Ostensibly, this is a good thing: Below you’ll find masterpiece after masterpiece from the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Agnes Varda, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Barbara Kopple, Jacques Demy, Akira Kurosawa, the Maysles, Pennebaker, Ingmar Bergman-those looking for a crash course in world cinema can pretty much single-handedly thank Turner Classic Movies’ folding under the HBO banner for the bounties they’re about to inhale. Basically, it’s like Criterion Channel Lite in some of its more highbrow corners. Like most other streaming services that aren’t owned by, say, the House of Mouse, there is no real overarching theme to what HBO Max presents, which is exactly why HBO Max represents such a powerful urge to just roll over and let it all happen. Even Hayao Miyazaki, notoriously against having his movies available on streaming services, finally gave in. Whereas once these streaming services represented a more accessible alternative to an overpriced cable TV package, now we’re given no alternative, even though pretty much every movie imaginable is available for us to watch right now. Welcome HBO Max: You get a piece of us too. You’ll find a lot of French gems here, not to mention an essential selection of documentaries, silent films, sci-fi staples, psychedelic monster movies, musicals and every shade of Oscar bait in between. Here are the 50 best movies on HBO Max right now: 1. Stars: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, Douglas Rain, William Sylvesterįifty years ago, Stanley Kubrick told the story of everything-of life, of the universe, of pain and loss and the way reality and time changes as we, these insignificant voyagers, sail through it all, attempting to change it all, unsure if we’ve changed anything. Clarke (whose novel, conceived alongside the screenplay, saw release not long after the film’s premiere), 2001: A Space Odyssey begins with the origins of the human race and ends with the dawn of whatever comes after us-spinning above our planet, god-like, a seemingly all-knowing, hopefully benevolent fifth-dimensional space fetus-spanning countless light years and millennia between. And yet, despite its ambitious leaps and barely comprehensible scope, every lofty symbolic gesture Kubrick matches with a moment of intimate humanity: the sadness of a mighty intellect’s death the shock of cold-blooded murder the minutiae and boredom of keeping our bodies functioning on a daily basis the struggle and awe of encountering something we can’t explain the unspoken need to survive, never questioned because it will never be answered. So much more than a speculative document about the human race colonizing the Solar System, 2001 asks why we do what we do-why, against so many oppositional forces, seen and otherwise, do we push outward, past the fringes of all that we know, all that we ever need to know? Amidst long shots of bodies sifting through space, of vessels and cosmonauts floating silently through the unknown, Kubrick finds grace-aided, of course, by an epic classical soundtrack we today can’t extricate from Kubrick’s indelible images-and in grace he finds purpose: If we can transcend our terrestrial roots with curiosity and fearlessness, then we should. That the end of Kubrick’s odyssey returns us to the beginning only reaffirms that purpose: We are, and have always been, the navigators of our destiny. Stars: Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette, John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Tom SizemoreĪ blisteringly dispiriting drama about the toll taken upon medical workers, Bringing Out the Dead naturally has plenty to say about martyrs and morality. Martin Scorsese isn’t letting anyone’s literal faith or that in the broken American healthcare system go unexamined. Nicolas Cage’s dead-eyed and desperate ambulance driver cycles through jaded partners (brilliantly painted by John Goodman, Ving Rhames and Tom Sizemore) as he tries to put some goddamn good into this seemingly godforsaken corner of New York. Will he be saved by Mary (Patricia Arquette), daughter of a heart attack patient? Or will he sink deeper into the hallucinatory madness that has already seemingly claimed everyone around him? Paul Schrader pens another sleazy and sad script as he adapts Joe Connelly’s novel, depicting the timeless twilight world of medical emergencies with all its grimy detail and psychological ghosts. It is a world of imperfection, a world of good intentions, a world just a phone call (or improbable, but not impossible, accident) away.Īll those night shoots were worth it: The film looks as nightmarish as it feels.
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