Max’s strategy of releasing new movies from Warner Bros. simultaneously in theaters on its streaming platform for a limited time means new original films often get pulled from its library months after release. But Dune and King Richard recently returned to the lineup. Most of the movies Max adds to its robust library each month are mostly older films. Still, there are a handful of new movies available at Max, both brand-new Max Originals and other recent films it just added to its streaming collection.
Below are six new movies on Max:
1. Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia
Max Release Date: July 20, 2023
Director: Salima Koroma
Stars: Mia Isaac, Jessica Frances Dukes, Garret Dillahunt, Andrew Liner
Genre: Documentary
Rating: TV-MA
Produced by CNN Films and HBO Max—two brands who I’m sure can relate—this documentary covers HQ Trivia, the company that was briefly on top of the world before completely disappearing. HQ Trivia was created by Vine founders Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll in 2017. A daily trivia show delivered via app became all the rage an opportunity for players to win actual money. The show peaked on March 28, 2018, with more than 2 million concurrent players tuning in for an episode. But it was plagued by fund-raising and payout problems and by December, 2018, Kroll had died from a drug overdose. Director Salima Koroma enlists HQ host, the Quizdaddy Scott Rogowsky, to tell the meteoric rise-and-fall story of the game show that briefly brought us all together. —Josh Jackson
2. Gray Matter
Max Release Date: July 13, 2023
Director: Meko Winbush
Stars: Mia Isaac, Jessica Frances Dukes, Garret Dillahunt, Andrew Liner
Genre: Sci-fi
Rating: TV-MA
Eight years after the latest iteration of Project Greenlight ended and 22 years after the series first premiered, Project Greenlight returned with Issa Rae (Insecure) as the series’ new executive producer. After picking ten finalists from thousands of entries, Rae, Kumail Nanjiani, and Gina Prince-Bythewood help to mentor this year’s winner as she directs the new film Gray Matter. That’s right, with intent, for the first time in Project Greenlight history, the winner is a woman. The science-fiction film about a mom and daughter with superhuman abilities stars Jessica Frances Dukes, Mia Isaac, and Garret Dillahunt, and was released on Max on July 13, allowing you to watch both the making of the film and the actual film all at once. —Amy Amatangelo
3. All That Breathes
Max Release Date: February 3, 2023
Director: Shaunak Sen
Genre: Documentary
Rating: TV-14
Paste Review Score: 9.4
All That Breathes, a documentary by Shaunak Sen about two brothers—Muhammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad—in New Delhi who say they have saved more than 20,000 kites (an Indian bird of prey) over the last two decades, is enchanting. There have been other stories about the amateur medic duo, along with their assistant Salik Rehman, but none as lyrical as this documentary. The brothers, former bodybuilders who grew up in the Chawri Bazaar area of Old Delhi, started treating injured black kites in 1997 out of necessity. These scavenger birds were often prey to another kind of kite—the paper ones commonly flown as a lazy weekend pastime or to mark festive occasions. The string, called manja, used in the paper kites is usually coated with glass particles, in order to cut and capture another person’s kite. However, these razor-sharp strings can be fatal to birds, slashing their wings and sending them careening from the skies, especially during the later summer and fall months when kite-flying is at its peak. On finding one such injured kite, the brothers took it to a bird hospital run by people of the Jain faith. Ahimsa, the practice of non-violence and compassion towards all life, forms the core of Jainism. And so, the hospital told Saud and Shehzad that they could not treat the meat-eating bird. As a result, the brothers ended up treating injured birds that they continued to find, with some help from other local vets and based on their own interest and knowledge. They carry out their bird rehabilitation operation, called Wildlife Rescue, out of the basement of their family’s liquid soap dispenser manufacturing office. The documentary uses the brothers and their relationship with the carrion birds as metaphors for the state of the environmental and political climate of India’s capital, forming a subtle subtext to the main account. The brothers’ relentless passion overrides an awkward tone that carries through All That Breathes. As much as this amateur trio is rehabilitating the birds, they are—in a sense—being rescued themselves. —Aparita Bhandari
4. The Menu
Max Release Date: January 3, 2023 (Originally released November 18, 2022)
Director: Mark Mylod
Stars: Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicholas Hoult, Ralph Fiennes, Hong Chau, Janet McTeer, Judith Light, John Leguizamo
Genre: Comedy
Rating: R
Paste Review Score: 9.5
Early in The Menu, director Mark Mylod’s beautiful, intricate dark comedy set amid the trappings of exclusive restaurant culture, a character explains that, for him, art doesn’t matter. Films aren’t important. Neither are books, paintings or music. Food, he tells us, is the purest and best art form, because a great chef’s medium is “the raw materials of life and death.” Like just about every piece of dialogue in the film, written with fiendish joy by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, it’s both funny in the moment and unexpectedly profound in the larger context of The Menu’s dark game. Yes, the enigmatic master chef at the heart of film is playing with the raw materials of life and death on his plates—seafood, fungi, roast chicken, flash-frozen microgreens and plenty of artful foam—but the menu he’s developed, and the film that depicts it, is also dealing with the raw materials of human human life and death. The list of ingredients is long, the techniques complex, but everything is whipped like egg whites into something so light and airy you barely notice the bitterness until it smacks you in the teeth. The restaurant at the heart of this heady recipe is Hawthorne, a fabulously expensive establishment run by the demanding, precise Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes, sharp as carbon steel) from a private island where all the ingredients are local and a seat at the table will set you back more than a grand. Hawthorne serves just 12 diners per service, and on the night we journey to the island, they include everyone from a couple of regulars (Judith Light, Reed Birney) to a renowned and famously hard-to-please food critic (Janet McTeer) to a fading movie star trying to build a second career as a travel show host (John Leguizamo). The film is interested in each of these personalities to varying degrees, but turns particularly sharp focus on Margo (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), a mismatched couple with very different views of what they’re about to experience. Yes, all the ingredients are treated with care, and the film’s early developments are placed with the precision of a single sprig of chives tweezed onto a plating, but the film’s dark secret is that it’s not here to be subtle. Its true strength is not in tweezers, or carefully engineered molecular gastronomy, but in the furious swipes of a cleaver coming at your head. The complexity, both tonally and visually, is there to tease out the film’s black genre heart, and it’s that heart that makes The Menu a delicious and deeply filling experience that will make you beg for a second helping.—Matthew Jackson
5. The Banshees of Inisherin
Max Release Date: December 13, 2022 (Originally released October 21, 2022)
Director: Martin McDonagh
Stars: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan
Genre: Drama
Paste Review Score: 9.8
Rating: R
Whether we wear it on our sleeves or bury it somewhere down in the darkest part of ourselves, we all carry the fear that someday someone we trust and love will simply decide to abandon us. It lives somewhere in each of us in the same vicinity as the fear that, someday, inexplicable and motive-less violence will descend on us and our loved ones—a little knot of dread waiting to unspool. But this fear is quieter, simpler and, therefore, less-often discussed in the wider cultural landscape. There are a lot of films about sudden violence, but you don’t see as many feature-length explorations of straightforward, person-to-person departures. With that in mind, it would be easy to look to Martin McDonagh’s phenomenal The Banshees of Inisherin as some kind of fable, a dark fairy tale from a faraway time and place meant to cast long, shadowy metaphors over our own lives. If you’re willing to look closely, you’ll definitely find all the material you need to make those metaphors happen in your mind, but at the film’s Fantastic Fest premiere, McDonagh himself called it “a simple break-up story,” an exploration of what might happen to two men if one simply decided to cut ties with the other. So, is it a grand, fathoms-deep exploration of the bittersweet nature of human relationships, or “a simple break-up story” that’s just about one Irishman deciding he doesn’t want to see another Irishman anymore? In the end, it’s both, and that’s what makes The Banshees of Inisherin and its blackly hilarious portrait of everyday pain one of the best films of the year. Through beautifully framed shots rich with the texture of rustic stone walls and the warped glass of old windows, McDonagh takes us back to Ireland a century ago, where civil war rages on the mainland and things progress at their usual slow pace on the island of Inisherin. It’s here, with artillery fire raging in the background, that Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) decides he’s done hanging out with his old pub pal Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell). For some on the island, it makes a certain degree of sense—the creative and contemplative Colm and the more simple-minded Pádraic always were a mismatched pair—but for Pádraic, it’s a baffling, literal overnight tectonic shift in his life. He hopes Colm’s sudden distance is part of a fight that he somehow forgot, or a poor choice of words after one too many pints, but according to Colm, it’s painfully, frighteningly simple: “I just don’t like you no more.” It all creates an atmosphere that invites us to ask a question about what we’re watching: On the grand scale of time, does it really matter if one man decides to cut ties with another? Will history record it? Will anyone care? Or, when faced with our own mundane despair in the face of the vast wider world, is being nice to your neighbor the only thing that matters? McDonagh’s characters, and McDonagh himself, might not have an answer for us, but the film’s ability to call these questions to mind is evidence of its haunting power. In its unwavering devotion to the straightforward nature of its story, The Banshees of Inisherin has found something profound and universal, something that will leave you both laughing and shaken to your core. It’s the kind of film that crawls into your soul and stays there.—Matthew Jackson
6. AmsterdamMax Release Date: December 6, 2022 (Originally released October 7, 2022)
Director: David O. Russell
Stars: Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Rami Malek, Robert De Niro, Zoe Saldaña, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Timothy Olyphant
Rating: R
Paste Review Score: 6.7
Amsterdam opens with a tagline that reads “A lot of this really happened,” a cutesy testimony meant to foreshadow that the film will at once relay a fascinating true story, while also cheekily muddying the line between fiction and reality. But the only thing that writer/director David O. Russell muddies is his own plot. Amsterdam follows an unlikely trio: A one-eyed eccentric named Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), his deadpan best friend Harold Woodsman (John David Washington) and Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie), a rollicking military nurse with an affinity for forging macabre sculptures out of bloody shrapnel. The three meet at the tail end of World War I, and instantly forge a lifelong bond. The majority of Amsterdam takes place over a decade after the War, at which time Burt is an experimental New York City plastic surgeon, Harold is an attorney and neither has heard from Valerie in years. The film kicks into gear when Burt and Harold are framed for murder by a devious stranger, and are subsequently sent on wild-goose chase to clear their names. Like Amsterdam’s opening tagline, the goose-chase is relentlessly silly, from “nonsense songs” composed of whimsical French words, to drug-related physical humor and a literal freeze-framed, “I bet you’re wondering how I ended up here” moment. But for most of its 132 minutes, eccentricity is the least of Amsterdam’s problems. More than anything, the film is flat-out confusing. Incredible performances from a stand-out cast certainly help, as does the vibrant, no-frills cinematography by the masterful Emmanuel Lubezki, and the whip-tight editing by Jay Cassidy. But when all is said and done, storytelling this glaringly flawed cannot be overlooked, and the wonderful elements of Amsterdam can only do so much to glue together this faltering house of cards. —Aurora Amidon