From buzzy indie breakouts to old classics to 'Barbie', these are the must-watch films on Max right now
In the days when Max was known as HBO Max, the streaming service was known as the place to go to rewatch The Sopranos, Sex and the City and The Wire and stream recent blockbusters. After the merger that formed Warner Bros. Discovery in 2022, much has changed. Yes, it’s still the platform to use if you want to spend time with Tony, Carrie or Stringer, but the selection of awesome movies has blown up, thanks to licensing deals with the likes of Turner Classic Movies, Criterion Collection and Studio Ghibli. Need help navigating its considerable catalogue? Here are the 25 newer and older movies on Max you absolutely need to stream ASAP.
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Director: Adam Schimberg
Cast: Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson
A struggling actor with a severe facial deformity undergoes an experimental treatment that changes his life, until a doppelganger of his former self comes around and starts mucking things up. Sebastian Stan is great in this boldly weird dark comedy as a guy uncomfortable in any skin, while Adam Pearson is hilariously oblivious as his unwitting arch nemesis.
Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Ray Liotta, Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco
Somehow, being able to stream Martin Scorsese’s gangster milestone at your leisure feels wrong. It should only be allowed to air on cable at random times, as it had for decades, forcing you to drop everything in order to watch to the end whenever you happen to catch it. ‘Yes, yes, honey, I know the baby’s on the way, but the Billy Batts scene is coming up! By the way, what do you think of the name “Lufthansa”?’
Director: Gints Zilbalodis
The little movie that could of 2024, this wordless wonder from Latvia beat out Pixar, DreamWorks and Netflix to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Naturalistic and wondrous, it follows an anonymous cat escaping rising flood waters along with other animals, including a scene-stealing capybara. Simple as that. And yet, the journey is transfixing, emotional and gorgeous – and the lack of dialogue makes it a perfect movie for kids and adults to enjoy together.
Director: Jonathan Glazer
Cast: Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller
No shade to Oppenheimer, but in the coming years, Jonathan Glazer’s quietly disquieting Holocaust drama may very well come to be seen as the actual best movie of 2023. It’s already probably the most important, not just for the unique perspective it brings to the atrocity but for the parallels it holds to the modern-day atrocities occurring just over our own proverbial walls too many of us would rather not acknowledge.
Director: Chantal Akerman
Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck
The best film ever made – according to Sight & Sound’s 2022 poll – is the slowburniest of slowburn classics. Widowed housewife Jeanne (played by Delphine Seyrig) sticks like glue to her daily routine as Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s static camera observes her doing chores, preparing meals and receiving a male client every afternoon. And then, from nowhere, something snaps. Don’t let its 200-minute runtime deter you – this is a landmark in feminist cinema.
Director: M Night Shyamalan
Cast: Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Night
Let’s hear it for girl-dads! Sure, in this bonkers thriller, Josh Hartnett might be a serial killer trying to maneuver out of a police sting set up to capture him, but he’s also a father braving a pop concert with his teen daughter. Isn’t that worthy of some leniency? M Night Shyamalan does his parental duty as well, casting his own aspiring pop-singer daughter as an Ariana Grande-like superstar. It’s the director’s most ridiculously fun movie in ages – emphasis on ‘ridiculous’.
Director: Fritz Lang
Cast: Peter Lorre, Otto Wernicke, Gustaf Gründgens
One of the most influential movies ever made, German auteur Fritz Lang’s expressionist noir is the crime movie from which all other crime movies are descended. A disturbed yet somehow sympathetic Peter Lorre is a child killer on the loose in Berlin, pursued not just by the police but the city’s criminal element and an angry mob of citizens. Released at the birth of the sound era, it’s still a movie that communicates primarily through visuals – many of which remain jarring almost 100 years later.
Directors: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods
Cast: Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East
Normally, if you knocked on a stranger’s door and Hugh Grant answered, it’d signal the start of a charmingly awkward love affair. Not so here. Instead, he invites a pair of Mormon missionaries inside for pie, some New Atheist lecturing and a tour of his torture dungeon. Not everything in this A24 horror-thriller works, but Grant sure does, twisting his stumbly-bumbly persona into something sinister and having a ball doing it.
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Yutaka Sada
Second only to Ikiru in the subgenre of Kurosawa masterworks with modern settings, the Japanese legend’s adaptation of a 1959 Ed McBain novel has admirers that would likely argue for its primacy, including Spike Lee, who’s planning a remake. A wealthy businessman (Mifune) learns his son has been kidnapped. When he discovers it’s actually his chauffeur’s son who’s been abducted, he must decide what’s more important: his conscience or his bank account. It’s a class-conscious, mixed-genre thriller that also clearly influenced Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite.
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Voice cast: Rumi Hiiragi, Miyu Irino, Mari Natsuki
Animator Hayao Miyazaki has many contenders for the best movie in his repertoire, but his fantastical 2001 masterpiece about a girl fighting to save her family from a witch’s spell probably has the best argument for the top spot. It was the first foreign film to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and the second highest-grossing picture in Japanese history. Beyond the accolades, it’s simply delightful: wide-eyed, witty and full of warmth.
Director: Jane Schoenbrun
Cast: Justice Smith, Jack Haven
Imagine David Lynch directing Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that still won’t fully explain this enigmatic indie-horror sensation, but it’s as close as a single sentence can get. Atmospheric and heavy with anxiety, it centres on two lonely teens who bond over a television show that may only exist in their heads. Director Jane Schoenbrun has described it as an allegory for the trans experience, and though gender dysphoria is never explicitly mentioned, much of the fear is derived from the sense of living a life that’s not your own.
Director: Jennie Livingston
A testament to the power of allowing marginalised people to speak for themselves, this landmark documentary brought drag culture into the mainstream, which not everyone in the LGBTQ community agrees is a good thing. But there’s no denying that the wildly expressive performances vibrate with a joy that leaps right off the screen. More than even the routines, director Livingston gave her subjects space to discuss the pleasure and pain of queer existence with unvarnished honesty – a radical act at the time, and still striking today.
Director: Kristoffer Borgli
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Julianne Nicholson, Dylan Gelula
The Charlie Kaufman vibes are strong with this wonderfully weird treatise on the surreality of fleeting fame (and, yes, cancel culture) right down to casting Adaptation alum Nic Cage as a balding, unassuming college professor who inexplicably begins making cameos in the dreams of random strangers around the world. It’s a movie bursting with ideas, to the degree that it almost seems to bulge against its runtime, but Cage carries the whole affair – especially when his own dreams turn to nightmares, along with everybody else’s.
Director: Greta Gerwig
Cast: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Will Ferrell
Whatever your expectations were for a live-action Barbie movie, writer-director Greta Gerwig managed to either exceed or completely confound them, delivering a fantastical feminist satire that dominated the box office and became the first true post-pandemic event picture. Sadly, its lasting legacy may end up being a deluge of films based on old toys that aren’t nearly as fun or funny, but at least we’ll always have Ryan Gosling’s Ken.
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason
Declaring the most ‘definitive’ Hitchcock film is a nearly impossible task, but North By Northwest is perhaps the best example of his wide-ranging appeal. It’s his purest popcorn flick, a suave, sexy caper starring Cary Grant at his most Cary Grant. It’s also genuinely suspenseful, with a handful of the most bravura action sequences in his oeuvre that are also among the most iconic of all time. (Most filmmakers would kill for just the crop duster scene, but then he follows it up with the climax at Mt Rushmore.) And it ends with the most juvenile sex joke anyone could get away with in the ‘50s. Truly, the guy could do it all.
Director: Rose Glass
Cast: Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Ed Harris
Sex, violence, bad haircuts, steroids – the erotic thriller is back, baby! Kristen Stewart is a bored gym manager in New Mexico whose life is jolted awake when an uber-jacked drifter (Katy O’Brian) wanders into town. Full of odd details and flashes of hallucinatory horror, it’s an antidote to the prudishness of 2020s cinema, with a mindfuck of an ending that’ll leave you wondering if someone spiked your popcorn.
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Cast: Paul Weller, Nancy Allen, Daniel O’Herlihy
Dutch iconoclast Paul Verhoeven set out to satirise ‘80s corporate greed with this ultraviolent sci-fi shoot-’em-up and ended up predicting the future. Sure, the streets aren’t yet being patrolled by formerly human cops resurrected as nigh-indestructible titanium law enforcement cyborgs, but with the increasing militarisation of the American police force, how far off can we be? In all seriousness, it’s a much smarter and scathing film than its setup suggests – a Verhoeven signature.
Director: Richard Linklater
Cast: Richard Linklater, Rudy Basquez, Jean Caffeine
What came first: slackers or Slacker? It’s hard to say if Richard Linklater’s meandering debut defined a generation or helped create it, but regardless, there is perhaps no greater Gen X time capsule that exists. Made for the relative pittance of $23,000, it plays out essentially as a series of barely-connected vignettes, starring actual disaffected twentysomethings from Linklater’s hometown of Austin, Texas. It doesn’t sound like much, but its unfakeable authenticity proved to be the spark that ignited the indie film boom of the ‘90s.
Director: Steve James
At once one of the greatest documentaries of all-time and also one of the best sports movies ever, Hoop Dreams follows two basketball-obsessed kids from inner city Chicago as they attempt to transcend their surroundings and make it to the NBA. But it’s not just a movie about basketball – in fact, you don’t have to care a lick about the sport to be drawn in by its narrative and the wider view it takes on issues related to race, class and opportunity in America. Much has changed about the sports world in the decades since. Many other things, sadly, have not.
Director: Clint Eastwood
Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, Chris Messina, Zoey Deutch
Is this Clint Eastwood’s last film? If it turns out that way, he goes out not necessarily with a bang, but with a taut, traditional legal thriller of the sort that doesn’t get made much anymore. A juror in a murder trial (Hoult) realises too late that he may have been the person who caused the death in question. Does he angle for a conviction? An acquittal? Or does he confess? A knotty procedural with a throwback ’90s feel, it’s a film out of time – and all the better for it.
Director: Sean Baker
Cast: Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, Mya Taylor, Karren Karagulian
In many ways a precursor to Anora, Sean Baker’s fifth film hits the streets of LA to follow a sex worker on a search to find and confront her cheating pimp boyfriend. (An unfaithful pimp? Gasp!) Shot entirely on an iPhone, the movie has the feel of a documentary and the energy of a screwball comedy. The livewire performance from non-pro Kitana Kiki Rodriguez nearly matches Mikey Madison for pure verve.
Director: Gillo Pontecorvo
Cast: Jean Martin, Saadi Yacef, Brahim Haggiag
‘Depressingly relevant’ isn’t maybe the most fun endorsement of a film, but Gillo Pontecorvo’s seminal Algerian War flick delivers fresh resonance every time you see it. It was studied by the Bush administration before the invasion of Iraq (not that they picked much up) and as a visceral insurgency story, it remains eerily prescient. It also helped establish the grammar of the modern political action-thriller. Not many movies can claim to be equally influential in Hollywood and the Pentagon.
Director: Claire Denis
Cast: Denis Lavant, Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin
Claire Denis’s adaptation of Herman Melville’s novella ‘Billy Budd’ is an existential masterpiece full of simmering homoeroticism, grappling bodies and sunbaked African landscapes. It’s also tinged, hauntingly, with regret, as Denis Lavant’s ex-Legionnaire reflects on how his desires and sense of self got lost in the brutal regimentation of military life. The famous ending – in which a demobbed Levant hits the dance floor – will make you reevaluate Corona’s cheesy anthem ‘The Rhythm of the Night’.
Director: Ousmane Sembene
Cast: Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Anne-Marie Jelinek, Robert Fontaine
A landmark in world cinema, the debut from the godfather of African film is a stark depiction of the tragedies of post-colonialism. A young Senegalese woman moves to Antibes in Southeastern France with dreams of a better life, only to find herself consistently othered by the couple she nannies for. It’s a strikingly honest portrayal of racism and the immigrant experience across Europe in the late ‘60s that remains sadly relevant today.
Director: Wong Kar-wai
Cast: Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung
Is there a more romantic movie in cinema? Wong Kar-wai’s seductive story of two lonely (and incredibly good-looking) souls connecting in 1960s Hong Kong is a total heartbreaker. Tony Leung’s journalist meets secretary Maggie Cheung. Tantalising, flirtatious encounters ensue in a nocturnal cityscape that’s gloriously photographed by the great Christopher Doyle as this pair of married but lonely people tiptoe toward each other and the world stands still around them.
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