This month’s departures from HBO Max have a color in common: red. It’s the color of Hellboy and the color of Mars – and it’s also the color of that famous scene in the horror classic Carrie.
My three catch-em-while-you-can recommendations for HBO Max this month have something else in common too: stunning central performances. Ron Perlman is a wisecracking delight as a hellishly powerful superhero, adding a very welcome dose of grumpiness to a genre that was starting to feel somewhat stale. Matt Damon is utterly believable and completely compelling as a scientist stranded millions of miles from home. And Sissy Spacek in Carrie is truly exceptional, delivering a performance that’s heartbreakingly fragile and truly terrifying.
These are very different movies, but they’re all exceptional. If you’ve seen them already they’re well worth revisiting. And if you haven’t, you’re in for a movie masterclass on one of the best streaming services.
Carrie
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Two Carries are leaving HBO soon: the 1976 original and the 2013 remake. The older film is vastly superior to the newer one – the remake scored just 51% with the critics on Rotten Tomatoes and has variously been called “remarkably redundant”, “terrible pointless junk” and “one of the worst remakes ever made”. But the original film based on Stephen King’s horror classic is tremendous, with an astonishing central performance by Sissy Spacek as the titular teen who starts to suspect she has supernatural powers. It’s currently sitting with a whopping 94% rating from the critics.
Carrie “is a terrifying lyrical thriller,” legendary New Yorker critic Pauline Kael wrote. “The director, Brian De Palma, has mastered a teasing style – a perverse mixture of comedy and horror and tension.” Looking back from the 2020s, Total Film wrote: “Brian De Palma transcends the pulpy horror feel by emphasizing the awakening-sexuality metaphor, and using some glorious trickery,” while The Fright File called it “One of cinema’s ultimate operatic teenage melodramas. I have seen “Carrie” more times than I can count, and yet it never loses its uncommon heartbreak and blood-curdling dramatic power.”
The Martian
![The Martian | Official Trailer [HD] | 20th Century FOX - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/ej3ioOneTy8/maxresdefault.jpg)
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Matt Damon spent a lot of time in spacesuits in the 2010s: there was (mild spoiler alert) Bad Space Matt in Interstellar, and Good Space Matt in this impressive solo performance. Damon is Mark Watney, left behind on Mars after a fierce storm leads his fellow explorers to think he’s dead and leave the red planet without him. But he’s not dead, and he’d really like to get home.
The 91% critic rating is well deserved. Empire Magazine gave the film four stars: “Instantly joining E. T. and Bruce Dern’s Freeman Lowell (Silent Running) in the pantheon of cinema’s greatest space gardeners, Damon’s Watney is the actor at his most engaging, by turns flip and desperate… The Martian mixes smarts, laughs, weird character bits and tension on a huge canvas. The result is (Ridley) Scott’s most purely enjoyable film for ages.”
Hellboy
![Hellboy (2004) - Official® Trailer [HD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/kA9vtXbbhVs/maxresdefault.jpg)
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Like Carrie, there’s more than one Hellboy movie and the original is vastly better than the remake: the 2019 reboot of Hellboy got a frankly embarrassing 17% critic rating. That’s partly because it didn’t have Guillermo Del Toro in the director’s chair or Ron Perlman in the Hellboy prosthetics. The film is “a unique romp,” The New Yorker said, “with an exciting yet vulnerable superhero at the center who just happens to be the spawn of Satan.”
NPR raved about it too. “Anyone can send an immense, computer-generated vegetable monster rampaging at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, but it takes a special kind of imagination to do it in a way that’s thrilling, emotionally complex, and rapturously beautiful all at once.” Time Out agreed. “Del Toro, in love with his source but never overawed by it, keeps things moving; Perlman ties it together with some of the driest witticisms this side of Indiana Jones.”
