HBO Max

Fuze Is HBO Max’s Number One Movie. It Never Really Opened in America.

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A construction crew in Paddington digs up a bomb the Luftwaffe dropped on London eighty-odd years ago. The device is live. The city empties the blocks around it, and while a bomb disposal officer lies on his stomach over the thing, a crew several streets away walks into a bank the evacuation has emptied for … Read more

Practical Magic Is Back, and Its Sequel Has an Impossible Job

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  Somewhere around the midnight-margaritas scene, Practical Magic stops pretending to be about its plot. Two sisters and their aunts turn a kitchen into a small hurricane of blender noise and Stevie Nicks, and for a few minutes the 1998 movie forgets it has a curse to break and a body in the garden. That … Read more

Mother Mary — the Flop That Became an HBO Max Hit, and the Real Movie Under the Pretension

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  Mother Mary made about three million dollars in theaters on a twenty million dollar budget, which in studio math is a quiet disaster. Critics were not kind either. Variety called it the most pretentious pop star movie since Vox Lux, and it is not hard to see why. Lowery’s film wraps a small story … Read more

Lanterns — HBO’s Green Lantern Show Is at War With Itself

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  Lanterns opens the way a prestige crime drama opens: on the aftermath of a shooting in Rushville, a small farm town in Nebraska, the kind of place where nothing is supposed to happen. Two investigators walk the scene. Then one of them, Hal Jordan, a Green Lantern, says the killer was probably not human. … Read more

Normal — Bob Odenkirk’s Sheriff Was Written Before Nobody Made Him a Star

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  A worn-out sheriff takes a quiet posting in a small Minnesota town called Normal, hoping to put some distance between himself and his own wreckage. The place is prosperous, polite, and far too calm. Then a bank robbery goes wrong, his own deputies open fire on civilians, and Sheriff Ulysses, played by Bob Odenkirk, … Read more

The Strangers: Chapter 2 Feels Unfinished, and the Reason Is How It Was Made

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  Somewhere in the last stretch of The Strangers: Chapter 2, you start to notice the movie is not going to end. Not really. It just stops, mid-chase, with the door left open for another film. If that feels like a pause instead of an ending, there is a concrete reason, and it has nothing … Read more

Materialists — The Rom-Com Celine Song Built From Her Real Job as a Matchmaker

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  Materialists was sold as the summer’s glossy love triangle: Dakota Johnson caught between Pedro Pascal’s money and Chris Evans’s charm, all of it wrapped in A24 sheen. That is the movie people bought a ticket for. It is not quite the movie Celine Song made. Before she wrote Past Lives, Song spent months working … Read more

We Live in Time: Why Florence Pugh’s Romance Is Told Out of Order

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  You spend a good part of We Live in Time unsure of when you are. One scene has Almut and Tobias meeting for the first time. The next has them raising a young daughter. Another drops back to a hospital room that resets everything you have watched so far. The film never flags these … Read more

The Drama on HBO Max — Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, and the Cringe Comedy Hiding Inside a Wedding Movie

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  For most of its first hour, The Drama behaves. Zendaya and Robert Pattinson play Emma Harwood and Charlie Thompson, a couple a week away from their wedding, and the film hands you the movie the trailer sold: two of the most photographed actors alive, a gorgeous engagement, the low comic hum of a big … Read more