The Best Raw Movies to Watch on Max (HBO Max)
Usually, what makes a movie memorable are the scenes and provoke raw, unadulterated emotions. Whether you’re into suspenseful thrillers or emotional dramas, we’ve rounded up the best movies and shows to stream now for a raw emotional experience.
Each episode of the medical show The Pitt follows an ER team over the course of an hour. There are no time jumps or montages, this is real-time for them. Countless patients come and go, their injuries ranging from terrifying to deadly, and whether they live or die depends on how fast the team responds. […]
x1After the only war the Americans have lost, American post-Vietnam war portrayals tend to lean as patriotic revenge fantasies or romanticized disillusionment, but rarely do they portray the people caught in between. HBO’s The Sympathizer is an adaptation of the Pulitzer winning novel of the same name, and while it’s mainly an American production, Park […]
As a mystery-driven crime drama, Mare of Easttown treads pretty familiar territory without necessarily digging too deeply into the sociopolitical context it seems to hint at throughout its seven-episode run. But as the miniseries’ focus shifts from the usual procedural elements to more personal drama among the townspeople of Easttown and certain past events they […]
Biographical documentaries tend to depict exceptional people– people who are so great that everyone wants to know about them, and people who are so terrible that they serve as a warning. Great Photo, Lovely Life depicts a serial sexual abuser in photojournalist Amanda Mustard’s family, able to get away with nearly all his crimes each […]
The Harry Potter movies undoubtedly changed the lives of its young stars forever — but a stuntman whose future the films had more tragic consequences for is the deserved focus of this moving documentary. David Holmes was just 17 when he was hired as Daniel Radcliffe’s stunt double, a role he held throughout the series. […]
It’s a bold move, centering a drama around a creature as docile as a donkey, but EO pulls it off without ever leaning on the crutch of CGI. Instead, the film makes ingenious use of a hundred-year-old film technique: the Kuleshov effect. By splicing the image of the titular donkey’s placid, expressionless face against visual […]
Nobody should doubt Tatiana Suarez’s place in the world of mixed martial arts, and it goes without saying how inspirational she can be to young girls who feel they don’t fit a traditionally feminine mold. But a documentary really should do more than just reiterate facts, farm motivational soundbites, and refuse to ask follow-up questions […]
Though it isn’t the groundbreaking slasher movie that it initially seemed to be marketed as, X simply knows how to do its job very well: the gore is plentiful and the build-up to the inevitable kills is just loaded with anticipation. But where the film becomes much more interesting is in the palpable sadness that […]
A music documentary with its star as one of its main talking heads runs the risk of coming off like cheap PR, but Tina Turner’s own articulate insights never restrict this retrospective on her life. If anything, she assists directors Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin in expanding the film’s scope to cover the origins of […]
Even if it doesn’t provide the most comprehensive information about treatment and care for multiple sclerosis (MS)—especially for those who can’t afford a ridiculously expensive stem cell transplant—this isn’t really the point of Introducing, Selma Blair. This is still mostly a biographical documentary about a (self-confessed) “not-so-famous” celebrity, who gets to be incredibly honest about […]
A black comedy with an aggressively bleak view of its own protagonist, this story of a celebrity’s life falling apart starts off funny and gradually becomes more and more difficult to watch. As the titular character scrambles to keep each part of her life afloat, her sense of self begins to fracture as well—emphasizing how […]
Disproving the notion that American animation is only for kids, the latest project from Genndy Tartakovsky (most known for Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack) is an uncompromising action epic that puts most multimillion-dollar live-action blockbusters to shame. Though Tartakovsky has stated that Primal will continue on as an anthology series, the first two seasons tell […]
There are moments in our childhood that we deeply regret, even if we didn’t know better, even if innocence can excuse us, and even if we weren’t the ones primarily responsible for the mistake. The memory of it can be haunting, but none has been as devastating as the memory depicted in Louis Malle’s semi-autobiographical […]
The prospect of death puts everything into perspective, but Cléo from 5 to 7 crafted a totally new one altogether. As it says in the title, the titular singer wanders the French capital in real time, with an ominous tarot card reading turning Cléo’s world into black and white, shifting the mood even as she […]
Though it takes place in New York at the turn of the 20th century, The Knick is not your typical historical drama. Set to a pulsating techno score and with a whizzing pace and kinetic camerawork, director-cinematographer-editor Steven Soderbergh injects the show with a potent sense of immediacy so that it never feels like a […]
Based on the Austrian novel, The Piano Teacher is as brilliant and as disturbed as its protagonist. The film follows Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), the repressed masochist in question, and the trainwreck of a relationship that she develops with her student Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel). Their dynamic is undeniably toxic. Austrian auteur Michael Haneke frames […]
First off you have to remember it is the same writer as Training Day. Then you have to believe that he must have gone to a joint training camp between the Taliban and Mexican Cartels or something since Training Day to come up with such a tense, unpredictable script. But End of Watch is more than […]
As has become typical of a David Simon series, The Deuce manages to bring myriad characters and perspectives into one setting, but somehow without resulting in information overload or stale drama. Simon’s work (most famously, The Wire) has always been arguably more ethnographic than traditionally dramatic, and here it’s no different: the portrait he and […]
While the mixed reception of its near-faithful American remake Vanilla Sky might make some viewers pause, there’s an intuitive brilliance in the Spanish original Open Your Eyes that isn’t easy to translate. Sure, the apparent differences help– it’s shorter and less complicated, and Cesar’s face turns more grotesque than David’s does. But what’s startling about […]
Rosetta begins fiercely, with a shaky handheld camera chasing the eponymous teenager (Émilie Dequenne) as she storms across a factory floor and bursts into a room to confront the person she believes has just lost her her job. The film seldom relents from this tone of desperate fury, as we watch Rosetta — whose mother […]
In this film-within-a-film, we and a fictional version of actress Maggie Cheung are brought through the disorienting experience of French filmmaking. The film’s washed-up director wants to remake the classic silent film Les Vampires to revive his career. But as with all plans, everything inevitably goes wrong. On top of depicting the regular chaos of […]
Sometimes, in life, we’re forced to be with people we don’t immediately get along with, like in the classroom, the workplace, or, if you’re unlucky, in a jail cell. Down by Law is black-and-white drama focused on three men in a jail cell, two of them outright hating each other, but not as much as […]
x1With a driver protagonist, trying to reintegrate with the rougher parts of his home city, forming a connection with a woman way out of his league, Soho-based Mona Lisa has spawned comparisons to the New York-classic Taxi Driver (1976), but this British neo-noir has a completely different tone and spirit, with a completely different conclusion. […]
Given the name, Revanche seemed to be a revenge thriller, and to a certain degree, that’s correct, but the way writer-director Götz Spielmann frames the plot makes it feel much more like a naturalistic character study of the way love and violence walks hand-in-hand, leading to a tragedy that shifts its thrill each time ex-con […]
What Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher intentionally refuses to give you by way of plot or resolution, it more than makes up for in sharp visuals, a beautifully sparse score, and an unscratchable feeling of restlessness. It’s a downer for sure, watching 12-year-old James hounded by guilt as he navigates the mundane bleakness of his everyday life. […]
Having an ordinary life isn’t a bad thing, but it can feel like a huge disappointment, hearing of other people and characters having extraordinary lives. However, when Harvey Pekar started writing down that ordinary life, his life became… still quite ordinary, but at least with an outlet through his autobiographical comic book American Splendor. That […]
This movie is distilled horror. A teenager sleeps with her boyfriend for the first time, after which he tells her that he was the latest recipient of a curse that is transmitted through sexual contact. After she becomes completely paranoid without any manifestations, the curse manifests itself in assassins that kill their way to her. […]