3 underrated (HBO) Max movies you should watch this weekend (November 8-10)

It’s the second week of November, which is still too late for scary movies (sorry, Heretic) and too soon for holiday movies. Sure, you could stream the latest season of The Diplomat, but what if you’re carving a solid movie that lasts around two hours?

Fortunately, Max has plenty of them, with thousands of titles from every genre imaginable. We’ve selected a great drama from 2024, a dark satire from the 1990s, and a recent movie that takes place on a famous boat. And no, it’s not Titanic.

We also have guides to the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+.

The Player (1992)

There’s plenty of movies about movies, but The Player ranks among the best of them. Released in 1992, Robert Altman’s acidic satire about the nasty business of show was an instant sensation, earning the director an Academy Award nomination and lead star Tim Robbins fame for his pitch-perfect portrayal of morally bankrupt studio executive Griffin Mill.

Griffin has an unusual problem: someone is sending him threatening postcards. Griffin thinks it’s a disgruntled screenwriter whose pitch he rejected, and he confronts the man one dark night in Pasadena. After Griffin accidentally kills him and covers up the crime, he must deal with evading police, plus the disturbing reality that the murdered man wasn’t the person who was sending those threatening messages, while juggling day-to-day activities like hearing a pitch for The Graduate 2.

Fine Line

The Player sounds like a thriller, but it’s more of a comedy. Altman, as always, has a keen eye for how people talk to and over each other, and he gleefully exposes the rot that’s behind the town’s shiny surface. The movie’s over 30 years old, but you could see it today and think it was made only yesterday.

The Player is streaming on Max.

Janet Planet (2024)

2024’s been a quiet year for indie movies compared to 2023, but that doesn’t mean there are a few hidden gems here and there that worth discovering. One of the best is Janet Planet, a fantastic character study from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker and starring Mare of Easttown‘s Julianne Nicholson as the title protagonist.

The lead character, Janet, isn’t actually a planet; instead, she’s a harried single mother to 11-year-old Lacy, who can be quite a handful. As Janet tries to rekindle her love life, she must also struggle with her daughter’s constant need for attention and willingness to sabotage her potential romances with several men.

A24

Set in western Massachusetts, Janet Planet is a slice-of-life drama that feels lived-in and honest. The movie doesn’t have much a plot, but rather a loose string of scenes that add up to a sympathetic portrait of a close relationship between a mother wanting to do right by her child and a daughter not yet willing to let go of her childhood.

Janet Planet is streaming on Max.

Let Them All Talk (2020)

COVID ruined the plans for a lot of movies. Marvel’s Eternals, No Time to Die, and others had to keep pushing their release dates as the pandemic kept almost everyone indoors. One movie that was not pushed back was Let Them All Talk, which debuted on Max as a streaming exclusive. In fact, there’s a strong argument to be made that the Steven Soderbergh movie starring Meryl Streep. Dianne Wiest, Candice Bergen, and Lucas Hedges actually benefits from the pandemic as it had a captive audience who was hungry for any new content.

Let Them All Talk takes place largely on a cruise ship, the Queen Mary 2, and focuses on Alice Hughes (Streep), a famous author who hasn’t written a book in a while and is a bit prickly about it. She’s traveling to England to receive a prestigious literary award, and invites two old friends she hasn’t seen in years — Bergen’s bitter Roberta and Wiest’s bubbly Susan — and her nephew (Hedges) along for the ride. As usual with plots like these, old tensions soon surface, several hidden truths are revealed, and Alice has to confront questionable decisions she made in the past to face her uncertain future.

Let Them All Talk is streaming on Max.