19 Best Mystery Releases on Max

Life and death in Caddo Lake are hard. Paris (Dylan O’Brien) lost his mom to a car accident that nearly took his life as well. While he never says it outright, his survivor’s guilt is written all over his face and in his body language. Paris is trying to make a go of reconnecting with those he’s stayed away from for years, but it’s a struggle. Former love (Diana Hopper) has the best luck with him but it is still halting and awkward. The alienation grows when he finds a necklace like his mom used to wear. To make matters worse, he discovered it in an area of the swampland where things seemingly go haywire. The world seems to go mute, wolves--not indigenous to the area--appear, and electronics cease to work. Elsewhere on Caddo Lake, Ellie (Eliza Scanlen) has her own parental problems. Her father went missing when she was very young, a tragedy that has driven a wedge between her mom (Lauren Ambrose) and her deeply empathetic stepfather, Daniel (Eric Lange). She can’t stop reminding either of them how he—and the rest of his family—aren’t her family, even as they clearly want to embrace her. The only exception to her ire is her younger sister, Anna (Caroline Falk). Unfortunately, one night, Anna goes missing, too, presumably after she snuck off to find Ellie and her friends. She may have wandered into the same bit of swamp that Paris found so otherworldly. Caddo Lake has a complex science-fiction engine driving it. However, writers-directors Logan George & Celine Held don’t seem especially interested in digging deep into it. Instead, they leave many questions about it only tangentially touched upon. The queries are left open-ended in a way that feels right for the story, not a dodge or a disappointment. Continue Reading →

It’s disappointing and fitting that director Ti West’s MaXXXine is undone by its sheer ambition. Throughout West’s licentious slasher series, his films have always featured titular heroines whose dreams were never commensurate with the limitations of their present circumstances (cue Mia Goth’s iconic “Please, I’m a star!” diatribe in 2022’s Pearl). In a similar vein, MaXXXine follows Maxine Minx (played once again by a show-stopping Goth) as she struggles to make a name for herself in Hollywood despite a less-than-savory past (for starters, she’s the sole survivor of a brutal massacre, as depicted in the first film of the series, X). Like its titular protagonist, MaXXXine has high ambitions, attempting to weave in commentary about the dignity of sex work, the glamor and exploitation of Hollywood, the soul-crushing dogmas of conservative Christianity, and the pitfalls of fame all while delivering bloody genre thrills. It’s an admirable attempt, but, unfortunately, that desire to cover so much thematic ground does a disservice to the film as a whole, ultimately rendering MaXXXine a sizzle reel of iconic 1980s set pieces in a desperate search for a more compelling story to thread them together.  Taking place in 1985 and six(xx) years after X, the film follows Maxine as she carves a successful name for herself in the pornographic film industry. Still, she’s convinced that she’s meant for greater things, hoping to make the leap into non-stag films. She gets her big break when she lands the lead role in the horror film The Puritan II, but cannot rest on the laurels of her inchoate movie career. A serial killer known as the Night Stalker has been brutally murdering young LA hopefuls, and after three of the victims have a direct connection to Maxine, she realizes that her past has caught up with her. In between her blossoming movie career, she strives to stop the Night Stalker, lest her dreams are thwarted. Continue Reading →

From the cosmic ether to the granular eye, Daina Oniunas-Pusić’s singular debut feature, Tuesday, migrates across space and scale with poignant ease. Fifteen-year-old Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) is terminally ill, which her mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) doesn’t want to accept. It’s not until Death visits them as an elder macaw (voiced by Arinzé Kene) that Tuesday and Zora can confront the terrifying mysteries of mortality and embrace an afterlife. It’s a soaring cinematic fairy tale about life and loss that touches our heartstrings with the tenderness of a feather.  It starts with the simplicity of belief. Oniunas-Pusić’s writing feels so contemporary because it wholeheartedly embraces wonder as an axiom. This is not a late 20th-century magical comedy where half the movie is spent convincing someone (usually a parent/adult) that the magic is real. There is no dramatic irony. Instead, Pusić invites us to trust and believe in the magical reality she sets before us, just as Zora must learn to trust and believe her daughter when she says it’s time to let go. The appearance of the talking parrot sets off a chain of empathy in which everyone, including Death, wants to be understood. It’s easy to understand these characters when the performers make everything so legible. Petticrew shows Tuesday’s conflicted feelings about being a youth at the end of her life. She’s being pulled away yet has found much to appreciate and enjoy. Tuesday could be a tragic figure, but Pusić and Petticrew render her more human than mortal. It would be easy for Petticrew to remain at Louis-Dreyfus' feet (as Tuesday does) for most of the film, but they instead crafts a fortitude that holds its own. Continue Reading →

The most frustrating thing about Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire isn't that it's stupid. It knows it's stupid; it's banking on that. It's not even that its luster has been eclipsed by Japan's most recent entry in the terrible lizard's decades-long rampage on the cinematic landscape, the now-Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One. It's that somehow, director Adam Wingard and the team behind the MonsterVerse have forgotten how to be the right kind of stupid, fumbling the formula that 2021's Godzilla vs. Kong captured with surprising charm. (Then again, our assessments of 2021's COVID-era output are innately suspect, considering most of us were just glad to be back at the movies at all.) But the more you settle into the latest entry in Warner Bros. and Legendary's "MonsterVerse" -- the Americanized shared universe of Japanese-sourced kaiju movies that started with 2014's Godzilla -- the more confounding this exercise becomes. The end of the previous film in the series teased a kind of detente between Japan's favorite reptile and Skull Island's favored son, the two working together to take down MechaGodzilla after a movie's worth of preening spats on cargo ships and among the skyline of Hong Kong (no relation). You'd think screenwriters Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett, and Jeremy Slater would double down on the "what now?" of it all: how would these two reluctant allies share the Earth? That might be fun. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire Review (Warner Bros./Legendary) Instead, The New Empire feels like a semi-retread of Godzilla vs. Kong -- actually, scratch that, more like a King Kong movie with a few bits of Godzilla peppered in here and there. Like so many sitcom roommates before them, the pair have drawn a chalk line halfway down the planet and decided to each keep to their own territory. Godzilla protects humanity from rogue Titans on the surface, and in between bouts, he curls up in the Roman Colosseum like a cat bed, one of the film's more charming images. Meanwhile, Kong searches for other giant apes like him down in the Hollow Earth. (Yeah, that exists now.) Continue Reading →

Michael Keaton gives a subtle & empathetic performance as a hitman in his waning days. The minute the mournful saxophone music swells in Knox Goes Away (which is minute one), you think to yourself oh boy, here we go. A car driving in the Los Angeles night, two hitmen, one cool, cultured, and precise, the other seemingly more casual and good-humored about the whole thing, meet in a diner to banter and discuss their next job; none of this fills the viewer with confidence that they’re about to see something they haven’t seen a million times before. And then the first hitman asks the diner waitress for a cup of coffee, seemingly having forgotten he already has one in front of him, and maybe something different is happening here. Continue Reading →

Jodie Foster and Kali Reis shine as a pair of detectives investigating an increasingly surreal crime. In Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt mysteries, the title character is a brilliant, eccentric detective haunted by the unsolved disappearance of one of her closest friends. Her cases are vitally recognizable and beautifully surreal. When The Infinite Blacktop, the most recent entry in the series, was released in paperback, Gran held a giveaway, including a copy of the book and some fun feelies. On one of those, a pen, the following was printed: “Open your eyes and learn to see that truth lives in the ether.” In the course of thinking about Issa López (Tigers Are Not Afraid)’s excellent True Detective: Night Country, it’s a line that’s been on my mind. It's the end of 2023. In Ennis, Alaska, the eccentric scientists of the Tsalal research station vanish just as the long polar night sets in. Ennis police chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and detective-turned-trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) know that something is not right. Though bitterly estranged, the former partners share a drive to discover what happened at Tsalal and why. Their need to get to the truth only intensifies after the scientists are discovered in a ghastly, bizarre state—a collective corpsicle, all of them nude and visibly terrified. Continue Reading →

The plot of Free Fire, in many ways, could not be more straightforward. A mix of thugs, gun runners, and revolutionaries meet up to exchange weapons in a Boston warehouse in the 1970s. Things go wrong in a hurry. Continue Reading →

Don’t Worry Darling, director Olivia Wilde’s latest film, is neither a masterpiece nor a disaster. Based on the amount of behind the scenes drama that has surrounded the entire production filming to promotion, this review will surely come as a disappointment to some. But if not for the gossip about the filming of the movie and the celebrities involved, this deeply forgettable film would probably fade from the public eye in no time at all. Continue Reading →

“You’ve seen one you seen them all," says the dastardly movie director from beyond the grave. It’s the recently murdered Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody), telling us early in the film about how stale the murder mystery genre was even by the 1950s, when See How They Run takes place. It’s also a warning to the audience that this movie will not be adding anything new, revelatory, or exciting to whodunnit cinema. Everything here has been done before, and better.  Continue Reading →

It’s been over a year since we saw Cassie Bowden (Kaley Cuoco) at the beginning of her sobriety, coming to terms with how the trauma and legacies of her childhood shaped her. As season two begins, we get the rundown on how that’s been going via her AA sharing. Now based in Los Angeles, Cassie is healthy, in a relationship with smoking hot photographer Marco (Santiago Cabrera). She's also still working as an international first-class flight attendant with an unspecified side hustle that definitely isn’t working with the CIA, wink.   Continue Reading →

The opening shot of Matt Reeves' The Batman evokes, if nothing else, the opening shot of Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation: we peer, ominously, through the binoculars of an unseen voyeur, looking at a young boy in a red ninja outfit playing with his father in a Gotham penthouse. While this isn't a flashback to young Bruce Wayne -- rather, we see Gotham's tough-on-crime Mayor Mitchell and his soon-to-be-orphaned boy -- the evocation is undeniable. By the time The Batman's three hours whiz past you, we'll have a similarly probing look into Bruce Wayne himself: what he prioritizes, what drives him, what he thinks he's doing for the city as Batman and what he realizes he should be doing. And it's that texture, that sense of interiority, that makes The Batman one of the best films of the year thus far, and one of the most fascinating cinematic adventures the character has to offer. Continue Reading →

Some of the best thrillers have to do with the home. Night House, The Invisible Man, and series like Haunting of Bly Manor and American Horror Story tap into that vein of particular terror that comes with having your safety, your shelter violated. It quite literally hits you where you live. Continue Reading →

When Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel hit shelves in 2014, it was a standout in science-fiction. HBO’s adaptation can’t help but hit differently in 2021. It’s a post-apocalyptic tale about what’s left of the world after a deadly flu ravages the populace. The parallels to current events are glaringly obvious.  Continue Reading →

While we spent a lot of time debating whether or not “elevated horror” is a real thing or just something film snobs made up so they didn’t have to be embarrassed about liking a scary movie, gore fell to the wayside. There was a period when we weren’t getting an acceptable amount of blood and guts, in favor of understated chills and psychological trauma. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but it’s left something lacking in the genre. With Nia DaCosta’s take on Candyman and the upcoming Halloween Kills, however, it looks like old-fashioned look-between-the-fingers horror is back in all its splattery glory. Add to that list James Wan’s Malignant, often very silly, but always with a self-aware wink at the audience, with a body count that will satisfy even the most jaded horror fans. Continue Reading →

Hugh Jackman chases down the ghost of Rebecca Ferguson through futuristic memory tech in Lisa Joy's ponderous, limp tech-noir pastiche. It would only be frustrating to recount exactly how many opportunities writer-director Lisa Joy (Westworld) throws away in her desperate effort to please in Warner Bros.’ latest, Reminiscence.  It’s not just that Joy fails to follow through on the noir tropes she so clearly wants to pay homage to while attempting to subvert, or a cast that features Thandiwe Newton and Hugh Jackman as jaded private gumshoes in a dystopian Miami, not to mention the near-perfect timing of this movie’s release. Noirs didn’t just come into their own in the years around WWII: some of the best examples of the genre came in the wreckage after, as people still flailing in the trauma of the Great Depression and genocide wondered what the hell was next in a new era of peace and prosperity that some found just as terrifying as what preceded it. Continue Reading →

Within the opening scene of The White Lotus, it’s revealed that someone will die at some point during the show. But the question of who that someone is and how will they die isn’t really the central plot, as the six-part miniseries is much more interested in the characters and their fascinating dynamics than the mysteries and all the events leading up to the impending death. Continue Reading →

Several movies into the Conjuring universe, we’ve mostly separated the real life grifters Ed and Lorraine Warren from the America’s Mom and Dad version of them on screen. If the movies work, it’s because stars Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga bring warmth and gravitas to them. They sell the hell out of the bullshit their characters are peddling, whereas the real-life Warrens often came off as prickly and defensive in interviews, offended that anyone would dare to question their dubious authority. Wilson and Farmiga can only do so much, however, and it’s not enough to save The Conjuring: the Devil Made Me Do It, a by-the-numbers snooze that trades in haunted house horror for a supernatural police procedural. Continue Reading →

Mare of Easttown may at times feel like it’s kicking a dead horse. It’s a grammatically perfect post-Cardinal Bernard Law, cold-case-comes-alive thriller with rich performances by its entire cast. Yet for a story about a maverick detective purporting to be about more than crime, it follows surprisingly predictable beats, leaving little room for illuminating nuance.  Continue Reading →

For the horror genre, April 15, 2011, marked a handful of notable dates. On one hand, it was the 15th anniversary of when Scream started filming, starting with the 11-minute sequence in which an onscreen Drew Barrymore, thought by the masses to be the star, was eviscerated in the name of her killers' pop culture fetish. The movie not only reintroduced the slasher film back into the mainstream, but it also brought back one of its maestros. Of course, that'd be Wes Craven. Continue Reading →