Yes, Sinners and One Battle After Another are both on HBO Max now and if you somehow haven’t seen them yet, you really, really should. They were two of the best movies from 2025 and now that it’s awards season, you’ll be hearing about both of them over and over again, and nothing’s worse than being out of the loop.
That said, if you’ve watched them both and are looking for some deeper cuts on HBO Max, here are three really excellent movies that are well worth your time, especially if you dig Stephen King, the Coen brothers or, um, dinosaurs.
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Misery
As far as Stephen King adaptations go, Misery is low-key one of the best. While his high-concept supernatural horror stories like It, Carrie and Pet Sematary seem to get more attention, Misery packs just as much suspense and it does it without any supernatural elements. It just has two really solid, intriguing characters played by two true masters of the craft.
Misery tells the story of a famous romance novelist named Paul Sheldon, played by James Caan, who gets into a car accident during a blizzard outside the home of Annie Wilkes, a nurse who happens to be his number one fan. After the accident, Sheldon awakens in a bed in Wilkes’ home with broken legs and she promises to care for him until the roads are clear and the phone lines are reconnected. Over time, more and more of Wilkes’ strange and obsessive behavior emerges, making it clear that Sheldon is in real danger.
The film was directed by Rob Reiner and given his recent, tragic death, many people are revisiting his films with particular focus on his comedies like This is Spinal Tap and When Harry Met Sally. And while Reiner will always be associated with laughs, Misery is meticulously plotted out, making for a perfect suspense film (and has its own cheeky streak too). Caan is great as a frustrated, arrogant writer who first tries to placate Wilkes as a somewhat strange fan, but then he grows increasingly terrified of her. Kathy Bates, in one of her earliest film roles, is really the best part for how believable she is as both a lonely woman and a truly threatening force. It’s no wonder that she won an Oscar for playing Wilkes — which still stands as the only Stephen King adaptation to win an Academy Award.
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65
Being a lifelong dinosaur nerd, I’m pretty easy to please when it comes to movies featuring these creatures. If you’re going to put dinosaurs in your movie, I’m going to be there with bells on, especially if you want to do something a little different with dinosaurs, unlike the Jurassic World franchise, which seems intent on contriving the exact same island-based set of circumstances over and over again.
65 takes place, as you might have imagined, 65 million years ago, right when the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs is about to hit earth. In fact, the asteroid’s imminent impact makes for a pretty damn effective ticking clock for the movie. The story focuses on a spaceship pilot named Mills who is from a planet called Somaris. He’s transporting a bunch of people who are in cryosleep when he runs into an asteroid field. He crashlands on Earth and all the passengers die aside from one young girl who he must get to the escape shuttle before the asteroid hits. Along the way he tangles with a variety of dinosaurs as well as other volatile bits of nature from that time like tar pits, quicksand and hot springs.
A large part of the reason why 65 works so well is that it’s just 90 minutes long, making it a very tight action adventure story that never slows down for too long. The story is straightforward, which with so many alien elements, is an asset. It’s also pretty cool that, in addition to using dinosaurs that everyone knows and loves like Tyrannosaurus and Velocriaptor, it also features more obscure creatures like Oviraptor and Nothosaurus.
Now, there are some anachronisms in the film, as Nothosaurus were from the Triassic period, not the Cretaceous, and several of the dinosaurs featured should have had feathers but don’t. But if you’re looking for a fun movie and can overlook the scientific flaws, 65 is an enjoyable ride.
1
Blood Simple
Blood Simple is the first feature-length film by the Coen brothers and to recommend it, I’ll recount the first time I saw it.
By the time I saw this 1984 crime thriller, I’d already seen the Coen brothers’ biggest hits like Fargo, The Big Lebowski and Raising Arizona, as well as a couple deeper cuts like Barton Fink, Miller’s Crossing and, my favorite, O Brother Where Art Thou? (this was before No Country for Old Men). With all of that foreknowledge, it was really interesting to see Blood Simple as sort of the prototypical Coen brothers film as it employed many of the devices that would become their signature. For example, the brownish hue that shades many of their work is here, as is the bold camera work and snappily-written, fast-talking characters. None of them are fully formed yet, but with the help of their DP Barry Sonnenfeld (who’d go on to direct The Addams Family and Men in Black), the Coen-isms are all there and it’s intriguing to see how they would develop.
But even if you don’t care about any of that, Blood Simple is just a damn good crime thriller about a bartender (Dan Hedaya) who hires a private eye (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill his wife (Frances McDormand) and her lover (John Getz). Things spiral out of control, however, and there’s some backstabbing and unexpected twists. M. Emmet Walsh’s character, an unscrupulous private eye named Loren Visser, is especially magnetic. And while the brother filmmakers were still finding their voice at the time, it was all very well written and tightly paced, making it perfect for the Coen aficionado and philistine alike.
