The 50 Best Movies on Max Right Now

When HBO Max debuted in May 2020, subscribers rightfully expected (and got) the formidable catalog of prestige television associated with the HBO brand. But its movie library drew from a much deeper well. Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, is a huge conglomerate, and its premiere streaming service comprises decades of titles from Warner Bros., Turner Classic Movies, Studio Ghibli and more. Viewed in that light, its recent rebranding as Max seems fitting.

That means a lot of large-scale fantasy series and selections from the DC extended universe. Max is also an education in Golden Age Hollywood classics and in independent and foreign auteurs like Federico Fellini, Satyajit Ray and John Cassavetes. The list below is an effort to recommend a diverse range of movies — old and new, foreign and domestic, all-ages and adults-only — that cross genres and cultures while appealing to casual and serious movie-watchers alike. (Note: Streaming services sometimes remove titles or change starting dates without notice.)

Here are our lists of the best movies and TV shows on Netflix, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video and the best of everything on Hulu and Disney+.

‘The Iron Claw’ (2023)

Though the title of Sean Durkin’s biopic about Von Erich family of wrestlers refers to a signature finishing move the patriarch (Holt McCallany) passed along to his sons (played here by Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White, among others), it could just as easily describe his domineering toxicity or the cold hand of fate. The cascading tragedies that faced the real Von Erichs as they rose to prominence in the Reagan-era ’80s are so awful that Durkin dials back on them a little while still capturing the scene and the tender brotherly love that transcend all that loss. Manohla Dargis found “pleasure and meaning in the sons’ roughhousing and camaraderie, as well as beauty, heat and melancholy in their heartbreakingly fleeting physical perfection.”

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‘Moonage Daydream’ (2022)

After fashioning home movie footage and other visually striking odd-and-ends into the superb documentary “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck,” the director Brett Morgen once again rejects the cookie-cutter storytelling of most music biopics for “Moonage Daydream,” a sumptuous impression of David Bowie’s career. Without the benefit of talking heads to offer biographical details, Morgen instead draws on archival footage to convey Bowie’s unique power as a chameleonic glam-rock icon and conceptual artist. It’s more experiential than informational, and all the better for it. As A.O. Scott put it, Bowie “is not so much the subject of the film as its animating spirit.”