Have you defied gravity yet? If not, you’re one of the few who haven’t. Wicked is a genuine phenomenon right now, and one of the leading contenders for next year’s Oscars. But I haven’t taken a trip to Oz yet simply because there’s too much good stuff on streaming right now.
That’s especially true for Max, which has great films from the present to the distant past. (Yes, they even have 1939’s The Wizard of Oz.) If you have a craving for movies that don’t contain evil witches, pink-colored princesses, or flying monkeys, well, this list is for you. These movies may have Nazis, porn stars, and real-life artists, but they are all united by their ability to entertain and even enlighten.
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+.
MaXXXine (2024)
Final parts in trilogies are always hard to pull off if your name isn’t Peter Jackson, and MaXXXine, Ti West’s concluding chapter in his X triptych, is a messy affair that doesn’t quite match the quality of its previous two entries, X and Pearl. But it’s still a movie worth seeing for two reasons: its uncanny evocation of a seedy 1980s Los Angeles and Mia Goth’s feral, all-in performance as the title character, who must dodge a serial killer while also navigating the perils of a pornography industry that uses and abuses the female talent it depends on.
It’s 1985, and Maxine Minx has all but forgotten the traumatic events that occurred six years ago. But the past has a way of catching up with the adult movie starlet, and her friends are paying the price with their lives. Has Pearl, the murderous old woman who offed her pals and co-workers in a Texas farmhouse in X, come back from the dead? Or is someone punishing Maxine for simply surviving and trying to establish herself as a “real” actress in non-hardcore movies? Either way, it looks like Maxine will once again have to get her hands dirty, and bloody, to get the happy ending she’s been looking for all along.
MaXXXine is streaming on Max.
Conspiracy (2001)
On paper, the plot of Conspiracy sounds like a bit of a bore. On January 20, 1942, 15 men gather in a room to eat, drink, and talk about the distribution of land and wealth in western Europe. Yawn, right? But once you realize these men are top Nazi military leaders, and what they are discussing is part of Hitler’s odious Final Solution plan to exterminate Jewish people across the continent, Conspiracy becomes something more chilling and transfixing; you can’t look away even though you want to.
The movie is based on the only surviving transcript of the Wannsee Conference, where the titular conspiracy takes place. Kenneth Branagh leads a terrific cast consisting of Stanley Tucci (who won a Golden Globe for his work), Colin Firth, and a young Tom Hiddleston, all of whom give faces and voices to what we commonly refer to as “evil.”
The “banality of evil,” a term Hannah Arendt coined in the 1960s, is concerned with the administration of mass genocide and who gets the spoils of such extermination. Conspiracy deals with this head-on and, like the great 2023 movie The Zone of Interest, takes a monumental subject like the Holocaust and gives it a new, albeit disturbing life.
Conspiracy is streaming on Max.
Basquiat (1996)
The New York City artist Jean-Michel Basquiat died at 27 in 1988, but his influence continues to be felt in 2024. His paintings have influenced everything from fashion to Apple Watch bands, and his brief life was filled with dramatic highs and lows. It’s only natural Hollywood would make a movie about him, and in 1996, another painter, Julian Schnabel, dramatized his life in a well-received indie picture that isn’t as well-known as it should be.
The Batman 2‘s Jeffrey Wright stars as Basquiat, who is first seen living in a cardboard box in Tompkins Square Park. Soon, he establishes himself in the Manhattan art world, where he meets and collaborates with Andy Warhol (a terrific David Bowie). Basquiat’s ascension, however, is complicated by his tumultuous romance with Gina (Claire Forlani) and his growing addiction to heroin, which would eventually consume him.
Basquiat avoids the traditional pitfalls of biopics (it doesn’t lazily list off a series of Wikipedia facts about his life like most movies do in the genre) and faithfully translates the painter’s chaotic genius that made his art so impactful then and now.
Basquiat is streaming on Max.