The 25 best movies on HBO and HBO Max right now

Director: Ryan Coogler

Cast: Michael B Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku, Delroy Lindo

So much more than a vampire movie, while also being an extremely kick-ass vampire movie, Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster is just the shot of adrenaline big-budget, non-franchise moviemaking needed. Michael B Jordan pulls double duty as Cain-and-Abel-coded twins returning home to the 1930s Mississippi Delta to open a juke joint and facing derobed Klansmen by day and banjo-strumming, step-dancing bloodsuckers by night. Awarded with a record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations, including a Best Actor win for Jordan, it’s proof original stories can still win at the box office – and that Coogler might be his generation’s Spielberg.

Watch Sinners now on HBO Max

Director: Mary Bronstein

Cast: Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, A$AP Rocky

A parental nightmare that makes The Omen look like an episode of Bluey, Mary Bronstein’s feature-length panic attack could’ve just as easily been called Overstimulation: The Movie. Rose Byrne, in a pantheon performance, is a therapist dealing with a sick daughter, a missing patient, an absentee husband and a bathtub-sized hole in her ceiling — and not a single person she encounters will cut her any slack, or even sell her wine after-hours. Is it a ‘fun’ watch? God no. But Byrne makes it worthwhile, particularly for fellow mothers in need of a trauma bond.

Watch If I Had Legs I’d Kick You now on HBO Max

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. 

Watch A Different Man now on Max

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Chase Infiniti

Who knew Paul Thomas Anderson had an all-time great action movie in him? In the director’s justified Best Picture winner, Leonardo DiCaprio – embodying any number of classic ’70s paranoiacs, with a touch of the Dude – is a leftwing radical turned burned-out recluse whose past comes back to destroy him in the form of human throbbing-forehead-vein Sergeant Lockjaw, detestably played by Sean Penn. Anderson’s camera hardly ever stops moving, scurrying through underground tunnels, leaping from street riots to rooftop escapes, culminating in a three-way car chase for the ages. 

Watch One Battle After Another now on HBO Max

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.

Watch Jeanne Dielman... now on Max 

Director: Zach Cregger

Cast: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Amy Madigan

Leveling up considerably from his head-turning debut, 2022’s Barbarian, Zach Cregger crafts a jigsaw-puzzle mystery evoking Stephen King by way of Paul Thomas Anderson. After an entire classroom of schoolkids vanishes overnight, a small suburban community is torn apart by suspicion and paranoia before a few citizens discover something more sinister — and possibly supernatural — may be responsible. As in his previous film, Cregger injects healthy doses of comedy into the horror without diluting the unnerving atmosphere, culminating in a hilariously gruesome punchline.

Watch Weapons now on HBO Max

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.

Watch Flow now on Max

Director: Josh Safdie

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kevin O’Leary

Together and apart, the Safdie brothers have made films centering risk-addicted narcissists and daring audiences to root for them. In Marty Mauser, Josh the elder finds perhaps the ultimate Safdie protagonist: a 1950s ping-pong pro willing to do anything and run over anybody for an opportunity to confirm his greatness. Timothée Chalamet is absolutely on fire in the role, but he may have played the part too well, as Oscar voters seemed unable to distinguish between actor and character and dinged him for his arrogance. As Mauser himself would likely opine, it’s a decision the Academy may come to regret. 

Watch Marty Supreme now on HBO Max

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’. 

Watch Trap now on Max

Director: Eva Victor

Cast: Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges

Walking a tonal tightrope most filmmakers wouldn’t attempt in a career, let alone with their debut feature, writer-director-star Eva Victor somehow wrings deadpan humour from the story of a college professor struggling with the long-tail effects of a sexual assault. Victor, previously known for their viral comedy videos, navigates tough subject matter with an endearingly light touch, marking them as an all-around talent to watch. A special shout out to John Carroll Lynch, who nearly steals the whole movie with a short cameo extolling the healing powers of a well-made sandwich.

Watch Sorry, Baby now on HBO Max

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.

Watch M now on Max

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 dropped a remake in 2025. 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. 

Watch High and Low on Max

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.

Watch Spirited Away on Max

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.

Watch Paris Is Burning now on Max

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.

Watch Barbie now on Max

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.

Watch Hoop Dreams now on Max

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.

Watch Heretic now on Max

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.

Watch In the Mood for Love now on Max

Director: Brady Corbet

Cast: Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones

With only his third feature, actor-turned-director Brady Corbet makes a bid for the canon with a three-and-a-half hour epic about nothing less than the lie of the American Dream. Adrien Brody, in his second Oscar-winning performance, is a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor who escapes Europe, lands in rural Pennsylvania and, under the patronage of an eccentric industrialist (Guy Pearce), embarks on a project that’ll consume him for decades. Made for an astonishingly paltry $10 million, the film’s grand themes, wide-scale vision and mammoth runtime grasp at the capes of masters from Francis Ford Coppola to Paul Thomas Anderson — and nearly reaches them.

Watch The Brutalist now on HBO Max

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.    

Watch Slacker now on Max

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.

Watch Juror #2 now on Max

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’.

Watch Beau Travail now on Max

Directors: Hideaki Anno, Shinji Higuchi

Cast: Hiroki Hasegawa, Yutaka Takenouchi, Satomi Ishihara

Over the years, Godzilla has been used to represent everything from the threat of nuclear power to American imperialism. In Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s reboot, the big lizard is effectively just a giant bureaucratic nightmare. Emerging from the sea in derpy-looking larval form, he swiftly evolves into the familiar king of the kaijus, all while government officials spin their wheels deciding what to do about him. It’s the most satirical film in the franchise, exuding a dry wit worthy of Wes Anderson, while still being a whomp-ass monster movie, with creature design that’s alternately hilarious and terrifying.

Watch Shin Godzilla now on HBO Max

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.

Watch Black Girl now on Max

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.

Watch The Battle of Algiers now on Max