This month’s departure from HBO Max has a color in common: red. It’s the color of Hellboy and the color of Mars – and so is the color of to Famous Scene in Horror Classic Carrie.
My three Catch-EM-While-You-Can recommendations for HBO Max this month also have something else in common: amazing central performances. Ron Perlman is a viewing joy like a hell of a powerful superhero and adds a very welcome dose of grumpiness to a genre that began to feel somewhat out of date. Matt Damon is completely credible and completely convincing as a scientist stranded millions of miles from home. And Sissy Spacek in Carrie is really unusual and delivers a performance that is heartbreakingly fragile and truly scary.
These are very different films, but they are all unusual. If you’ve already seen them they are worth revising. And if you haven’t done that, you’re in a movie Masterclass on one of the best streaming services.
Carrie
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Thaw Carrier Leaving HBO soon: The original from 1976 and 2013 gene recording. The older movie is much better than the newer one – the remake scored only 51% with the critics of the rat Tomatoes and has been differently called “remarkably superfluous”, “terribly meaningless junk” and “one of the worst remakes ever made”. But the original movie, based on Stephen King’s Horror Classic, is huge with an astonishing central performance of Sissy Spacek as the titular teenager who begins to suspect she has supernatural powers. It is currently sitting with a huge 94% assessment from the critics.
Carrie “Is a scary lyrical thriller,” wrote the legendary New Yorker critic Pauline Kael. “The director, Brian de Palma, has mastered a teasing style – a perverse mix of comedy and horror and excitement.” Looking back from the 2020s, Total Film wrote: “Brian de Palma transcends the pulpy horror of horror by emphasizing the metaphor of awakening-sexuality, and using some glorious trickery”, while the scary file called it “one of Cinema’s ultimate Operatian Teenage-Melodramas. never its unusual heart target and blood course.
The Martian
![The Martian | Official trailer [HD] | 20th century FOX - YouTube](https://pakinomist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/1755908771_970_Did-you-miss-this-ticket-office-from-2015-Dont-let.jpg)
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Matt Damon spent a lot of time in space suits in the 2010s: There were (mild spoiler alarm) Bad Space Matt in Interstellar and Good Space Matt in this impressive solo performance. Damon is Mark Watney, left on Mars after a hard storm causes his colleagues to believe he is dead and leaves the red planet without him. But he is not dead and he really wants to come home.
The 91% criticism assessment is well deserved. Empire Magazine gave the movie Four Stars: “Immediately, one and Bruce Dern’s Freeman Lowell (Silent Running) in the Pantheon of Cinema’s greatest space gardeners, Damon’s Watney actor on his most engaging movie.
Hellboy
![Hellboy (2004) - Official® Trailer [HD] - YouTube](https://pakinomist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/1755908771_638_Did-you-miss-this-ticket-office-from-2015-Dont-let.jpg)
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Like Carrie there is more than one Hellboy Movies and the original are much better than the remake: Restart of 2019 of Hellboy Got an honestly embarrassing 17% critic assessment. It is partly because it did not have Guillermo del Toro in the instructor’s chair or Ron Perlman in the Hellboy prosthetics. The movie is “A Unique Romp,” said New Yorker, “with an exciting but vulnerable superhero in the center that just happens to be Satan’s Spawn.”
The NPR also felt about it. “Anyone can send a huge, computer -generated vegetable monster shaking at the bottom of the Brooklyn Bridge, but it takes a special kind of imagination to do it in a way that is exciting, emotionally complex and predatory beautiful at once.” Time Out agreed. “Del Toro, in love with his source, but never surpassed by it, keeps things moving; Perlman ties it along with some of the driest jokes this side of Indiana Jones.”
