3 Underrated HBO Max Movies I Can’t Wait to Watch This Weekend (October 24-26)
As October nears its end, it’s almost impossible not to watch a horror movie.
HBO Max has a great selection of spooky films, but Watch With Us will recommend only one for now — Halloween H20, a legacy sequel that’s been overshadowed by 2018’s Halloween.
HBO Max has other movies too, and viewers who enjoy an intelligent rom-com should give I Give It a Year a chance. It’s funny and a little sassy, just like its lead star, Rose Byrne.
Finally, the indie movie offers spy thrills told from a unique perspective with an outstanding performance from The White Lotus season 3 star, Parker Posey.
‘Halloween H20: 20 Years Later’ (1998)
When 2018’s Halloween was released, quite a few critics praised lead star Jamie Lee Curtis for going all-in, reprising her iconic film role – Laurie Strode – and giving her character surprising pathos and emotional complexity. But diehard Halloween fans know Curtis did that 20 years before that film in Halloween H20, the first time Curtis returned to the horror franchise that made her famous.
In this sequel, Curtis’ Strode is living under an assumed name, Keri Tate, and working as a headmistress at a private school in Northern California. She’s still traumatized by what happened to her as a teenager, so much so that she’s a barely functioning alcoholic. She’ll have to pull it together to save her teenage son, John (Josh Hartnett), and his friends from Michael Myers, who has returned yet again to finish what he started in Haddonfield in 1978.
Is Halloween H20 a good horror film? Not really. The kill count is minimal and relatively tame, and it suffers from the post-Scream irony and self-referential attitude that brought down all films in the genre during this period. Still, Curtis makes this movie worth seeing. Her Laurie is flawed and not really likable, which was a far cry from her teenage self two decades ago. Life – and a severe case of survivor’s guilt – has brought Laurie down, but like her final girl sisters, she can weather pretty much anything.
Halloween H20 is streaming on HBO Max.
‘I Give It a Year’ (2013)
It’s love at first sight for Nat (Rose Byrne) and Josh (Rafe Spall), so they waste no time in getting hitched. But at their wedding, several friends suggest their marriage won’t last, giving it a year, tops. The newlyweds naturally scoff at this assertion, but as the days turn into months, they begin to feel trapped in their union and start to flirt with other partners. Can Nat and Josh save their marriage? Even if they can, is it worth saving at all?
I Give It a Year is a comedy of marriage and instant regret. On paper, Nat and Josh seem like the perfect couple – they’re beautiful, ambitious and like each other. But is that enough to build a lifelong commitment with someone? It’s a serious question, but the beauty of the movie is that it deals with it in a comedic way that is unmistakably British. Fresh from her success in Bridesmaids, Byrne is terrific as a woman torn between what she should and what she wants to do.
I Give It a Year is streaming on HBO Max.
‘Fay Grim’ (2007)
One eventful day, Fay Grim’s (Parker Posey) life is upended when she’s visited by a mysterious CIA operative, Agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum), who informs her that her estranged husband, Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan), is dead. Even worse, he wrote down sensitive information in several notebooks that the CIA is desperate to track down to keep it from getting into the wrong hands. But when Fay travels to Paris to retrieve her spouse’s notebooks, she finds herself encountering one bizarre individual after another. What was Henry up to? And even if Fay is successful in giving the notebooks back to the CIA, what will happen to her now that she knows some incendiary top-secret information?
There are a handful of great rom-coms on HBO Max, but it would sure make things a lot easier if the streamer actually had a romantic comedy section. Instead, it takes a lot of searching to find some of the best examples of the genre. Thank You! You have successfully subscribed. Subscribe to newsletters Please […]
Part espionage theory, part surreal comedy, Fay Grim feels like a low-budget The Da Vinci Code made by David O. Russell. The film’s actual director, Hal Hartley, throws one comic curveball after another, but never loses sight of his spy film narrative. What holds this all together is Posey, who has the right amount of glamour, comedy and strangeness to make Fay Grim always interesting to watch, even if you scratch your head sometimes at some of the plot developments.
