The Best Thrilling Movies to Watch on Max (HBO Max)
When it comes to memorable viewing experiences, it’s usually all about the scenes that pull you to the edge of your seat. Whether you’re into suspenseful mysteries or emotional dramas, here are the most thrilling movies and shows to stream.
After being promoted as a project lead, Ron falls down due to his office chair breaking. At first he tries to joke it off, but the work piles on, the expectations get higher, and all he can do is call The Chair Company. It leads him to an unexpected conspiracy that could be a combination […]
From the creators of HBO’s Mare of Easttown comes Task, a gritty crime drama that follows two men —one cop and one criminal —who, despite their differences, are on a similarly rocky journey towards healing. The series is slow to start, and it doesn’t help that the premise is something you’ve seen many times. But […]
From the creators of Scavengers Reign and Veep comes Common Side Effects, a show that’s at once quirkily funny and chillingly relevant. It’s about Marshall, a fungi expert who finds a mushroom that heals all wounds and illnesses. As a result, he becomes a target of big pharma, insurance companies, and even government agencies, all […]
You’d be forgiven for assuming Celtics City would be like most sports documentaries on TV—unremarkable and over-the-top. But in this case, Celtics City deserves to be over the top. The NBA team, perhaps more than any in the league, has such a rich history, filled with wins and losses, joys and failures, shame and impact, […]
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 […]
Heretic starts slow and talky, veering into philosophical territory as Hugh Grant’s creepy Mr. Reed drills Sisters Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Paxton (Chloe East) about faith and religion. But pretty soon, it turns into an utterly gripping escape thriller and supernatural mystery. Some things about the movie will frustrate you, and even more will have […]
Bright, breezy, and refreshingly unburdened by the seriousness of so many live-action Superman shows and movies, this new animated series wipes the slate clean and boils down the titular hero to his most endearing qualities. Here, Clark Kent is still learning to be more in touch with his identity and emotions—most evident in his enigmatic […]
With an accounting mistake leading to being stranded in the desert, it’s hard to predict where VIVANT would lead us to. As corporate employee Yusuke tries to undo his supposed accounting error, he gets into a series of surprising events including having to negotiate with a terrorist, being accused of a bombing, and escaping to […]
Stylishly shot and perfectly paced, Spy/Master is the kind of political thriller that will have you pressing play on the next episode as soon as possible. It starts in media res, losing no time in backgrounders (the artful opening credits efficiently fills you in on Romania’s role in the Cold War) as we follow Victor […]
Directed by Steven Soderbergh (Oceans trilogy, Erin Brockovich, and more recently, Kimi), Full Circle is a twisty and stylish noir that takes a while to grasp, what with its epic ensemble and sweeping storylines, but once that first thread of connection is made, it becomes a series that’s very hard to leave. Each episode leaves […]
It’s rare to see a prequel surpass its antecedent, but Pearl is that exception. You can watch it before or after X and still get the same satisfaction from piecing together the puzzle of Mia Goth’s many roles (three in total across the trilogy). If the first film owed a lot to slasher classics like […]
The bizarre case of Kathleen Peterson’s death, which has yet to be fully resolved to this day, has been the subject of many a media article. The press covered it relentlessly when it all started in 2001, then a critically-acclaimed documentary was released in 2004. This was followed up with a sequel in 2018, and […]
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It’s hard not to roll your eyes at what looks like yet another white-centered story set in a foreign land. But Tokyo Vice, thankfully, is hardly that. Co-produced by crime drama auteur Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral, Miami Vice), the HBO series is a stylishly thrilling and comprehensive look at the yakuza crime ring running Tokyo […]
The HBO series The Undoing looks a lot like the prestige miniseries that comes on TV these days. It has an impressive budget, heavy-hitting leads (among them Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant, and Donald Sutherland), and a self-serious tone that is partly commanding and partly absurd. You’ll have a hard time picking it out from the […]
Set in 1930s Hollywood, a decadent city festering with crime and corruption, Perry Mason is a stylish noir series that fully recalls the crime classics of its era. It has the hallmarks of an old-fashioned mystery, the most prominent of which is the titular detective himself, Perry Mason—a boozy antihero with a heart of rusty […]
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If all live-action superhero media stopped here, it would’ve been a triumphant conclusion. Carving its own path from the subversive Alan Moore classic and still so much gutsier than most superhero films and TV shows, Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen miniseries continues interrogating the idea of powerful masked vigilantes to explore institutionalized racism, America’s history of anti-Black […]
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 […]
The last time Junji Ito’s work was animated by a Western studio, it wasn’t terrible, but it didn’t match up to the terror of his original stories. Nevertheless, animators persisted, and Production I.G. and Adult Swim’s attempt is a mini-series adaptation of the three volume manga Uzumaki. Uzumaki: Spiral Into Horror is a peculiar horror […]
You may have heard about this 2019 critic-favorite from clips like this one of a kid running to flee the movie theater during a screening. “little billy ran the f**k out the door”, the caption reads. You will want to do the same. Recovering from losing her sister and her parents in a single incident, […]
Adapted from Caleb Carr’s blockbuster crime novel, The Alienist follows a team of amateur investigators in 1896 New York: Daniel Brühl as Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, the formidable titular “alienist” who studies the psychology of those alienated from society; Luke Evans as John Moore, a newspaper illustrator; and Dakota Fanning as Sara Howard, the first female […]
A chilling and dark movie to be especially appreciated by true suspense lovers. At the funeral of the family’s matriarch, no one is emotional except the granddaughter, whose grieving is disturbing, to say the least. When both grieving and not grieving are unsettling, you can tell what kind of family (and movie) this will be.
A fast-paced thriller, and “actually dangerous” movie as envisioned by its directors, Good Time is about a bank robbery gone wrong and one brother trying to get his other brother out of jail in its aftermath. It’s a deep and fast dive into New York’s criminal underworld that will not give you the time to […]
There’s more than a touch of Louis Theroux to this engrossing documentary — fronted by New Zealander pop-culture journalist David Farrier — about an innocuous-seeming Internet phenomenon: the actually-sinister subculture of “competitive endurance tickling”, in which young men undergo “tickle torture” for money on camera. When Farrier unassumingly requests an interview with an American producer […]
After the successful run of the first instalment, The Conjuring 2 brings back lead couple Ed and Lorraine Warren for yet another real life-based case of demonic possession. This time, it’s the Enfield poltergeist, a case which gained popularity in the London Borough of Enfield between 1977 and 1979, and while the Warrens in the film […]
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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 […]
Ostensibly, the Long Good Friday is about a London crime lord facing a series of unfortunate killings just as he was about to start his completely legal new business venture. Already the story works, since the question of who’s behind these assassinations drives the mystery of the story. It also helps that the crime lord […]
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Eyes Without a Face is aptly titled. As the mad Dr. Génessier goes to extreme lengths to restore his daughter Christiane’s beauty, the beauty he accidentally disfigured in a car accident, we mostly see Christiane with her face masked, only with her eyes undamaged. It’s her eyes that drive this French body horror classic. Her […]
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Long before his battles with King Kong, this sci-fi classic set the foundations of what was to become the world’s longest running film franchise. It’s an interesting rewatch, decades later. That’s not because the monster in the title is huge and awesome, though it certainly helped when it finally emerged from the water. No, what […]
It’s a miracle that an animated series like Samurai Jack was ever made—much less allowed to endure—on a children’s network: barely any dialogue, action that approaches the realm of the avant-garde, and storytelling that doesn’t rely on jokes or moral lessons. For its first four seasons that aired from 2001 to 2003, it barely had […]
If you are a fan of Hong Kong martial arts films, you probably already know who Jet Li is. The iconic action star has plenty of great titles in his filmography but the work that shot him to continent-wide stardom was Once Upon a Time in China, and for good reason. His competitive background in […]
After an initially disappointing breakthrough attempt to Hollywood, Jackie Chan pivoted back to Hong Kong, unexpectedly creating an iconic film franchise and maybe perhaps one of the best martial arts movies ever made. Police Story seems to be a simple story at first, but it was through this film that Chan’s spectacular stunts evolved for […]
See, usually, when American violence in media is critiqued, it’s usually through analytic studies or overly exaggerated lectures stirring moral panic. Instead of doing this, however, auteur Michael Haneke decided to surpass the crime genre, playing with the form and emotions in Funny Games. It’s terrifying, not because it immediately delves into the violence, but […]
A very intelligent and nuanced movie that relentlessly asks unpleasant questions. It’s a story about a woman seeking freedom by turning away from her own family and finding something she did not expect. The main character of the movie, Martha, is taken in by a cult and the movie depicts how this experience shapes and […]
First released in 1998, HBO’s From the Earth to the Moon is a fittingly epic series that captures the magnitude of NASA’s missions to the moon. It’s equally informative and dramatic, featuring more real-life characters than you can track and more information than you can sometimes process. Thankfully, Tom Hanks appears at the start of […]
