3 underrated (HBO) Max movies you should watch this weekend (January 17-19)

Are you in the mood to be scared? January may seem like an odd time to watch a horror movie, but for the last few years, the genre has thrived in the first month of the year with such recent hits as M3GAN and Night Swim. 2025 brings us Wolf Man, a modern retelling of the classic werewolf tale, and all signs point to another winter horror hit.

But those movie fans who want something more mellow this weekend aren’t out of luck. Streaming has plenty of options, with Max being one of the best out there. In addition to such current popular movies like Juror #2 and Furiosa, the streamer has the following three movies that, for one reason or another, have been overlooked and underrated.

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+.

Showing Up (2023)

When we first meet Lizzy (Venom: The Last Dance‘s Michelle Williams), her life is a bit of a mess. A sculptor who works part-time at a local art school, she’s preparing for an upcoming art show. Well, she’s supposed to be preparing, but life always gets in the way. Her water heater is broken, and her landlord, Jo (The Whale’s Hong Chau), won’t fix it. It doesn’t help that Jo is also showing her art at the same show Lizzy needs to get ready for. To make matters worse, her father has surrounded herself with a bunch of untrustworthy hippies and her brother is showing early signs of mental illness.

In anyone else’s hands, Showing Up could be a comedy or a drama, but Kelly Reichardt, director of such modern classics as Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and First Cow, manages to make it a bit of both. “Slice of life” is a phrase commonly used to describe the director’s films, and while accurate, it fails to capture the strange beauty each one of her films has. Showing Up doesn’t have a lot going on, but in its depiction of the day-to-day joys and disappointments of everyday life, it captures something elusive and essential.

Showing Up is streaming on Max.

Pathology (2008)

They can’t all be winners, but movies like Pathology are the reason why “guilty pleasure” was invented as an excuse to enjoy less-than-stellar movies. In this medical thriller, Milo Ventimiglia, fresh off his multi-year sentence in Stars Hollow on Gilmore Girls, is Dr. Teddy Grey, a recent Harvard School of Medicine graduate who joins a sort of Skull and Bones-type secret organization for medical interns with a taste for committing the perfect murder. Teddy thinks these perfect murders are theoretical until he discovers, nope, they are real deaths.

Led by Jake Gallo (Michael Weston), the group sets its sights on Juliette, who happens to be Gallo’s unfaithful fiancée. As Teddy struggles to keep his horror concealed so he can expose the group and stop Jake, he may be putting himself, and his fiancée, Gwen (Alyssa Milano), in danger. What’s a hunky, somewhat dim-witted doctor-to-be to do?

Pathology is silly and stupid, but it’s oddly watchable in an are-they-really-doing-this? kind of way. To his credit, Ventimiglia plays this straight, which only highlights all the absurdity around him. The ending is ridiculous, but also perfect, with karma as a medicine best served with a cold, sharp scalpel.

Pathology is streaming on Max.

Being Mary Tyler Moore (2023)

I never watched The Dick Van Dyke Show or The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but I knew how beloved “our Mary” was to her fans. But she was always that bright, distant TV icon with the million-dollar smile, and the woman behind that image was always an enigma to me.

Being Mary Tyler Moore changed that, and for the better. The 2023 documentary by James Aldophus chronicles the entire life of the actress, from her childhood in New York City to her early work as a TV actress in such programs as 77 Sunset Strip and, later, The Dick Van Dyke Show. But it’s when she branched out on her own, forming her own production company with then-husband Grant Tinker, that Moore emerged as an icon, making The Mary Tyler Moore Show one of the defining programs of the ’70s and a key moment in the women’s movement during that time.

There’s more to her life than just that show, and the documentary is particularly fascinating when it focuses on after her marriage to Tinker ends and she navigates life as a single, older woman working in both Hollywood and the New York theater industry. Being Mary Tyler Moore is an in-depth look at someone you think you knew, but didn’t; it also will make you want to watch Ordinary People again, so make sure you have tissues ready to soak up those tears.

Being Mary Tyler Moore is streaming on Max.