Don’t look now, but Thanksgiving is just around the corner. That means you’re probably going to go to the movie theater to watch one (or more) of the following films: Wicked, Gladiator 2, and/or Moana 2.
If that’s true, that means you’ll need to save a few bucks and stay home this weekend. Fortunately, HBO and Max have tons of movies at your disposal. The following three are lesser-known, but they are all solid movies to watch when you want to stay inside and beat the cold.
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+.
Dinner with Friends (2001)
We’ve all been there: You’re eating dinner with a friend, and they start to overshare. Sometimes it’s an intimate detail like he or she doesn’t like to wash their hands after going to the bathroom (yuck!), while other times it could be an anecdote you don’t find all that amusing. Dinner with Friends, a 2001 Norman Jewison movie, takes this to the extreme. One night while preparing for an upcoming dinner with their longtime friends Beth (Toni Collette) and Tom (Greg Kinnear), bourgeois couple Gabe (Dennis Quaid) and Karen (Andie MacDowell) encounter a bombshell: Beth is divorcing Tom. Beth’s side of the story is that Tom cheated on her, and he’s a jerk.
But as the dinner progresses, Beth leaves, Tom arrives, and he tells his side of the story: Beth is intolerable to live with, their marriage has been dead for a while, and now he wants out. Beth and Tom’s dueling narratives present a challenge to Gabe and Karen: Who should they believe and what effect will it have on their marriage, which doesn’t seem so sturdy after all these revelations?
Dinner with Friends deals with serious subject matter, but it doesn’t feel like a major bummer. Jewison keeps the tone relatively light, and the performers, particularly Collette as the spiky-haired, abrasive Beth, are well cast. The dialogue is the standout, though, and it’s no wonder: the movie is based on a 1998 David Margulies play that won the Pulitzer Prize.
Dinner with Friends is streaming on Max.
Starter For 10 (2007)
In America, if you’re a smart college student who wants to show off your knowledge and make a few bucks in the process, you go on Jeopardy. In England, you go on University Challenge, a beloved national quiz show that Starter For 10′s hero, Brian Jackson (James McAvoy), desperately wants to appear on. The only roadblock? It’s a team competition, and he has to recruit three other members, train them, and lead them to victory.
This is the intriguing setup to Starter For 10, a movie that almost no one’s heard of, but which has a bevy of established and future stars in its cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Rebecca Hall, Alice Eve, Dominic Cooper, James Corden, Game of Thrones actor Charles Dance, and others. The movie follows a traditional underdog narrative, but it’s told with a certain zest that’s unmistakably British. McAvoy makes for an engaging hero, one unburdened by doomed love affairs like in Atonement or mutant apocalypses like in the Fox X-Men films. It’s cool to see him so young, and so charming.
Starter For 10 is streaming on Max.
WarGames (1983)
WarGames is a contradiction: It’s a movie that anticipates the growing dominance of artificial intelligence in international warfare and it’s also charmingly naïve and outdated. It bears all the hallmarks of being made in 1983: the retro attitudes toward women; the rah-rah spirit behind its depiction of American government operations and its antagonistic relationship with the Soviet Union; and Matthew Broderick as its lead star.
So if it’s tempting to dismiss WarGames as not worth your time, then just chill, OK? It’s actually pretty entertaining, for all the reasons I’ve already listed and so much more. Broderick stars as David Lightman, a teenage brainiac from Seattle who inadvertently hacks his way into a government computer database. He plays a wargame with the computer, but the program can’t distinguish what’s real and what’s a simulation, and soon, it’s preparing America’s missile supplies,and nuclear weaponry for World War III. The you-know-what has hit the fan, and David, along with his friend, Jennifer (Ally Sheedy, another 1983 touchstone), must find a way to outsmart the computer program before it’s too late.
WarGames is streaming on Max.
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