3 underrated (HBO) Max movies you should watch this weekend (December 13-15)

The countdown to Christmas is speeding up, and you might just be over the holiday. I know I am. How many times can one watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation or drink eggnog? The holiday season is getting to be a bit much.

If you need an escape from all the caroling and good cheer, then you’ve come to the right place. The following list contains absolutely no X-mas-themed fun whatsoever. Instead, these movies have dead mermaids, World War II espionage, awful Philadelphia weather, a nude Batman lying on some jagged rocks, and Bruce Willis in a rain slicker. That sounds like a good weekend’s worth of entertainment to me.

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+.

Unbreakable (2000)

There’s no shortage of superhero movies in 2024, and most of them aren’t that very good. (Hello, Madame Web, I’m looking at you.)  But one of the very best was made over 20 years ago, and it isn’t adapted from any comic book. Instead, it sprang from M. Night Shyamalan’s fertile mind, and inadvertently started a franchise of its own that continued with Split and Glass.

In Philadelphia, security guard and family man David Dunn (Bruce Willis) survives a trainwreck that leaves everyone else dead. How the heck did he survive? It turns out that David is gifted with the power of invulnerability, something that attracts the leather-clad Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson). With Elijah’s help, David begins to explore the nature of his powers. But why is Elijah so interested in David’s superhuman abilities? And how can David reconcile his family life with his newfound power?

Unbreakable is streaming on Max.

The Lighthouse (2019)

This Christmas, director David Eggers is giving the gift of nightmares with Nosferatu, an updated take on the classic Dracula story. But Eggers is no stranger to frightening his audience, and he did it most effectively with 2019’s The Lighthouse, an intense black-and-white horror film that stars only two actors, Robert Pattinson (The Batman 2) as Ephraim Winslow and Willem Dafoe (American Psycho) as Thomas Wake — and a whole lot of seagulls.

Ephraim and Thomas are stationed at the titular lighthouse in 1890s New England. It’s a harsh and unforgiving place, but the men aren’t that much better. Thomas orders Ephraim to do menial tasks around the lighthouse while Ephraim experiences strange visions, kills a one-eyed gull, and maybe finds the rotting corpse of a mermaid. What’s going on here? As a storm sweeps in, the men grow increasingly at odds with one another as both begin to become unnerved by a place that might just be haunted.

The Lighthouse is streaming on Max.

Shining Through (1992)

There are plenty of great World War II movies out there like The Zone of Interest, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, and so many more. And then there’s Shining Through, which is not great by any means, but tells an interesting story despite two disastrous miscastings. The very out-of-place Melanie Griffith and Michael Douglas, two actors who are very much of their time, portray the lead lovers/secret agents Linda Voss and Ed Leland, who must retrieve Germany’s plans for the V-1 flying bomb, a devastating weapon of war that could decide the victor of WWII.

The best way to do that is for Linda to go undercover as a nanny to high-ranking Nazi general, Franze-Otto Dietrich (a pre-Taken Liam Neeson, who speaks German with a thick Irish accent). Linda must keep her true identity a secret from Dietrich long enough to find plans for the flying bomb and escape unharmed. But doing that is a lot harder, and more dangerous, than anyone had planned.

With Griffith’s baby-squeak voice and Douglas’ early ’90 sensibilities, Shining Through sometimes threatens to turn into an unintentional comedy. But the story, which comes from Susan Isaacs’s novel, is strong enough to endure that, and the movie is professionally directed and produced. That’s faint praise, but hey, the bar is very low here, and Shining Through should satisfy moviegoers who love war stories that take place off the battlefield.

Shining Through is streaming on Max.