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Jeffrey M. Anderson

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The best in streaming entertainment, from the experts.

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The 21 best movies on Amazon Prime Video right now

Amazon is focused on producing quality movies of its own, but you'll also find plenty of classics. Here are some of the films you should look for.

Once Upon a Time in China — Golden Harvest

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Amazon's Prime Video has been surpassed by the sheer number of Netflix original movies, which seem to come out weekly. While Netflix has caught up in terms of quality, the service still concentrates more on mainstream entertainments. Amazon, on the other hand, is more focused on artful movies and risk-taking.

The streaming service is nurturing great directors: Leos Carax, Spike Lee, Gus Van Sant, Park Chan-wook, Richard Linklater, Steve McQueen, Jim Jarmusch, Todd Haynes, Lynne Ramsay, and more. Ditto for talent; actors like Joaquin Phoenix, Adam Driver, and Kate Beckinsale all appear in more than one Amazon Studios film. Additionally, Amazon's library of catalog titles—several examples of which are on this last—is far more vast than Netflix's, especially when it comes to titles made before 1980.

Here are our top picks:

Updated November 7, 2021 to add one movie and to remove two movies that have rotated off the streaming service..

Burning

Based on the great Japanese author Haruki Murakami's short story "Barn Burning," Lee Chang-dong's Burning (2018) was recently voted in a poll as the greatest Korean film ever made. It's a mysterious movie, yet entrancing, like a dream that you'll want to try and remember. It focuses on three characters—the aimless Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), his old classmate Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), and the handsome, sportscar-driving Ben (Steven Yeun, a recent Oscar nominee for Minari)—who may or may not have some kind of romantic or sexual connection, but it doesn't matter.

Ben mentions that he likes to burn down greenhouses, and that he has selected a new one nearby, but that's not exactly the plot either. The movie is really about its small moments—such as a play of light in a window, or Hae-mi miming the act of eating a tangerine—and the subtle, searching emotions they elicit.

Dead Ringers

David Cronenberg directed this seriously creepy horror-drama, with Jeremy Irons giving one of cinema's all-time greatest performances as twin gynecologists Elliot and Beverly Mantle. (The astonishing twinning effects are all practical, and with only the subtlest movements, he manages to make each identical twin unique.) Elliot likes to seduce their female patients, and then pass them on to Beverly. Beverly falls in love with actor Claire (Geneviève Bujold), and when she leaves, begins a downward spiral into drugs. Soon the brothers are spiraling together, while at the same time inventing a series of strange gynecological tools designed for mutations.

Dead Ringers (1988) is one of Cronenberg's masterpieces, arguably his deepest and most disturbing dive into body horror, told unblinkingly, with clinical precision, and accompanied by Howard Shore's brilliantly eerie score. It's not always an easy watch, but it is unforgettable. Weirdly, Prime Video is currently preparing a new series based on the film.

The Elephant Man

Astoundingly, David Lynch followed up his nightmarish, cult classic debut feature Eraserhead (1977) with the highly respectable The Elephant Man (1980), based on non-fiction books about the real-life Joseph Merrick. While Lynch kept some of his signature touches, such as black-and-white film, an unsettling, hissing soundtrack, and two bizarre, surrealistic flashback sequences, he also concentrated on the film's emotional power.

Though many actors played the Merrick role on stage, John Hurt won the movie role and endured a brutal makeup regimen to replicate Merrick's particular look. But despite that, Hurt gives a tender, heartbreaking performance, making this one of the most powerful tear-jerkers ever made. In supporting roles, the movie also boasts the award-winning likes of Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud, and Wendy Hiller.

In a Lonely Place

Director Nicholas Ray would gain fame for making Rebel Without a Cause, but his In a Lonely Place (1950) was an early masterpiece; both films make striking use of physical space to underline a character's tormented psychological state. Humphrey Bogart stars as screenwriter Dixon Steele; he's offered a chance to adapt a novel, but rather than reading it himself, he invites a coat check girl—who has read it—to his apartment to tell him the story. When she turns up murdered, he becomes a suspect.

Meanwhile, he falls in love with a neighbor, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), who stays by his side as he feverishly begins writing again. Unfortunately, he is also prone to strange, violent explosions, which doesn't help his case. (Bogart is terrifying in these rages.) The apartment complex setting, with its unifying courtyard, becomes a major character in this tense, powerful noir.

The Lady from Shanghai

After the extraordinary Citizen Kane, Orson Welles had to struggle to get films made. The legend behind The Lady from Shanghai (1948) is that, while on the phone with Columbia Pictures, he grabbed a nearby paperback and pitched it as his next project. Married to the lovely Rita Hayworth at the time, he cast her in the lead, but proceeded to make a typically brilliant, unusual (and un-commercial) Wellsian masterpiece. To start, he cut Hayworth's luxurious brown hair and died it blonde, an act that received the blame as the reason for the film's financial failure.

Welles plays sailor Michael O'Hara, who gets into trouble when he rescues beautiful Elsa, meets her wealthy, sinister husband, lawyer Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), and agrees to work for him on his yacht. He becomes involved in a plot to stage a murder, which then turns into a real murder. The movie has many striking moments, but none more celebrated than the showdown in the hall of mirrors.

Midsommar

Ari Aster (Hereditary) sets his second feature film in wide-open spaces and bright daylight, where no character is entirely good, and monsters lurk in all of us. Midsommar (2019) begins with the insecure Dani (Florence Pugh), who loses her entire family to an accident. Her boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), wanted to break up with her, but now feels obligated to stay. He also awkwardly invites her along on a trip to Sweden with his pals, Josh (William Jackson Harper) and Mark (Will Poulter), who are not pleased when she accepts.

Their other friend, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), hopes to show them his home village, and a special 9-day celebration that occurs only once every 90 years. With the midnight sun—24-hour sunlight—during and after a mushroom trip, things feel very weird, but the first day's ceremony brings with it a sense of terror that only grows more intense. This cut is long, 147 minutes, but it's paced like a summer day; an even longer 171-minute director's cut exists.

Once Upon a Time in China

In 1986, directors John Woo and Tsui Hark electrified the Hong Kong film industry with their groundbreaking hits A Better Tomorrow and Peking Opera Blues. For the next decade or so, theaters were rich with astonishing, high-flying, fast-moving martial arts films, crime stories, and crazy fantasies. Tsui's Once Upon a Time in China (1991) is arguably one of the best-known (and will be getting its own Criterion Blu-ray release later this year).

Martial arts master Jet Li stars as real-life Hong Kong folk hero Wong Fei-hung (also portrayed by Jackie Chan in the Drunken Master films). It's 1875 in a turbulent China, and Wong at first refuses to fight the many corrupt and evil forces around him. But never fear; when he does fight, it's truly spectacular, whether he's taking on many opponents, armed only with an umbrella, or fighting a single opponent in a warehouse full of ladders, catwalks, and crossbeams. Li's blazing screen presence and lithe, clean movements are the stuff of cinema poetry.

Val

Using footage from his entire life and career, actor Val Kilmer attempts to tell his story in the documentary *Val.*

Actor Val Kilmer, who became a star in Top Gun and is also known for films such as Willow, The Doors, Tombstone, Batman Forever, Heat, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, amassed some 800 hours of footage of his life, in the form of family home movies, and his own VHS footage, shot throughout the various stages of his career. After being diagnosed with throat cancer, and his voice so distorted that it's difficult to understand, he decided to allow his story to be told.

Assembled by filmmakers Leo Scott and Ting Poo, Val (2021) features new footage of the actor, palling around with his son Jack (also an actor); Jack narrates the film, reading his father's words, in a voice that sounds remarkably like his father's. The footage charts Kilmer's rise through movies, his brushes with other famous people, and his tough times, with wonderful honesty. There's a sneaking suspicion sometimes that Kilmer isn't quite telling us everything, but what's here is surprisingly touching.

Vivarium

Dropping less than a month after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and people sheltering-in-place, Lorcan Finnegan's Twilight Zone-like sci-fi horror movie Vivarium (2020) took on new levels of meaning, both terrifying and cathartic. A young, unmarried couple, schoolteacher Gemma (Imogen Poots) and gardener Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) decide to look for a house.

A creepy real estate guy, Martin (Jonathan Aris), shows them a place in a soulless community called Yonder. All the houses look the same—all a sickly, unnatural shade of green—and everything feels plasticky and generic. The couple politely tours the house, but Martin disappears, and then they can't find the entrance to the community; they drive and drive until they wind up back at the same unit, seemingly trapped there. Things grow weirder and more disturbing, accompanied by an icky color scheme and generally queasy feeling.

Here are Jeff's earlier recommendations from September, also in alphabetical order.

Blow the Man Down

This fascinating, funny crime film, co-written and co-directed by Bridget Savage Cole, Danielle Krudy, is, uniquely for the genre, driven entirely by women. Blow the Man Down (2020) begins with the sound of sea shanties in a small Maine fishing village called Easter Cove. Sisters Mary Beth (Morgan Saylor) and Pris Connolly (Sophie Lowe) have just buried their mother. Mary Beth goes to a bar and lets a man pick her up. He takes her to the docks, and when she tries to get away from him, he winds up pierced with a trident.

Pris dutifully helps dispose of the body with her trusty fillet knife, but then the knife goes missing, and a bag of money turns up. Add to this delicious, subtly funny setup a cabal of older ladies (June Squibb, Anette O'Toole, and Marceline Hugot) that keep a vise-grip control over the town, secretly in charge of everything. But Margo Martindale steals the movie as Enid Nora Devlin, who runs the town brothel and has a mysterious connection to the other ladies. Martindale's sense of motherly menace, as she lumbers around in huge, black shawls and a black cane, is great fun.

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot

Gus Van Sant's biopic of cartoonist John Callahan might have fallen into goopy self-importance, but instead it's loose and rambunctious, and at times exhilarating, and bathed in warm, orange tones. It's even more irreverent than his Oscar-winning Milk (2008). Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot (2018) begins with Callahan (Joaquin Phoenix), abandoned as a child, and now an alcoholic.

At a party, he meets Dexter (Jack Black), and decide to head to an even better party. But, driving drunk together, they get into an accident that leaves Callahan a quadriplegic, with only some limited mobility in his hands. He begins drawing his infamous, near-blasphemous cartoons, often with disability as a subject, but even after becoming published, he still has demons that need wrestling. Rooney Mara plays a physical therapist, a sadly underwritten role, but Black and Jonah Hill, as an AA sponsor, are both top-notch.

The Fog

Following the immense success of his still-essential Halloween (1978)—and a stopover on TV for an Elvis movie—John Carpernter returned to widescreen horror with The Fog (1980), a movie reliant more on its clammy mood than on gore or slashings. When the fog comes into the long frame, Carpenter relishes the way it moves, rolling from back to front, toward the audience.

The movie opens with none other than John Houseman explaining the plot: exactly 100 years ago, a ship sunk off the coast of the town of Antonio Bay, and now a mysterious fog, containing mysterious and vengeful forces, envelops the town, causing death and mayhem. Adrienne Barbeau plays sexy radio DJ Stevie Wayne, whose son finds a plank from the death ship, and Hal Holbrook plays Father Malone, whose church may hold a key to the puzzle. Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Janet Leigh, and Nancy Loomis play townspeople who try to survive. Carpenter also composed the masterful, eerie soundtrack music.

The Handmaiden

Korean director Park Chan-wook is best known for his twisted cult classic Oldboy (2003), and cinema buffs know him for his other, equally subversive work. So it's no surprise that this 2.5-hour costume drama is far from the stodgy, stuffy thing it could have been. Based on a novel by Sarah Waters, The Handmaiden (2016) takes place in the 1930s during the Japanese occupation of Korea. A young Korean pickpocket, Sookee (Kim Tae-ri), is chosen by a con artist who poses as a Japanese count (Ha Jung-woo), to assist in a new scam. Sookee is to become a new handmaiden for a beautiful Japanese heiress, Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), while the Count swoops in to win her hand in marriage. Together they will try to drive her insane.

Meanwhile, Lady Hideko lives with her uncle (Cho Jin-woong, with an ink-blackened tongue), who keeps a collection of rare erotic books and forces her to read to guests on a regular basis. Eventually Sookee upsets the plan when she begins falling in love with Lady Hideko. Director Park commands complete control over his ornate frames and opulent decorations, using them to suggest various layers of deceit and desire.

Knives Out

Director Rian Johnson (Brick, Looper, Star Wars: The Last Jedi) wrote the absolutely brilliant original screenplay for this playful, funny, and razor-sharp (no pun intended) murder-mystery with slashes of wry humor. The giant wheel of knives that seems to point toward people's heads is the visual centerpiece of Knives Out (2019), but the film sustains a specific look and feel throughout, focusing on its airtight whodunit, as well as a string of brilliant performances by an amazing cast.

That cast starts with Daniel Craig as legendary private detective Benoit Blanc, along with Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Katherine Langford, and Jaeden Martell playing spoiled, suspicious members of the wealthy Thrombey family (all savoring their spiky dialogue). Christopher Plummer plays patriarch Harlan, a best-selling novelist, and Lakeith Stanfield and Noah Segan are a detective and a cop, baffled by the strange case. Look for M. Emmet Walsh as a security guy, and listen for the voice of Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a TV movie.

Last Flag Flying

Directed by Richard Linklater, the seriously underrated Last Flag Flying (2017) is a worthy companion piece to Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (1974), both based on novels by Darryl Ponicsan. It involves a road trip taken by three former military men, all of whom served together in Vietnam: ex-Marines Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston) and Richard Mueller (Laurence Fishburne), and ex-Navy Corps medic Larry "Doc" Shepherd (Steve Carell).

It's 2003, and Doc has lost his son in the current war in the Middle East and wishes his old friends to accompany him to claim the body. Sal is a lovable loudmouth while Mueller is now a reverend at his local church; Doc is simply quietly processing his grief. Their charismatic combo—and three outstanding performances—provides not only big laughs but also easily makes the tear-ducts flow. Linklater guides them through the story with his usual easygoing flow and a frozen, wintertime rural-ness, with amusingly out-of-place Christmas decorations.

The Lighthouse

Robert Eggers (The Witch) directs this highly unsettling, disturbing—and yet unforgettable—horror film in sinister black-and-white and in a constricting square-shaped frame. Set somewhere in the 1890s, The Lighthouse (2019) is so vivid that it feels as if Eggers might have time-traveled with his camera. Robert Pattinson plays Ephraim Winslow, a man with a shadowy past who reports for work as an assistant lighthouse keeper. His new boss is Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe, in a ferocious performance), an old sea-poem reciting salt.

While working the unforgiving job, Ephraim finds that he cannot access the top-floor beacon, which Thomas keeps locked for some reason. Ephraim experiences bad omens and nightmarish visions of tentacles and a mermaid (Valeriia Karaman, the only other person seen in the movie). At night, the men drink and descend into madness while a storm wind bashes against the sea-salt bleached house.

One Night in Miami

Oscar-winning performer Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk) makes her feature directing debut with this impressive drama, which plays like a stargazing Lollapalooza of amazing Black Americans. The idea of Cassius Clay (Eli Goree)—the soon-to-be Muhammad Ali—meeting up with Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) in a Miami hotel room on one night packs enough star power to inspire awed silence.

It takes place the night Ali beat Sonny Liston in 1964, and rather than celebrating, he meets with his friends. (Malcolm, who arranges the meeting, doesn't provide any adult beverages, but at least he brought ice cream!) It's based on a play by Kemp Powers (who also wrote and co-directed Pixar's Soul), and it still feels like a play; i.e., fairly talky. But the talk—about many topics, but mainly about the responsibility these men, as Black Americans, have to help make the world a better place—is incredibly powerful, and undeniably timely. The four performances are superb, and King keeps up a perfect pace, never letting things turn into a slog, but also leaving enough time to digest the rich themes.

Ran

Warlord Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai) attempts to divide up his kingdom among his children, with tragic results in Akira Kurosawa's *Ran*.

Many years after his celebrated samurai films, the septuagenarian Akira Kurosawa directed this awesome, moving, full-color epic, which is loosely based on Shakespeare's King Lear. (His earlier 1957 film Throne of Blood had been based on Macbeth.) Performed in an acting style inspired by Noh Theater, the story involves a warlord who wishes to divide his kingdom between his three sons (rather than daughters, as in the play), but rather than a peaceful transition of power, we get betrayal and murder. The story proves the Japanese proverb that a single arrow may be broken easily, but three arrows together may not.

Kurosawa's 160-minute Ran (1985) has a beautiful, powerful sense of movement with in the frame, and utilizes very close-ups or cuts within scenes. For an imported movie, it was a decent-sized hit in America (in Japan it was considered a disappointment), and it went on to earn four Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Director. It won only for Best Costume Design.

Sound of Metal

In the powerful, disquieting Sound of Metal (2020), Ruben Stone (Riz Ahmed) plays thundering drums for a metal band called Blackgammon. His girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke)—her eyebrows bleached ghostly white—plays clamorous guitar and shrieks unintelligible lyrics. One day while assembling the merch table, Ruben experiences a drop in his hearing. The Oscar-winning sound design tells us what it's like; everything is muffled and distant. A doctor informs Ruben that he's already lost most of his hearing. He winds up at a camp for deaf and hearing-compromised individuals, run with tough love by Joe (Paul Raci).

Ruben is determined to raise the money for cochlear implants and resume his music career, but Joe argues that deafness is not something that needs to be "fixed." It's a fascinating conundrum, and the movie makes it fully universal and touchingly human, all the way up to its shattering climax. In their roles, both Ahmed and Raci (who, in real life, is the child of deaf parents and a rock musician who performs in ASL) are extraordinary.

The Way Back

The acclaimed Australian director Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, etc.) made this excellent wartime suspenser, The Way Back (2010), focused more on old-fashioned rousing adventure than on realism. A band of soldiers (Jim Sturgess, Colin Farrell, Ed Harris, etc.) escape from a Siberian prison camp and must survive the freezing, snowy woods, even after thwarting the angry guards. Making their way toward the Mongolian border, they discover that they now must likewise survive the baking, brutal flatlands of Mongolia and Tibet.

Saoirse Ronan co-stars as another refugee that the soldiers reluctantly take along. The usual prison movie/survival movie stuff is here (starvation, sickness, etc.), but Weir keeps it watchable with his professional swiftness and confident tone. The cast is great, but Farrell is a standout with his character Valka, a dodgy, but spirited misfit.

The Vast of Night

Written by James Montague and Craig W. Sanger and directed by Andrew Patterson, The Vast of Night (2020) is arguably one of the best debut films of the past several decades. It's a mind-blowing, whirlwind sci-fi movie that is ostensibly about an alien visit, though it's also about much more. It's the 1950s in a small town in New Mexico, and fast-talking nerd Everett Sloan (Jake Horowitz) helps set up the sound equipment for the big high-school basketball game before beginning his shift as a radio DJ. Fellow student Fay Crocker (Sierra McCormick)—who works as a telephone switchboard operator—walks a bit with him, enlisting his help in operating her new tape recorder.

At work, Fay hears a strange sound on the line and sends it over to Everett, who plays it on the air. He receives a call from an ex-military man named Billy (Bruce Davis), who claims he heard the same sound once before. And thus begins a strange and exhilarating night, captured with astonishing, long-take camerawork, mesmerizing close-ups, rapid-patter dialogue, and moments of eerie silence.

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Jeffrey has been a working film critic for more than 14 years. He first fell in love with the movies at age six while watching "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" and served as staff critic for the San Francisco Examiner from 2000 through 2003.