The departures of this month compared to HBO Max have a common color: red. It is the color of Hellboy and the color of Mars – and it is also the color of that Famous scene of horror classic Carrie.
My three TV-Pas-Time recommendations for HBO Max this month also have something else in common: superb central performance. Ron Perlman is a eccentric delight as a damn heroe, which is a very powerful dose of grumpy in a genre that was starting to feel a little outdated. Matt Damon is completely credible and completely convincing as a scientist blocked millions of kilometers from his home. And Sissy Spacek in Carrie is really exceptional, offering a performance that is heartbreaking and really terrifying.
These are very different films, but they are all exceptional. If you’ve already seen them, they are worth revisited. And if you didn’t do it, you are in a film masterclass on one of the best streaming services.
Carrie
To watch
Two Transportation Care soon HBO: the original of 1976 and the remake of 2013. The older film is much higher than that more recent – the remake has only marked 51% with the criticisms on Rotten Tomatoes and was variously called “remarkably redundant”, “terrible unnecessary” and “one of the worst remakes ever made”. But the original film based on Stephen King’s horror classic is great, with an astonishing central performance by Sissy Spacek as a holder adolescent that begins to suspect that she has supernatural powers. He is currently sitting with a huge note of 94% of criticism.
Carrie “is a terrifying lyric thriller,” wrote Pauline Kael, the legendary New York critic. “The director, Brian de Palma, has mastered a teasing style – a perverse mixture of comedy, horror and tension.” By looking back from the 2020s, Total Film wrote: “Brian de Palma transcends the feeling of luscious horror by emphasizing the metaphor of awakening-sexuality, and using a glorious hoax”, while the scary file called it “Carrie” more than I can count, and yet it never loses its heart and curd.
The Martian
![The Martian | Official trailer [HD] | 20th Century Fox - YouTube](https://pkpressclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/1755901964_383_Have-you-missed-this-blow-at-the-2015-box-office.jpg)
To watch
Matt Damon spent a lot of time in space combinations in the 2010s: there was (light spoiler alert) Bad Space Matt in Interstellar, and Good Space Matt in this impressive solo performance. Damon is Mark Watney, left on Mars after a fierce storm led his exploration colleagues to think that he died and leaving the red planet without him. But he is not dead and he would really like to go home.
The 91% criticism is well deserved. Empire Magazine gave the film four stars: “Instantly joining and Bruce Dern Freeman Lowell (running) in the pantheon of the biggest film gardeners in the cinema, Watney’s Watney is the actor of his most attractive, most desperately desperate film on a huge film.
Hell
![Hellboy (2004) - official trailer® [HD] - YouTube](https://pkpressclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/1755901964_766_Have-you-missed-this-blow-at-the-2015-box-office.jpg)
To watch
Like Carrie, there is more than one Hell film and the original is much better than remake: the 2019 restart of Hell I obtained a frankly embarrassing criticism note. This is partly because he had not guillemo del Toro in the president of the director or Ron Perlman in the Hellboy prostheses. The film is “a unique game,” said New Yorker, “with an exciting but vulnerable superhero at the center that happens to be the Frai de Satan.”
NPR has also dismissed on this subject. “Everyone can send a huge monster of vegetables generated by unleashed computer at the base of the Brooklyn bridge, but it takes a special type of imagination to do it in a way that is exciting, emotionally complex and delightedly beautiful at the same time.” Time Out has agreed. “Del Toro, in love with his source but who has never exaggerated, makes things move; Perlman binds him with some of the driest spirits on this side of Indiana Jones.”
