3 Underrated HBO Max Movies I Can’t Wait to Watch This Weekend (October 17-19)

The fall season is in full swing, and HBO Max has tons of movies to celebrate the glory of autumn.

Watch With Us has recently highlighted several horror movies in the past few weeks, but that’s not the only genre on the streamer.

The underrated rom-coms 2 Days in New York and Broken English are great love stories few know about, while the box-office flop Pan has plenty of visual treats for you to feast your eyes on this weekend.

‘2 Days in New York’ (2012)

Marion (Julie Delpy) loves her new boyfriend, Mingus (Chris Rock), but their relationship is soon tested by the unexpected arrival of Marion’s extended family, who don’t exactly like Mingus. Over the next 48 hours, the couple walks around the city to get away from them, but are left questioning each other about their views on love, sex, race and pretty much every big topic you can think of. Marion begins to wonder just how well she really knows Mingues, while he questions if her love for him is as deep as he wants it to be.

2 Days in New York is unabashedly chatty, often frustrating and a bit meandering, much like the lead couple it chronicles. But like Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, which Delpy also starred in, it allows us to spend some time with two complicated characters while also seeing one of the world’s most beautiful cities. New York City itself is a third character in this film, and there’s no beating watching two lovers bicker while walking in Central Park.

2 Days in New York is streaming on HBO Max.

‘Broken English’ (2007)

Nora Wilder (Parker Posey) is good at her job. As the head of guest relations at a fancy Manhattan hotel, she makes strangers feel at home even when they’re thousands of miles away from where they live. Her love life, on the other hand, is another matter. Single and increasingly desperate, she is pessimistic about the prospect of making any kind of satisfactory love connection at this stage of her life.

Then, she meets the handsome Julien (Melvil Poupaud), and her whole outlook changes. An eccentric Frenchman, Julien, opens Nora’s eyes to the possibilities of romance. But is Julien the real deal, or just another in a long line of romantic disappointments? And even if he is her soulmate, will their cultural differences prove to be too difficult to overcome?

Broken English is a rom-com that’s more dramatic than funny, and that’s what makes it so special. There’s black humor in watching Nora go on one disastrous blind date after another, but for the most part, it takes a serious look at a woman’s romantic outlook as she approaches the big 4-0. Best known for playing larger-than-life characters, Posey’s Nora is grounded and realistic – there are no exaggerated accents and quotable lines here. Instead, Broken English contains Posey’s best performance to date – a little funny, a little sad and deeply, touchingly vulnerable.

Broken English is streaming on HBO Max.

‘Pan’ (2015)

Every decade, Hollywood tries to make a big-budget movie about Peter Pan, and they always flop. Even Spielberg couldn’t conjure his usual magic with the flawed Hook, so it’s even more baffling that Warner Bros. gave British director Joe Wright $150 million for his steampunk take on J.M. Barrie’s classic story. The result is a curiosity – while it doesn’t all quite work, it’s the most adventurous Peter Pan adaptation to date.

A prequel, Pan is set before the boy who wouldn’t grow up encountered the Darling family with his pal Tinkerbell. In this movie, Peter’s origin story is told, including how he arrived at Neverland and his conflict with his first enemy, the vain pirate Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman). When Blackbeard kidnaps him, Peter teams up with a fellow prisoner, James Hook (Garrett Hedlund), to escape and find Peter’s missing mother. But Blackbeard wants Peter dead, and he’ll destroy most of Neverland to see his enemy defeated.

Pan is a weird amalgamation of fantasy and action, with the odd musical number thrown in here and there. (Expect to hear Jackman sing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” aboard a pirate ship!) The movie’s flaws and strengths are the same: it has lots of CGI action scenes, a wildly inconsistent tone and an outlandish, over-the-top performance by Jackman. Still, you can’t claim it’s not ambitious, and it’s always watchable, if not always successful. The bar for a successful Peter Pan adaptation is pretty low, but Pan manages to pass it.

Pan is streaming on HBO Max.