HBO Max‘s film library is vast and brimming with well-known, widely beloved blockbusters and contemporary classics. Fortunately, the streaming platform also hosts a wide array of lesser known, oft-forgotten gems that deserve to be seen. These underappreciated titles include, among other films, a classic Hollywood romance that has been unfairly overshadowed by its remake and a small-budget feature debut that ranks as one of this year’s best dramas.
Here are five great hidden gem movies streaming on HBO Max right now.
“Love Affair” (1939)
Over the years, “Love Affair” has become considerably less well-known than its 1957 remake, “An Affair to Remember,” and that is a shame. This Leo McCarey-directed romance starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne about a French womanizer who falls in love with an American singer on an ocean liner is a mesmerizing black-and-white drama that settles itself in around you.
Watching it feels less like being immediately grabbed and swept away and more like being slowly surrounded in a thick fog of romance and connection. Its effects are subtle until they’re not — a little like falling in love.
“Sorry, Baby” (2025)
“Sorry, Baby” is one of 2025’s best films. Writer-director Eva Victor’s feature directorial debut follows a reclusive college professor (Victor) as she grapples over time with a traumatic event. Episodic in its structure and yet kaleidoscopic in its depiction of depression and trauma, “Sorry, Baby” is a film made with thoughtful care and surprisingly masterful control.
It is a drama comprised of carefully rendered, easy-to-miss details. Even more importantly, the film knows how to make an illuminative roadside conversation hold just as much weight as a stationary shot of a door, and that makes “Sorry, Baby” a truly impressive and memorable feature debut.
“Chungking Express” (1994)
Director Wong Kar Wai’s 1994 masterpiece “Chungking Express” is one of the most purely joyful and yet wistfully melancholic films ever made. An anthology project about two police officers’ (Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung Chiu-wai) chance relationships with two very different women (Brigitte Lin and Faye Wong) in 1990s Hong Kong, “Chungking Express” is a lightly comedic exploration of both the sadness of heartbreak and the rejuvenating optimism of newfound love.
Inimitable and infectious, it is a film overflowing with memorable moments and images. Just try to watch its final scene without smiling — and enjoy it as much as you can when you inevitably fail.
“The Lobster” (2016)
Here is a very different film about love and loneliness: Director Yorgos Lanthimos‘ “The Lobster.” An absurdist black comedy, this 2016 gem takes place in an alternate reality where single adults are forced to relocate to a hotel with other single people and are given 45 days to find a new life partner before they are turned into animals.
Featuring pitch-perfect performances from stars Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, John C. Reilly and Léa Seydoux, “The Lobster” marked an international breakthrough for Lanthimos and paved the way for many of his future projects. Ten years later, it remains one of his finest and most idiosyncratic achievements — one made all the better by its beautifully ambiguous conclusion.
“Babette’s Feast” (1987)
There are few better films you could watch during this Thanksgiving and wider holiday season than “Babette’s Feast.” This 1987 classic, which became the first Danish movie to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, follows a French refugee (Stéphane Audran) of the Franco-Prussian War who is accepted in the late 19th century into a small, strict religious community by a late pastor’s two kind-hearted daughters.
Years later, she decides to prepare a feast for not only the women who took her in but also the members of their increasingly divided congregation. The film is, quite simply, one of the best explorations of the power of food — both as an act of love and as a vessel for community and understanding — that has ever been rendered onscreen.
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