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HBO Max just rebranded its name and logo, but what hasn’t changed is all the great movies that are streaming right now on the platform.
But beyond hits like Sinners and A Minecraft Movie, the streamer also has a treasure trove of underrated films that are worth your time.
This weekend, Watch With Us recommends streaming the horror prequel — and unexpected trending new topic — Annabelle, the fascinating biopic Grey Gardens with Drew Barrymore and Monte Carlo, an escapist comedy starring Selena Gomez in her Justin Bieber era.
‘Annabelle’ (2014)
You might have heard about the strange case of Dan Rivera, a paranormal investigator who died last week in a hotel room. He was travelling with the Annabelle doll, a supposedly cursed object that was first featured in the horror hit The Conjuring. Now’s as good a time as any to revisit the first film focusing on the doll, 2014’s Annabelle, which is better than you think for a horror film about a possessed killer doll.
In the late 1960s, med student John (Ward Hurton) gifts his pregnant wife Mia (Annabelle Wallis, no relation) an antique doll. That’s when weird stuff begins to happen, like their next-door neighbors getting killed by a bunch of cultists and the doll seemingly moving around the house by itself. Mia does some digging and finds out the doll is a vessel for a demonic spirit who wants to possess her. With the help of a priest and friend, Evelyn (Alfre Woodard), Mia must stop Annabelle from inhabiting her and endangering her newborn child.
Annabelle is the right kind of silly — if you can buy that a cute, inanimate doll is an unholy threat, then you’ll enjoy what the movie has to offer. The movie is more violent and less effective than The Conjuring movies, but it works as a horror flick that delivers all the blood and scares you’d expect.
Annabelle is streaming on HBO Max.
‘Grey Gardens’ (2009)
Chances are you know who Little Edie is. Born Edith Bouvier Beale, the Kennedy family outcast was the star of the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens and an icon for people who loved her eccentric style and outlandish life. Little Edie’s (Drew Barrymore) life was dramatized in the massively entertaining 2009 HBO film Grey Gardens, which focused on her relationship with her mother, Big Edie (Jessica Lange), during and shortly after the filming of the documentary.
Mother and daughter are recluses who have withdrawn from their high-profile life as socialites who are connected to the Kennedy family through their aunt and first cousin, Jackie (Jeanne Tripplehorn). Little Edie loves her mother, but she grows to resent her controlling influence that prevents her from fully enjoying her life. As their lives are documented and seen by a wide audience, her relationship with Big Edie becomes more strained. Can Little Edie forgive her mother’s past mistakes to enjoy the newfound celebrity status the popular documentary brings her?
Barrymore and Lange were nominated and won many awards, including an Emmy and a Golden Globe, for their work in Grey Gardens — and they deserved them. It would’ve been easy to make both Edies caricatures to be laughed at, but Barrymore and Lange find genuine pathos and vulnerability in their damaged socialites. The film shows why they both became counterculture icons — they lived life their own way and didn’t give a hoot what anyone else thought of them.
Grey Gardens is streaming on HBO Max.
‘Monte Carlo’ (2011)
Need to escape from reality this weekend? Then Monte Carlo is just the ticket to leave your brain at the door and travel to the titular city all through the magic of movies.
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When recent high-school graduate Grace (Selena Gomez) is mistaken for British heiress Cordelia (also Gomez), she decides to make the most of it and pose as her to get out of a bad Paris field trip. Along with her friend Emma (Katie Cassidy) and stepsister Meg (Leighton Meester), she travels to Monte Carlo as Cordelia with her entourage, who gain access to luxurious hotel suites and cute guys. But how long can Grace keep up her deception before the real Cordelia finds out?
Monte Carlo is fluff, but it’s well-done fluff that gives you exactly what you want: pretty people living it up in an exotic place you probably will never visit. At the height of her Wizards of Waverly Place fame, Gomez shows all the charm that made her a star on that Disney Channel show, and Cassidy is also good as Grace’s boy-crazy friend.
English (US) ·