The 50 Best Movies on Max, Updated for July 2023

DIRECTOR: James Mangold
STARS: Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin
RATING: PG-13

The cultural legacy of Walk the Line now lives in the shadows of Walk Hard, the spoof film that so expertly skewers the cliches of musician biopics from the aughts. But something can be ripe for praise as well as parody. Thanks to two committed and compassionate performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as Johnny Cash and June Carter, Walk the Line proves there’s nothing wrong with a cliché so long as it’s executed with conviction.

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DIRECTOR: Rawson Marshall Thurber
STARS: Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Christine Taylor
RATING: PG-13

Among the films of the so-called “Frat Pack” in their prime, Dodgeball is definitely one that has not maintained quite the same cultural profile. It makes sense: this is definitely a broader and more juvenile comedy. And yet … the movie remains hilarious! Ben Stiller’s brash bravado as pompous gym owner White Goodman still cracks me up; it’s stealthily one of his best comedic creations.

Watch Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story on Max

DIRECTOR: Jared Hess
STARS: Jon Heder, Efren Ramirez, Jon Gries
RATING: PG

No film went from cult Sundance hit to mainstream merchandising machine quite like Napoleon Dynamite. (Is there any more emblematic mid-aughts uniform quite like a “Vote for Pedro” shirt?) Even if the taglines and jokes might have worn out their welcome a decade ago, Jared Hess’ film itself still delights as an offbeat delight. His unexpected comic rhythms must be witnessed to be believed.

Watch Napoleon Dynamite on Max

DIRECTOR: Emma Seligman
STARS: Rachel Sennott, Molly Gordon, Polly Draper
RATING: Not Rated

If emerging from the pandemic has gotten you eager to re-engage with strangers in a crowded space again, let Shiva Baby disavow you of any idealistic notions about these events. Emma Seligman’s tight 77-minute feature debut toggles effortlessly between cringe comedy and horror as a twentysomething slacker navigates a tricky afternoon with friends, family, and ex-lovers. It’s both highly specific to an urban Jewish milieu and yet instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever felt suffocated rather than supported by their closest community.

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DIRECTOR: Judd Apatow
STARS: Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann
RATING: R

Though unassuming in its presentation, Knocked Up may have inadvertently become the ur-text for Millennials. Seth Rogen’s slacker stoner set the tone for a new age of twentysomethings stuck in perpetual adolescence as they delayed major life milestones. So when a one-night stand with Katherine Heigl’s striving Alison turns into an unexpected pregnancy, the film becomes a hilarious — and surprisingly heartwarming — look at how an entire generation would take a circuitous route to hit the big adult achievements.

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DIRECTOR: Martin Campbell
STARS: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen
RATING: PG-13

Casino Royale introduced the world to a “Bond who bleeds,” and 007 has never been the same since. Daniel Craig’s first outing as the British superspy remains the high watermark for his tenure in the role (at least for now). It’s both a perfect channeling of the James Bond’s debonair roots and a necessary modernization of the character, packed with gripping globe-trotting action and riveting suspense in equal measure.

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DIRECTOR: Cameron Crowe
STARS: Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon
RATING: PG-13

Yes, it’s the movie that gave us the phrase “manic pixie dream girl,” but there’s more to Elizabethtown than the cultural punchline it’s become. Filmmaker Cameron Crowe makes unabashedly sincere movies that wear their hearts on their sleeve. If you’re willing to deal with the messiness of emotions like grief and failure faced by Orlando Bloom’s protagonist, you can spot the glimmering diamond hiding in the rough here.

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DIRECTOR: Martin Scorsese
STARS: Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Cathy Moriarty
RATING: R

To some extent, we have Robert De Niro to blame for the last four years of awards-bait acting; his incredible physical transformation to play both a lean and bloated iteration of boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull solidified a notion of the best acting as the most visible acting. But any bitterness for yet another “he’s unrecognizable!” biopic fades away within minutes of watching the film itself. As LaMotta, a prizefighter who sabotages his own life and success thanks to ceaseless envy and doubt, he’s most effective at conveying self-destruction by exposing the character’s brooding inner world.

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DIRECTOR: Hirokazu Kore-eda
STARS: Lily Franky, Ando Sakura, Matsuoka Mayu
RATING: R

If you’ve never experienced the gracefulness and gentility of a Hirokazu Kore-eda film, there’s no better place to start than his Palme d’Or-winning film Shoplifters. This tale of found family on Japan’s outskirts, bound by their penchant for petty theft and tenderness for one another, is a humanist triumph. It’s a film capable of warming your heart, breaking it, and then helping you put the pieces back together.

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DIRECTOR: Costa-Gavras
STARS: Yves Montand, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Irene Papas
RATING: PG

Political thrillers rarely manage to capture the raw rage of the people quite like Costa-Gavras does in Z. This fictionalization of the fallout from a Greek politician’s assassination is boiling over with a scaldingly potent fury. Expect an experience full of suspense and void of any rosy-eyed notions of false comfort.

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DIRECTOR: Craig Johnson
STARS: Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Luke Wilson
RATING: R

The end of life is just the beginning in Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins, a dramedy featuring SNL stars Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader as suicidal siblings. They both fail in their attempts on the same day, bringing the estranged brother and sister back into each other’s orbit for the first time in a decade. Their misadventures in trying to keep it all together are heartbreaking, heartwarming and – of course – hilarious. It is scientifically impossible not to break into a big grin when the stars lip sync to “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.”

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DIRECTORS: Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Feris
STARS: Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Alan Arkin
RATING: R

Little Miss Sunshine takes a lot of flack for inspiring over a decade of “little indies that could” which feel reverse engineered to recreate its miraculous path from Sundance to the Oscars. But don’t hold the imitators against it. This hilarious, heartwarming tale of a dysfunctional family trying to keep it together on a road trip long enough to get their youngest member to a dance competition strikes a resonant emotional chord.

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DIRECTOR: Ellen Hovde, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Muffie Meyer
STARS: Edith ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale, Edith Bouvier Beale
RATING: PG

And you thought your family was weird? Grey Gardens reigns as the champion of cinematic kookiness as a group of documentarians plunges us into the world of two distant cousins of Jackie O. Truth is truly stranger than fiction when it comes to dysfunction between mother and daughter Little and Big Edie, recluses on the slippery slope of isolation to outright entropy.

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DIRECTOR: James L. Brooks
STARS: Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger, Jack Nicholson
RATING: PG

Break out the tissues — James L. Brooks’ Best Picture-winning mother/daughter tale Terms of Endearment still packs an emotional wallop all these years later. Though countless directors try to channel what Brooks perfected, there’s nothing like watching the master of the “dramedy” at work. He has a keen understanding of how comedy and drama go hand-in-hand rather than viewing them as entirely separate modes. That perceptiveness makes his films feel like real life, not just cinematic constructions.

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DIRECTOR: Cory Finley
STARS: Hugh Jackman, Allison Janney, Ray Romano
RATING: TV-MA

Move over, All the President’s Men, there’s a new shoe leather investigative journalism movie in town. The less you know about Bad Education before you go in, the better. Prepare yourself to be shocked by the corruption that a simple high school journalism story can reveal — and the hilarious extent to which people will go to avoid accountability for what she uncovers.

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DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman
STARS: Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Bengt Ekerot
RATING: Not Rated

A Swedish movie best known for a pale-faced Grim Reaper playing chess against a soul he hopes to take might not sound like the most pleasant viewing experience. Yet Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal does not get nearly enough credit for having a real funny bone. The humor is quite dark, of course, given that it’s a film about God and death. But just because something plumbs the depths of some of the most complex ontological questions does not mean it’s an entirely heady, enjoyable experience!

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DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg
STARS: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken
RATING: PG-13

Leonardo DiCaprio’s career has been laser-focused on shedding the “Tiger Beat” teen idol trappings that followed him after Titanic, so much so that he almost never allows himself to have fun on-screen in the name of being taken seriously. But every once in a while, he finds an excuse to cut loose like he does in Catch Me If You Can. Like a mid-century forebearer to today’s audacious scammers, DiCaprio’s Frank Abagnale Jr. cuts quite a trail of fraud and deception as he cons his way into three different professions with the FBI hot on his trail. He’s forging checks, breaking hearts, and proving irresistibly watchable.

Watch Catch Me If You Can on Max

DIRECTOR: Alfonso Cuarón
STARS: Daniel Radcliffe, Gary Oldman, David Thewlis, Emma Thompson
RATING: PG

You can make an argument for just about any Harry Potter movie as the best, but it’s pretty hard to dispute that Prisoner of Azkaban is the most important of them all. Director Alfonso Cuarón’s infusion of dark ambiance and devilish humor helped the series graduate from kiddie literature into the stuff of serious adult drama. Rather than relegate it forever to the dustbin of fantasy, he grounded it in the realities of teenage anxieties and growing pangs. It’s got a wicked sense of style and fun that set the tone for all that was to come from the franchise on-screen.

Watch Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on Max

DIRECTOR: Hiyao Miyazaki
STARS: Rumi Hiiragi, Miyu Irino, Mari Natsuki
RATING: PG

Pixar isn’t the only animation house capable of inspiring pathos with their imagination. HBO Max bought the streaming rights for the movies of Japan’s Studio Ghibli, which had all been previously unavailable online. If you don’t know where to start taking advantage of this opportunity, try Spirited Away. The story of a young girl, Chirono, who must rescue her parents from a world of spirits recalls the childhood classics that convinced us we could do anything.

Watch Spirited Away on Max

DIRECTOR: D.A. Pennebaker
STARS: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding
RATING: Not Rated

D.A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop might be the closest thing to a time machine you can get from home. Press play to be transported back to the Summer of Love and experience the music festival that brought together Simon and Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and more. The real highlight, though, is Otis Redding’s sublime rendering of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” He’s shot in silhouette against the glare of the blinding spotlight, and the effect is nothing short of transcendent.

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DIRECTOR: Joel Zwick
STARS: Nia Vardalos, John Corbett, Michael Constantine
RATING: PG

There may never be another word-of-mouth cultural sensation like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, a film that rose from a modest limited release to a box office sensation with months of staying power. It’s the perfect movie to stop and watch anytime it plays on TV because you’re never more than a minute away from a really solid joke or gag. But it’s also great to watch straight-through on streaming to connect with the heart and soul of Nia Vardalos’ script. This is an unforgettable story about how we reconcile the people and culture who made us with the person we want to become when those two things appear to be in conflict.

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DIRECTOR: Dan Gilroy
STARS: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed
RATING: R

Jake Gyllenhaal has never been better – or scarier – than he was in Nightcrawler. This terrifying thriller set in the dark underbelly of Los Angeles’ local news world exposes the seedy, sociopathic tendencies of American entrepreneurship. Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom is all manufactured charm and calculated chaos as he manipulates his way to the top of his field. He’s a particularly chilling monster because he’s cloaked in the self-help platitudes and capitalistic mantras we’ve been told are completely benign.

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DIRECTOR: Alexander Payne
STARS: Matthew Broderick, Reese Witherspoon, Chris Klein
RATING: R

The best movie about the 2016 election was actually made in 1999. When smug Mr. McAllister (Matthew Broderick) just can’t stomach the ascendancy of overqualified Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) to win student body president, he throws a wrench in the democratic system by recruiting an airheaded jock (Klein) to thwart her candidacy. This vicious, delicious satire of American politics and campaigning has not lost one iota of bite or humor over two decades later.

Watch Election on Max

DIRECTOR: Yasujiro Ozu
STARS: Chishû Ryû, Chieko Higashiyama, Sô Yamamura
RATING: Not Rated

“There is only one place for the camera,” said Martin Scorsese. “That’s the right place.” It’s astonishing to watch Yasuiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story and realize the camera is in the right place for the entirety of the film, perfectly calibrating its physical and emotional distance from the characters. This wistful story of two grandparents visiting their family will both warm and break your heart.

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DIRECTOR: Michael Curtiz
STARS: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid
RATING: PG

Whether it’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship or you’re asking Sam to play it again, Casablanca always satisfies. This is the Hollywood studio apparatus working at its finest. From the iconic quotes to the passionate performances, this is pure excellence.

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DIRECTOR: Sean Baker
STARS: Mya Taylor, Kitana Kiki Rodriguez
RATING: R

Your “actually, [BLANK] is a Christmas movie” collection is incomplete without Sean Baker’s Tangerine. This riotous comedy about two trans sex workers making it through a Christmas Eve in Los Angeles originally gained notoriety because it was among the first features shot entirely on an iPhone. But it endures as a testament to how chosen families can see us through challenging times. What is that if not the holiday spirit?!

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DIRECTORS: Trey Parker, Matt Stone
STARS: Trey Parker, Matt Stone
RATING: R

The humor of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone often gets characterized by the lowest-common-denominator juvenility onto which their youngest fans latch. But the duo truly are master satirists, with their fingers on the pulse in ways that contemporary audiences cannot always sense. Their 2004 film Team America: World Police stands as a remarkable sendup of Bush-era America, made from within the thick of the Iraq War, no less. And, hey, how many takedowns of jingoistic machismo also feature depictions of puppet sex? Get you some directors who can do both!

Watch Team America: World Police on Max

DIRECTOR: Jonah Hill
STARS: Sunny Suljic, Lucas Hedges, Katherine Waterston
RATING: R

We can’t go back to our younger years, but Jonah Hill’s mid90s gives us the next best thing by bottling up the excitement of coming-of-age in a movie. Though set in the specific milieu of 1990s skateboarding culture, the joys of watching Sunny Suljic’s thirteen-year-old Stevie find his people prove raucously resonant across a wide range of experiences. Hill captures something soaring about the magic of youthful discovery here, even as he documents the growing pains that come along with the fits and starts that accompany the winding journey to maturity.

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DIRECTOR: Spike Lee
STARS: David Byrne
RATING: TV-14

I am not ashamed to admit that I got up and danced around my room when I watched Spike Lee’s stunningly filmed version of the Broadway show David Byrne’s American Utopia. The Talking Heads music would be great all on its own, sure, but Byrne weaves into a hopeful story that does not make choosing optimism seem naive. Try to stay in your seat, I dare you.

Watch David Byrne's American Utopia on Max

DIRECTOR: François Truffaut
STARS: Charles Aznavour, Marie Dubois, Nicole Berger
RATING: Not Rated

If you’re just trying to hit the movies you’d watch an intro film class, the Truffaut film to watch is The 400 Blows. But if you want to dig a little deeper into one of the titans of the French New Wave, the move has to be Shoot the Piano Player, his irreverent mashup of the comedy and gangster flick. This hilarious, inventive movie ought to dispel any mistaken notions that watching old foreign films is some somber chore.

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DIRECTOR: Martin McDonagh
STARS: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Barry Keoghan, Kerry Condon
RATING: R

Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin begins from a simple yet loaded proposition: what if your best friend decided, seemingly arbitrarily, that he was done talking to you? This is the friendship breakup movie to rule them all as McDonagh burrows in on the decision’s impact on the aggrieved party, Colin Farrell’s aggrieved Pádraic, as well as the ripple effects it has throughout the entire community. The story unfolds with dry humor and raw heartbreak to magnificent, moving effect.

Watch The Banshees of Inisherin on Max

DIRECTOR: Billy Wilder
STARS: Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon
RATING: Not Rated

Don’t let the black & white fool you into thinking Some Like It Hot is mired in mothballs. The movie named by the American Film Institute as the country’s greatest comedy still retains all its laughter-generating capacity more than 60 years after its release. From its wild concept of two musicians disguising themselves as women in an all-girl group to escape Chicago gangster to its emphatic final line, Billy Wilder’s classic is still a laugh riot from start to finish.

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DIRECTOR: Peter Jackson
STARS: Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen
RATING: PG-13

“Epic” only scratches the surface of Peter Jackson’s work bringing The Lord of the Rings to life on screen. Cinema at this scale and scope never ceases to amaze. The Fellowship of the Ring, the series’ kickoff, achieves a remarkable balance between easing us into the world of Middle Earth, introducing the characters and providing a taste of the heavily grounded fantasy action that would follow.

Watch The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on Max

DIRECTOR: David O. Russell
STARS: Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Jason Schwartzman
RATING: R

If a phrase like “existential comedy” sounds enticing rather than oxymoronic, then I Heart Huckabees is a movie tailor made for your tastes. David O. Russell’s film gets philosophical as Jason Schwartzman’s adrift environmentalist attempts to diagnose the malaise in his life by consulting dueling sets of existential detectives. Husband-and-wife team Bernard and Vivian (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) believe they can find the meaning behind seemingly unrelated events, while the nihilistic Caterine (Isabelle Huppert) lures Albert with a guiding ethos that everything means nothing. Their tussle over the design of the universe tickles the funny-bone as it stimulates the brain.

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DIRECTOR: Gus Van Sant
STARS: Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, James Franco
RATING: R

Biopics about inspiring political leaders are a dime a dozen these days, but one that continues to shine amongst a wealth of mediocrity is Gus Van Sant’s Milk. The work of America’s first openly gay official Harvey Milk, resurrected on screen to Oscar-winning effect by Sean Penn, is singular and transformative, sure. But the film never loses sight of the fact that Milk’s success was not achieved alone in a vacuum; he achieved what he did because he engaged and inspired a community. If Harvey Milk meets the qualifications for a “great man”-style biopic, it’s only because he worked alongside a coterie of activists devoted to using the levers of government for good.

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DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan
STARS: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart
RATING: PG-13

There are two distinct periods in cinematic adaptations of comic books. There’s the period before The Dark Knight, when people didn’t know it was possible to scale such an imposing height, and the period after The Dark Knight, when people didn’t know it would be so hard to reach such a height again. Anchored in Heath Ledger’s harrowing incarnation of terroristic mayhem as the Joker, The Dark Knight is the definitive piece of post-9/11 cinema. In the Trojan horse or superhero IP, Christopher Nolan stages a society-wide tussle over the limitations of lawfulness on the grandest canvas he could find. We’re still feeling the reverberations today.

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DIRECTOR: Quentin Tarantino
STARS: John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis
RATING: R

More than a quarter-century of cinematic imitators, college dorm room posters, and graphic tees have not knocked the shine off the classic. Tarantino’s generation-defining postmodern pastiche Pulp Fiction remains as vital and exciting as ever. The snappy dialogue still crackles; the eclectic soundtrack still slaps; the ingenious plotting still exhilarates.

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DIRECTOR: Stanley Kubrick
STARS: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood
RATING: G

Over 50 years later, the wonder and awe of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 remains intact. The movie that made all your favorite directors want to make movies is a beguiling mystery box, indescribable as it conjures the ineffable. The visuals have not aged a bit, nor has the film’s understanding of the twinned promise and peril in the vastness of outer space.

Watch 2001: A Space Odyssey on Max

DIRECTORS: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker
STARS: Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen
RATING: PG

You think just because you don’t know the disaster movies of the ‘70s that Airplane spoofs, you won’t enjoy this uproarious comedy? Surely you must be joking. (I know, don’t call you Shirley.) The blueprint for the modern spoof movie still delivers on belly laughs four decades with a potent mixture of clever dialogue and slapstick humor. Audiences need not know the reference points to get a kick out of this ludicrous movie.

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DIRECTOR: David Lynch
STARS: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart
RATING: Not Rated

Want to get into the surrealistic stylings of David Lynch but find Twin Peaks and Mulholland Dr. too impenetrable? Try his feature debut Eraserhead, a perfect mixture of artful and accessible. You don’t need to understand every image for it’s overwhelming terror about being a new parent to permeate your soul. Lynch’s images might be abstract, but their impact is chillingly real.

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DIRECTORS: Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen
STARS: Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds
RATING: G

No movie about the movies captures the magic of the medium quite like Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain. This Technicolor musical captures all of Hollywood’s anxieties as it transitioned from silent films to talkies right when the ascendancy of television proved an existential threat to movies. One glimpse of Kelly’s exuberant dancing is all it takes to have your faith renewed in the enduring viability of cinema.

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DIRECTOR: Peter Bodganovich
STARS: Ryan O’Neal, Tatum O’Neal, Madeline Kahn
RATING: PG

Fans of schemers and swindlers on-screen owe it to themselves to watch Paper Moon. This comedy set in Depression-era America embeds us in the grift of two-bit hustler Moze Pray and pint-sized Addie Loggins, a young girl who may or may not be his daughter. The charms of real-life father and child Ryan and Tatum O’Neal are formidable here, and their sweetness provides a powerful countercurrent to the sourness of their scamming characters.

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DIRECTOR: Jason Reitman
STARS: Elliott Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner
RATING: PG-13

There’s a version of Juno that lives on in the cultural imagination that’s reduced to indie quirk at its most cringe and snappy, stylized dialogue that might as well be a different language. That’s maybe not wrong, depending on how much you enjoy those things, but Juno is also a disarmingly emotional story about love and family through the eyes of an unplanned teenage pregnancy. Director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody wear their hearts out on their sleeves here, and with each revisit, I come to appreciate just how special the earnestness and sweetness of the movie are among that class of ‘00s indies.

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DIRECTOR: Bennett Miller
STARS: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman
RATING: PG-13

Sure, Moneyball is a baseball movie, but it’s really more of a business movie that achieves the improbable task of making statistical analysis sexy and exciting. Director Bennett Miller has a lot to do with turning this once-troubled production into one of the best movies about the sport, but much of the thematic heft comes from screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. The film feels of a part with the writer’s other movies about innovators, The Social Network and Steve Jobs, stories about disrupting industries rife with stagnation and thus revolutionizing the world.

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DIRECTOR: Denis Villeneuve
STARS: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac
RATING: PG-13

Dessert POWER! It feels like a shame to watch Denis Villeneuve’s fantasy epic Dune in any environment other than a giant cinema, but the grandeur of his vision is sure to translate on a screen of any size. This is classical hero’s journey monomyth as Timothée Chalamet’s young Paul Atreides comes to realize the full weight of his messianic potential. This is the rare work of cinema that truly aspires to inspire shock, awe, and wonder – and Villeneuve’s engrossing universe commands that respect.

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DIRECTOR: James Cameron
STARS: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn
RATING: R

No number of ill-advised spinoffs or sequels (what are we on, the sixth now?) can diminish the spectacular achievement that is the first Terminator. Before the chronology got too scrambled and ret-conned, there was simply Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor caught in between two men from the future. Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) wants to protect Sarah’s unconceived son to rescue the fate of humanity, while a sentient cyborg (Arnold Schwarzenegger) will stop at nothing to hunt her down. This is the blockbuster at its best, combining high-octane action thrills with ingenious storytelling.

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DIRECTOR: David Lynch
STARS: Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern
RATING: R

“After seeing a David Lynch film,” tweeted musician Flea after a screening of Blue Velvet we both attended in 2021, “you walk out of the theater into a David Lynch world.” There’s something so potent about Lunch’s unique brand of surrealism, as if he’s rendering the observable world we know and recognize through a funhouse mirror without resorting to the carnivalesque. Blue Velvet unearths the rot hiding beneath the tranquil façades of suburbia, yet it does so with such gently creeping ease that it jolts with real force when the violence begins.

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DIRECTORS: Lana and Lily Wachowski
STARS: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss
RATING: R

What the Wachowskis achieved with The Matrix is a feat rarely replicated in Hollywood – they changed the medium from both a visual and an intellectual standpoint. Where would we be without the heightened reality of “bullet time,” their surreal effect that slows down fast-moving objects to make their whirring motion visible? Similarly, where would we be without the film introducing ideas about simulated reality into the mainstream via the easily digestible (and just as easily misunderstood) concept of the red pill? It was a revolution and remains a revelation.

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DIRECTOR: Wong Kar-Wai
STARS: Tony Chiu-Wai Leung, Maggie Cheung
RATING: PG

Wong Kar-Wai’s tale of doomed would-be lovers in 1960s Hong Kong may well be a perfect movie. The sumptuous In the Mood for Love drips with longing as two neighbors who realize their spouses are cheating on them struggle to sublimate their own feelings for one another. With each subsequent needle drop of the plucky violin tune “Yumeji’s Theme,” Wong dials up the passion and the devastation.

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DIRECTOR: Charlie Chaplin
STARS: Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard
RATING: G

Cinema may never produce a filmmaker who understands the connection between form and content like Charlie Chaplin. His final official outing as his iconic Little Tramp character, Modern Times, is the very definition of a classic. This silent comedy of Depression-era woes was timely for its release, but it endures because it’s a timeless satire of industrial society. This winning movie warms the heart as it places fire in the belly to strive for a world where all humans and their work have dignity.

Watch Modern Times on Max