Now that HBO Max has restored the “HBO” part of their name, right when we’d all gotten used to it simply being called “Max,” we get back to concentrating on what really matters: the movies. Well, as long as the company still bothers to release them, that is. Even considering its recent choices to shelf as many movies as it releases, HBO Max’s library is one of the more impressive among the mainstream streamers thanks to its connection with an actual film studio. Most new films released by Warner Bros. find their way to HBO and stay there, along with HBO original movies, tons of TCM classics, plus titles from other companies (like Criterion and Studio Ghibli). This makes our streaming list for HBO Max a bit different than those that cover the other majors, because there’s less overall churn to fight back against. But to save you from mindlessly flipping through the various hubs and menus because you can’t decide what the hell to watch, here’s The A.V. Club’s rundown of the best movies on HBO Max that aren’t going anywhere.
Bad Education
The first time we see Frank Tassone, the beloved public-school administrator Hugh Jackman plays in Bad Education, he’s striding onto the stage of an auditorium to a roar of applause. It’s his night, a celebration of his achievements—though, as we’ll quickly come to see, he spends most days in the spotlight, too, basking in the admiration of colleagues, students, and parents alike. Frank, who puts the super in superintendent, is head of a Long Island school district that, under his stewardship, has reached the top of the national rankings. Wandering from meeting to meeting in his finely pressed suits, a warm grin perpetually plastered across his face, he has the poise (and popularity) of a Kennedy—and indeed, Frank approaches the job with a politician’s savvy, committing names and interests to memory. But the real key to his success may be that he actually gives a damn. In movie terms, it’s as if one of the carpe diem heroes of an inspirational-teacher drama rose through the ranks, spreading his zeal for education to the whole district. That, anyway, is how Frank would probably prefer to frame his story. Bad Education tells a different version, ripped from the headlines and shaped into something far removed from the genre of gifted classroom mentors and the young lives they touch. The real Tassone, as some may remember, was at the center of New York’s Roslyn Public Schools scandal, in which a couple of high-ranking administrators embezzled millions of dollars of taxpayer money. Screenwriter Mike Makowsky, who grew up in the community and went to a Rosyln school the year the financial fraud came to light, dramatizes this national news into an engrossing procedural of white-collar crime. Cooking the books may sound like dry subject matter, but the film gives it a jolt of psychological urgency by building a whole house-of-cards narrative around a character of compelling contradiction: a con artist who’s managed to square his genuine commitment to the community (and the future of its children) with his betrayal of it. [A.A. Dowd]
The Battle Of Algiers
Are truth and objectivity sufficient to create a masterpiece? Some think so, certainly—The Battle Of Algiers regularly shows up on lists of the greatest war movies ever made (and sometimes shows up on lists of the greatest movies ever made, irrespective of genre). Dramatically, the film suffers a bit from the same shapelessness that afflicts biopics and other heavily fact-based pictures, registering as a succession of loosely connected events, rather than as a discrete object sculpted from the clay of history. Pontecorvo’s choice to mimic the visual aesthetic of documentaries—at which he succeeded so well that the original American distributor made a point of boasting that not a frame of newsreel footage appears—was both revolutionary and hugely influential; most of today’s roughhewn docudramas have some Algiers in their DNA. It’s that formal genius, along with Ennio Morricone’s anxious, staccato score, that truly endures, and will continue to do so long after heated debates about the phrase “radical Islam” have finally died. [Mike D’Angelo]
Battleship Potemkin
The historical mistreatment of Sergei Eisenstein’s agit-prop classic Battleship Potemkin demonstrates how movies made for express political purposes can be buffeted by the winds of change. Upon its release in 1925, Potemkin was hailed as a masterpiece, as much for the way it dramatized the emotions behind the communist revolution as for its innovative use of montage. But Eisenstein told the story of a sailors’ revolt maybe too well, with too much artistic detail. In a depressed pre-Nazi Germany, officials worried that the film would foment revolt among the military and police. In the Soviet Union, the powers that be gradually whittled away Eisenstein’s original vision by mandating the inclusion of more patriotic music, and the exclusion of quotes by disgraced political leaders. And in the U.S., unadulterated prints were hard to come by, since American distributors could only deal with European companies that had made their own alterations. [Noel Murray]
Behind The Candelabra
Steven Soderbergh’s Behind The Candelabra is, like many Soderbergh films, made up of a great many things. There are elements of wry comedy here—particularly from a plastic surgeon played by Rob Lowe—just as there are heartbreaking moments of relationship drama, scenes where Scott (Matt Damon) and Liberace (Michael Douglas) tear each other’s throats out. Yet what’s most impressive about the film is how it creates a sustained argument about the progress of the gay rights movement in the United States. With no actual, legal connection between Scott and Liberace, the two are forced into ever more complicated convolutions, and when the relationship inevitably crumbles, Scott has no legal protection when the pianist takes everything. This is a story about two men who were in love, then gradually fell out of that love, but it’s also a story about how the lack of legal protection for them (as well as Liberace’s terror of how society would react if he were outed) hounded them every step of the way. It’s pitched between quiet, intimate scenes with Scott and “Lee,” as he likes to be called, lounging around, enjoying each other’s company, and that old woman’s stare, with everything that hides behind it. [Emily St. James]
Black Girl
Ousmane Sembène’s debut feature, Black Girl, is commonly cited as the first major film to come out of Sub-Saharan Africa, despite the fact that much of the movie is set in France. Its place in film history has less to do with its production (which was French enough to qualify for France’s Prix Jean Vigo, which Black Girl won in 1966) than with its perspective. Black Girl was the first feature made in Senegal, and the first feature about black Africans to have been written and directed by a black African. No other national or cultural cinema started as confidently. The movie—about a young woman who takes a seemingly cushy job as maid and nanny to a French couple in Dakar, and then accompanies them back to France—is at once a humanist drama, a portrait of Senegalese life in the 1960s, a study of race relations in France, and a personal statement on post-colonial Africa’s relationship to Europe and the rest of the world. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
Carnival Of Souls
Herk Harvey is said to have directed more than 400 movies in his three decades of filmmaking. Almost all of them, however, were educational and industrial training films, which he shot, on time and under budget, for the Centron Corporation in Lawrence, Kansas. The chief exception—and Harvey’s only feature—was 1962’s Carnival Of Souls, an eerie, low-budget horror yarn that’s become a bona fide cult favorite in the half-century since it was first released. The film, about a church organist (Candace Hilligoss) haunted by leering specters after a car accident, approximates the feeling of a nightmare that won’t end. Both David Lynch and George Romero have cited it as an influence on their own early, shoestring shockers, while the twist ending anticipated several decades of climactic rug pulls. But like a lot of cult classics, Carnival Of Souls—a recent inductee of the Criterion Collection—was unappreciated in its own time. Audiences ignored the movie, the distributor went bankrupt, and Harvey returned to his day job, never to make a full-length film again. Centron’s gain was our loss; surely, there were better uses of the director’s talents than warning kids about the dangers of cheating. [A.A. Dowd]
Chimes At Midnight
Cut and pasted from the texts of five different plays (plus snippets of Holinshed’s Chronicles, the Bard’s main source on English history), Chimes At Midnight puts larger-than-life John Falstaff, Shakespeare’s most popular comic role, center-stage, only to dwarf him with cathedral and castle interiors. Orson Welles made innovative use of low angles in his debut, Citizen Kane, reinventing ceilings as backdrops; here, in his final trip into the corridors of power, they seem so far above as to be unreachable. Even Chimes At Midnight’s brutal, celebrated Battle Of Shrewsbury sequence—a hurricane of medieval violence that has remained a key Hollywood reference point for decades—finds time to cut back to Falstaff, wobbling around in a suit of armor like a lost astronaut roaming the moonscape of history. A big chunk of Welles’ body of work could be divided up into movies about power (e.g. Citizen Kane, Macbeth) and movies about powerlessness (e.g. The Lady From Shanghai, The Trial), and Chimes At Midnight fits squarely into the latter category. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
Dune
What Denis Villeneuve’s sleek new adaptation [of Frank Herbert’s novel] gets right, immediately, is the galactic, millennia-old scale: gigantic architecture, humongous spacecraft, vast landscapes, big ugly sandworms. No other recent film has looked quite so huge. It’s worth noting here that the actual onscreen title of Villeneuve’s film is Dune: Part One. The script (by Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts, and Eric Roth) covers only the first half of Herbert’s novel, and the result ultimately feels like half of a movie. Fortunately, it’s an ambitious one, made with the same stylistic intelligence that Villeneuve brought to Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, his earlier forays into smart sci-fi. Having come a long way from his arthouse roots, he has emerged as one of our most reliable and talented directors of suspense and effects. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
Faces
After a brief, unhappy tenure directing Hollywood projects, John Cassavetes spent the rest of his career working in the fragments of that shattered mold. Financed by acting jobs in films like The Dirty Dozen and Rosemary’s Baby, Faces premièred in 1968 and introduced the landscape that Cassavetes would return to again and again: the unquiet inner lives of those new houses that sprung up in the wake of WWII. John Marley and Lynn Carlin star as a couple testing the limits of their unhappy marriage, he with a call girl (Cassavetes’ wife, Gena Rowlands), she with free-spirited gigolo Seymour Cassel. Partly improvised, partly scripted, and partly somewhere between the two, Cassavetes’ films have frequently been likened to jazz. Faces bears the stamp of its particular era’s jazz; it trades in long stretches of chaos, even ugliness, which produce unexpected passages of grace and beauty. As punishing as that ugliness can be, the graceful bits stick in the memory. [Keith Phipps]
Hobson’s Choice
David Lean is best known for his epic late-period historical dramas exploring the psychological contradictions of outsized figures, like Lawrence Of Arabia, The Bridge On The River Kwai, and Doctor Zhivago. But his directorial career began with eminently British literary adaptations filmed on a smaller scale—Noël Coward’s This Happy Breed, Brief Encounter,and Blithe Spirit; Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and Great Expectations; and an adaptation of Harold Brighouse’s perennially popular theatrical comedy Hobson’s Choice. Released in 1954, Hobson’s Choice is the last of Lean’s black-and-white films; the following year, he directed Summertime (also originally a play) in glorious Technicolor, and then the huge spectacles began. As befits a film that marks this transition, Hobson’s Choice embodies the very best of the intimate Lean, while anticipating the startling clarity of vision he would later bring to the North African desert and the Russian steppes. [Donna Bowman]
House
1977’s House is a classic of what writer Chuck Stevens calls “le cinéma du WTF?!,” and it’s one of our favorites of the genre here at The A.V. Club. (We even inducted it into the New Cult Canon a few years back.) Written by director Nobuhiko Obayashi based on one of his young daughter’s nightmares, House is like an episode of Scooby-Doo directed by Richard Lester while he was utterly zonked out on psychedelics. Or maybe it’s like a ghost story told around the campfire by a precocious preteen who’s also out of her mind on psychedelics. You know what, maybe just watch it. [Katie Rife]
Judas And The Black Messiah
In terms of relating this history, Judas And The Black Messiah is relatively straightforward. It’s framed by the familiar device of a character giving an interview, and anchored by that most quintessential of human experiences: a love story. Director Shaka King takes a novelistic approach to the material, concentrating less on the relationship between the two title characters and more on what was going on in Chicago around the time FBI informant William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) infiltrated the Illinois Black Panther Party in 1968. Those hoping for a climactic confrontation between the film’s exciting lead actors won’t find that here, because, well, it didn’t go down like that in real life. But there’s still plenty of dramatic friction to be found. As Illinois party chairman Fred Hampton, Daniel Kaluuya is the sun around which everything else in Judas And The Black Messiah revolves. Hampton recruits new members, unites warring factions, and, with his charisma and radical platform, scares the bejesus out of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen). The activist really comes alive in front of a crowd, as Kaluuya channels the searing intensity he brought to Steve McQueen’s Widows to more righteous but equally electrifying ends. [Katie Rife]
Kiki’s Delivery Service
Fans of Hayao Miyazaki’s darker movies (Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke chief among them) may find Kiki bland and child-safe; of all the movies he’s written and directed, its features the least conflict and calamity. The worst that happens to the eponymous young witch is that she becomes dangerously depressed and momentarily stops believing in herself: For the most part, her effervescent energy and determination keep her spirits high as she enthusiastically explores her new town and new life. [Tasha Robinson]
Kwaidan
Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 anthology film Kwaidan (the title translates simply as Ghost Stories) isn’t the kind of movie you watch when you want to be scared out of your wits. None of its four tales of the supernatural goes for the jugular, and several of them deliberately telegraph their chilling conclusion, undermining any suspense. Kobayashi, who adapted all four from collections of Japanese folk tales assembled by Lafcadio Hearn, expected local audiences to be familiar with the basic narratives, the same way that an American audience would know what’s coming in a filmed version of, say, “The Hook.” What makes Kwaidan singular is the combination of Kobayashi’s almost maddeningly patient, methodical approach to drama (as exemplified by 1962’s Harakiri, also available via Criterion) and his expressionistic experiments with color, sound, and theatrical artifice. [Mike D’Angelo]
L’Argent
Bresson had a thing for 19th-century Russian literature, having adapted Dostoevsky twice; for his final film, L’Argent, he took inspiration from Tolstoy, transposing the writer’s posthumously published novella The Forged Coupon into modern-day France. The film is non-stop movement; it starts with the handing off of a counterfeit 500-franc note and then rigorously tracks its repercussions, ending with one of the most unsettling murder scenes in film history. Like Bresson’s earlier masterpiece Au Hasard Balthazar, it’s one of those movies that seems to contain a complete vision of the world, informed by a fully formed sense of what filmmaking can and should do—which seems all the more remarkable when you consider that it runs just over 80 minutes. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
Lady Snowblood
A pulpy, violent tale of revenge based on a comic serialized in a popular Playboy-esque men’s magazine, Lady Snowblood didn’t have to be art. But director Toshiya Fujita treated it as such, utilizing a complicated flashback structure and expressionistic cinematography to tell the story of Yuki Kashima, a highly skilled assassin trained from birth to find and kill the men (and woman) responsible for murdering her father and raping her mother before she was born. Her nickname, shurayukihime (“carnage snow princess”), is a pun on the Japanese name for Snow White, shirayukihime (“white snow princess”), reflecting her cold, grim beauty. Yuki found her ideal embodiment in Meiko Kaji, early icon of female action stardom and ultimate ice queen, whose huge, deep-set eyes reflect both burning hatred and heartbreaking reluctance. Elegantly dispatching her enemies with a flick of the wrist amid fountains of tempera-paint blood spray—this is one of those movies where blood doesn’t run or drip, it sprays—she’s both human and divine. [Katie Rife]
Moonage Daydream
Moonage Daydream is a documentary about David Bowie that does all it can to avoid being a typical documentary—and it succeeds. It isn’t a cradle-to-grave investigation of the performer’s life, even though most of it follows chronological order. It isn’t a concert film, even though there is a lot footage of him on stage. All facts about the man come straight from the horse’s mouth, via old clips, yet half of them contradict one another. Still, you come away feeling that you saw a side of this beloved artist you never knew about before. It’s quite a feat. Directed Brett Morgen’s steadfastness in refusing to offer context for some (most!) of these visual counterpoints is, in this critic’s opinion, a panacea against boring documentaries. It goes further, with spasmodic trips through associative images. An old interview of Bowie talking about the art of performance (offering details of the Ziggy Stardust persona) inserts clips from Metropolis, Mickey Mouse, Buster Keaton, cheesy ’50s sci-fi, and actual images from outer space into the blender. It’s great because it’s set to those cool Mick Ronson guitar licks, and, like the entire film itself, it always finds a groove. [Jordan Hoffman]
My Dinner With Andre
“Obviously something terrible had happened to Andre,” Wallace Shawn concludes after hearing reports about an old friend’s strange behavior toward the beginning of My Dinner With Andre. Once an acclaimed director of experimental theater, Andre Gregory spent years globetrotting and returned a changed man, someone who might go on about talking to the trees, or be seen weeping on street corners. As the film opens, Shawn has reluctantly agreed to catch up with him over dinner. Joining him at an upscale, just slightly forbidding restaurant, Shawn finds Gregory relentlessly upbeat, at least on the surface, and listens to his tales of super-fringe acting workshops, travels in the Sahara, a piece of performance art that involved being buried alive, and other strange adventures. After listening politely, Shawn replies. And that, in short, is My Dinner With Andre, an arthouse hit in 1981 built around a conversation between old friends and collaborators playing themselves, directed with dining-room intimacy by Louis Malle. [Keith Phipps]
My Neighbor Totoro
American anime connoisseurs were hip to Hayao Miyazaki even when his imaginative, epic adventures were only available on the bootleg market. But average moviegoers (or, more accurately, video renters) first encountered Miyazaki via My Neighbor Totoro, an atypical and arguably non-ideal way to meet the master. Compared to the breathtaking action sequences and elaborate fantasy landscapes of Miyazaki’s early features (not to mention subsequent films like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away), the genteel, languid Totoro seems at first slight, and even soporific. The sliver of a story—about two girls who move to a small village with their father while their mother recovers from a life-threatening illness—never gets past first gear, and the heroines’ few encounters with the mystical forest spirit Totoro hardly justify the movie’s title. Yet My Neighbor Totoro may be the most enduring entry in Miyazaki’s impressive filmography, because it’s so particular about the nuances of human behavior and emotion. The movie stands up to re-watching, gaining in profundity. [Noel Murray]
Princess Mononoke
A hero’s mythical journey begins when Ashitaka (Billy Crudup), a prince in feudal Japan, is infected by a giant-boar-turned-demon-monster and sets out to find the evil source responsible. His adventures lead him to Iron Town, an industrial fortress presided over by Lady Eboshi (Minnie Driver), which strips the forest of its vital resources in order to manufacture weapons. This draws the wrath of the wolf gods and the mysterious title character (Claire Danes), leading to a literal battle between man and nature. Miyazaki’s message leaves little to the imagination, but his animation offers plenty of sustenance, especially when he silences the expository dialogue and lets his rapturous images speak for themselves. Highlighted by a sparkling, translucent Forest Spirit that only emerges at night, tiny skeletal creatures with clicking swivel-heads, and a truly magical denouement, Princess Mononoke is still a formidable achievement, if not a resounding success. [Scott Tobias]
Spirited Away
After writing and directing the 1997 animated epic Princess Mononoke, Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki announced that he was planning to retire. Thank goodness he changed his mind. Spirited Away is a wonderful encore, marked by the painstaking attention to detail and artful balance between terror and joy that make his work unique. Spirited Away centers on Chihiro, a sullen, fearful Japanese girl whose parents are moving so far out into the country that they predict they’ll have to drive to the next town just to shop. While traveling to their new home, they discover an abandoned, disintegrating theme park, which they cheerfully explore in spite of Chihiro’s shrill protests. Suddenly, a boy approaches her and commands her to leave before nightfall. But before she can gather her wayward parents and escape, night does fall, in a breathtakingly eerie sequence that almost subsumes Chihiro’s danger with its technical achievement. Chihiro is trapped in the spirit world, and in order to save herself, her parents, and eventually her new friend, she has to come to terms with herself and her unwitting captors. Gradually, in a series of almost episodic adventures, she learns to be brave and face up to her responsibilities to herself and the people she loves. The baseline material is fairly standard stuff for a child’s adventure story, but the complex trappings and the shape of that story are uniquely Miyazaki. [Tasha Robinson]
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