The first day of spring is here, and most people will take advantage of the warm weather and venture outside. But here at What to Watch, movies, and not outdoor activities, reign supreme.
There’s plenty to choose from with all the streamers out there. But HBO and Max always seem to have the best films — including some underrated movies you may have missed the first time around.
An intense action-thriller, a haunting coming-of-age tale, and a sad sports drama are just some of the movies streaming on Max, and are just the ticket for a quality night’s entertainment.
‘Traitor’ (2008)
Samir Horn (Don Cheadle) is an arms dealer, and he’s good at his job. He attracts the attention of Omar (Said Taghmaoui), a terrorist who plans to secretly place suicide bombers on 50 random buses in the United States over Thanksgiving. Samir agrees to help Omar, but he has a secret: he’s actually working undercover with an American intelligence agent, Carter (Jeff Daniels), and wants to bring down Omar’s criminal enterprise from the inside.
Traitor is gripping stuff, what critics refer to as an “edge-of-your-seat” thriller — and watching Samir navigate between being Omar’s right-hand man and providing Carter with enough intelligence to stop him is incredibly tense.
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Cheadle plays Samir as a cipher, since that’s the only way the character can be effective at what he does. Guy Pearce shows up as an FBI agent, but his true role is better left unrevealed. There are a lot of layers to Traitor, and part of the fun is peeling them away one by one.
Traitor is streaming on Max.
‘White Bird in a Blizzard’ (2014)
No one quite captures the dreamy loneliness of adolescence like director Gregg Araki; he’s the Gen X poet of shoegaze romance and suburban melancholy. He received acclaim for cult films like Mysterious Skin and The Doom Generation, but one of his most underrated films is White Bird in a Blizzard, a haunting mystery set in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s starring a pre-Big Little Lies Shailene Woodley.
She plays Kat Connors, a 17-year-old girl whose big concerns in life are homework, avoiding her distant mother Eve (Eva Green), and romancing her handsome next-door neighbor, Phil (Shiloh Fernandez). But when Eve suddenly disappears without a trace, it sends Kat on a yearslong quest to discover why she left and how it impacted her.
White Bird on a Blizzard is more than just an ordinary thriller. (There’s never much doubt about what happened to Eve.) It’s also a lyrical ode to youth, set to the synth-pop fantasias of Depeche Mode, the Cocteau Twins and Love and Rockets, and a disturbing rumination on self-repressed female sexuality. It doesn’t all quite work, but like Eva herself, its messy flaws make it more interesting to watch.
White Bird in a Blizzard is streaming on Max.
‘The Iron Claw’ (2023)
Zac Efron, Oscar winner? In an alternate reality, that should’ve happened, and no, we’re not talking about High School Musical 3. The former Disney star gave one of 2023’s best performances in The Iron Claw, a dramatization chronicling the rise and tragic fall of the real-life Von Erich wrestling family in early 1980s Texas.
Efron is Kevin Von Erich, the oldest living son of the clan, who tries to please his demanding father Jack (Holt McCallany) while mentoring his younger brothers Kerry (The Bear‘s Jeremy Allen White), David (Harris Dickinson), and Mike (Stanley Simons). As the years pass, Jack drives his sons to become wrestling champions, whether they like it or not, and soon one tragedy after another takes its toll on the family.
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This is the rare sports movie that will make you cry ugly tears, and a good reason why is Efron’s muscular, sensitive performance. His Kevin is a gentle giant who just wants to hang out with his bros, pump some iron in the gym, and marry the local sweetheart Pam (Lily James). Fate had other plans, unfortunately, and The Iron Claw is best when it shows Kevin nearly breaking under the strain of all that testosterone and bad luck. It says a lot that the movie had to tone down the bad vibes (it omitted another brother who also died tragically) in fear that it would seem too unbelievable for audiences to stomach.
The Iron Claw is streaming on Max.
