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In addition to new Warner and HBO films, the streamer has a treasure trove of Golden Age classics, indie flicks and foreign films. Start with these.
When HBO Max debuted in May 2020, subscribers rightfully expected (and got) the formidable catalog of prestige television associated with the HBO brand. But its movie library drew from a much deeper well. Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, is a huge conglomerate, and its premiere streaming service comprises decades of titles from Warner Bros., Turner Classic Movies, Studio Ghibli and more. Viewed in that light, its recent rebranding as Max seems fitting.
That means a lot of large-scale fantasy series and selections from the DC extended universe. Max is also an education in Golden Age Hollywood classics and in independent and foreign auteurs like Federico Fellini, Satyajit Ray and John Cassavetes. The list below is an effort to recommend a diverse range of movies — old and new, foreign and domestic, all-ages and adults-only — that cross genres and cultures while appealing to casual and serious movie-watchers alike. (Note: Streaming services sometimes remove titles or change starting dates without notice.)
Here are our lists of the best movies and TV shows on Netflix, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video and the best of everything on Hulu and Disney+.
Given Sofia Coppola’s fascination with life in a gilded cage, evident in the suburban bedrooms of “The Virgin Suicides” and suffocating grandeur of “Marie Antoinette,” it’s almost inevitable that she would get around to Priscilla Presley, who met Elvis as a 14-year-old in Germany and was deposited at Graceland after the two were married. “Priscilla” suggests the predatory nature of the courtship between Elvis (Jacob Elordi), a pop supernova, and the slight Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny), Coppola explores the shifting power dynamics of their relationship. Ben Kenigsberg wrote that Coppola “has made in some ways a darker, more claustrophobic film than usual without sacrificing her airiness or sense of humor.”
Stream it on Max
In David Lowery’s minimalist twist on the haunted house movie, the ghost appears in a white bedsheet with eyeholes cut out of it, like a classic last-minute Halloween option. The spirit, in this case, is an unnamed musician (Casey Affleck) who has died in a car accident, leaving his wife (Rooney Mara) in a modest ranch home in Dallas that she can leave, but he cannot. Loss and grief are the obvious themes of “A Ghost Story,” but the film proves far more ambitious than that, opening up to temporal and cosmic planes that expand through centuries and across the universe. A.O. Scott called it “suspenseful, dourly funny and at times piercingly emotional.”
Stream it on Max
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