The best movies to watch this weekend are buried on HBO Max

While this doesn’t strike me every night, there are at least a few times a month when, after my child is asleep and I have enough energy where I think about I could do with a few more hours, all I want to do is watch a good black and white movie. Maybe it’s the film’s generally slower pace or maybe it’s the black-and-white look itself, which offers a stark contrast to the bright colors that illuminate my eyes during the hours of a day spent on my phone and laptop, but there’s something about monochrome photography that soothes me. And when I feel that black-and-white itch, there’s only one streaming service I rely on to scratch it and that’s HBO Max.

With its access to a library held under the Turner Classic Movies banner, HBO Max offers all kinds of black and white movies. There are hilarious farces from the 1930s and 1940s, as well as satisfying noir mysteries and horror stories that filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro still emulate. There’s also a decent selection of older foreign films — if not quite large by my standards — some of which don’t even feature Godzilla.

Here, I tried to choose three black-and-white films that are very different from each other, one of which was even made in the last ten years, just in case films from the first half of the 20th century felt too old to understand.

Rashomon

Rashomon has one of the most unusual legacies in film history. along with Ikiru, Seven Samuraiand several other films, Rashomon considered one of director Akira Kurosawa’s best works. His ability to tell epic-scale stories woven with complex human drama makes him one of the most important figures in the history of cinema — Japanese or otherwise. Rashomon has also appeared on almost every major “greatest films of all time” list, but it is perhaps best known for creating the popular storytelling trope most used in sitcoms.

You know those sitcom episodes where everyone tells their own version of something that happened and each telling is different because of the character’s distorted perspective? It is usually called a “Rashomon Episode” and is modeled after the storytelling popularized by Kurosawa’s 1950 film.. In the film, a samurai, his wife, and a bandit meet in the forest which ends with the samurai’s death. Each of these characters, plus a witness, then tells their version of events to the judge off-screen. (If you’re wondering how the dead samurai tells his version of events, it’s done through a creepy, cackling medium that takes the trope of the film’s unreliable narrator to its most extreme.)

When Rashomon is a historical film, no need to watch it purely out of obligation because it is also very entertaining. While much of the acting is considered broad by modern standards, it’s still an interesting ride as each storyteller has his or her own motives for hiding the truth. The Bandit (Toshiro Mifune) is cocky; the widow (Machiko Kyō), raped by bandits, feels ashamed; and the samurai (Masayuki Mori), even among the mediums, is arrogant and domineering over his wife. Even a seemingly impartial witness (Takashi Shimura) turns out to have potential reasons to distort the truth. Best of all, we never find out the “true” story because the audience decides, which is one of the reasons why this film has been talked about for more than three-quarters of a century.

To Be or Not to Be

If you’re familiar with comedian Jack Benny, you probably know him for playing himself (or rather, a fictional version of himself) in Jack Benny Programsitcom/variety show that dominated radio and television for over 30 years and influenced everything from The Muppet Show to Seinfeld. Although Benny reached the top in both mediums, film success eluded him for the most part, something that has become a running joke. Jack Benny Program. However, Benny starred in one very good film, namely the 1942 film To Be or Not to Be.

To Be or Not to Be directed by Ernst Lubitsch, whose most famous work in his decades-long career was the 1943 film Heaven Can Wait and the 1940s Shop Around the Corner. To Be or Not to Bealthough an English language film, it is set in Poland in 1939 during the Nazi invasion. It centers around a Warsaw theater company led by the arrogant and egotistical Joseph Tura (Benny) and his unfaithful wife and fading star Maria Tura (Carole Lombard). During the occupation, Turas and the rest of the theater troupe end up in a prison where they have to infiltrate the Nazis to protect the families of Polish airmen in England.

At that time, many people criticized Lubitsch for underestimating the war that was still going on in Europe. However, in the years since, institutions such as the British Film Institute and the American Film Institute have praised the film as a hilarious and satisfying farce that makes Nazis the butt of the joke. More than 80 years later, many of these jokes are still quite effective because they undermine Adolf Hitler as a leader so much that he felt so insecure that he said “Heil myself” and felt the need to bribe German children with toy trucks to sniff out parents who were critical of the Third Reich. Benny’s slow comedic timing also remains hilarious, as does an elaborate gag in which the theater company has to go undercover to trick the Nazi invaders. However, with so much comedy going on, the film still manages to find uncomfortable moments to convey the seriousness of the situation, especially for its Jewish characters.

Lighthouse

in 2019 Lighthouse is a great example of what can happen when you let great artists cook. In this particular case, those artists are director Robert Eggers and actors Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson.

Taking place in the 1890s, Lighthouse tells the story of a young, new lighthouse keeper (Pattinson) who studies under a veteran lighthouse keeper (Dafoe) for four weeks on a remote island off the coast of New England. With its extraordinary success The Witch and his latest hit is NosferatuEggers is best known as a horror director and Lighthouse certainly has elements of psychological horror in the way it explores the story of hallucinations caused by cabin fever. But the film is also very, very funny. As film critic Tim Grierson explained for Mel magazine at the time of its release, “Lighthouse is a great comedy about having a bad roommate” because most of the film is about two men who drive each other crazy in strange and often perverse ways.

Dafoe plays a superstitious, story-loving old sea dog who also happens to be a very demanding boss. Meanwhile, Pattinson stars as a frustrated man strained under the pressure of a demanding job and the isolation of being on the island. Between the two of them, there is a lot of drinking, laughing, screaming, and masturbating, and one of the men has sex with a mermaid.

It’s a journey.