure an abortion. Such a thing could never, of course, happen in modern America, during our more enlightened era, a right to bodily autonomy boldly and irrevocably ensconced among our inalienable rights. Ahem. In Unpregnant, Haley Lu Richardson plays Veronica, a young woman who needs to leave her home state of Missouri to avoid her parents preventing her from getting an abortion, joined by a childhood friend Bailey (Barbie Ferreira). If sounds heavy, but the movie is, at heart, a breezy road-trip movie involving a couple of mismatched friends. It’s pretty delightful.
All That Breathes (2022)
For some Muslims in New Delhi, it’s long been traditional to feed the black kites (a type of raptor), with the belief that such a good deed will help to ward off trouble. Except that it’s become increasingly hard for the birds to survive in the modern city, with the birds falling victim to all manner of dangers—pollution and overpopulation being the prime culprits. The documentary All That Breathes follows brothers Saud and Nadeem, who run a bird sanctuary that’s saved tens of thousands of raptors over the past two decades in a story about the interconnectedness of our ecosystems, and also about the virtue of staving off what feels like inevitable decline.
The Zone of Interest (2023)
Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar winner examines the banality of evil in the story of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (the always brilliant Sandra Hüller), living ostensibly ordinary lives while being complicit in the extraordinary evil happening just outside of the frame. It’s very specific in its treatment of the Holocaust and the real-life figures portrayed, but also suggests, more universally, that we all are capable of becoming blind to the horrors we have a hand in.
Good Time (2017)
This stylish, intense crime drama follows Robert Pattinson’s Connie as he attempts to extracts his disabled brother from police custody following a bank robbery gone wrong, while trying to avoid his own arrest for the same crime. It’s one of those great neo-noirs in which everything that can go wrong for our protagonists does; Pattinson turns in a thoroughly impressive performance.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)
The movie’s co-writer Jimmie Fails plays the lead here under his own name, a Black San Franciscan with long roots whose old family house (built by his grandfather) is now in a gentrified neighborhood and and worth millions. Unable to buy the house back even as it sits vacant, Jimmie makes the vacant Victorian a sort of home base for an exploration of his place in the modern, changing city. The beautifully photographed and acted movie had Oscar buzz for a time, though wound up being ignored. It’s very much worth a first or second look.
Parasite (2019)
One of the most unambiguously deserving Best Picture Oscar winners of recent years (maybe decades), Bong Joon-Ho’s dark satire is a searing indictment of modern capitalism, but also a very funny comedy of manners. Also, a horror movie. Get you a movie that can do it all.
Judas and the Black Messiah (2021)
Daniel Kaluuya won an Academy Award as Fred Hampton in this searing biographical drama about the FBI infiltration of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in the late-1960s Chicago. LaKeith Stanfield plays FBI informant William O’Neal in the movie that was also nominated for Best Picture.
In the Heights (2021)
Before Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the book, music, and lyrics for this musical set over three days in a largely Dominican American neighborhood in Upper Manhattan. The film version captures all the joyousness of the stage version, while adding location shooting that grounds all of the singing and dancing. It’s a gorgeous, moving celebration of life, change, and community.
Green Knight (2021)
David Lowery’s Medieval pastiche, based roughly (but authentically) on the 14th-century chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is a visual feast as well as a dark, sensuous journey into an imagined past. Dev Patel stars as the title’s knight in a movie that adheres more closely to the conventions of middle age storytelling than pretty much any movie I’ve ever seen. The result is something that feels a bit like a fever dream, but an experience for anyone willing to sink into it.
Albert Brooks: Defending My Life (2023)
Rob Reiner directs this delightful documentary about the actor, comedian, director, and screenwriter Albert Brooks, covering his early life as well as a decades-long career that includes SNL, Scorsese movies, Simpsons voices, and an Academy Award nomination. It’s mostly just a conversation between Brooks and Reiner, but it’s all pretty fascinating, whether or not you’re a long-time fan.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)
A fascinating portrait of photographer, artist, and activist Nan Goldin, whose work documenting the HIV/AIDS crisis and the more recent opioid epidemic after her own near-death from a fentanyl overdose. At the movie’s center is a moral conflict: Goldin’s tireless work against the Sackler family’s companies, for their roles in relentlessly marketing OxyContin, puts her in a tricky spot when it comes to displaying her work. Having encouraged the arts community to divest from these pharmaceutical giants, she also comes to question the value of displaying her work at museums, many of which are heavily funded by the Sacklers. How much must an uncompromising artist compromise for the greater good?
