Best Movies on Amazon Prime Right Now

SEVEN ACADEMY AWARDS

Everything Everywhere All at Once

2022 · STREAMING · SCIENCE FICTION / DRAMA

The Daniels' movie won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actor and Actress. Michelle Yeoh plays a Chinese-American laundromat owner who discovers she can access the skills and memories of her parallel-universe selves. The movie uses this premise to tell a story about intergenerational grief, immigrant experience, and what it means to love someone across the distance that time and expectation create.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is genuinely funny, genuinely moving, and formally inventive in ways that never feel like showing off. It is the most purely cinematic Best Picture winner in many years and one of the few films in recent memory that earns everything it asks you to feel. It is currently available on Amazon Prime and should be on your watch list if you have not seen it.

Watch it without reading too much about what happens. The movie's emotional arc works best when you don't know where it's going.

TWO ACADEMY AWARDS

Manchester by the Sea

2016 · STREAMING · DRAMA

Kenneth Lonergan's movie won Academy Awards for Best Actor (Casey Affleck) and Best Original Screenplay. It follows a Boston janitor who is named guardian of his teenage nephew after the death of his brother, and must return to the Massachusetts coastal town where something happened to him years before. The movie never explains or resolves that thing. It simply shows you a man who is living in the space after it.

Manchester by the Sea is the most honest movie ever made about grief that cannot be processed. It is also, intermittently, very funny. Lonergan understands that these are not opposite things. Lucas Hedges's performance as the nephew is as good as Affleck's. This is one of the finest American films of the past decade.

The movie's structure is deliberate. Give it the patience it asks for in the first act.

TWO ACADEMY AWARDS

Sound of Metal

2019 · STREAMING · DRAMA

Darius Marder's movie about a heavy metal drummer who begins losing his hearing won Academy Awards for Best Movie Editing and Best Sound. The sound design is central to the movie's experience in a way that is unusual even for a movie about sound: the audience is placed inside Ruben's hearing loss through the texture of the audio itself, moving between the muffled world he now inhabits and the sounds he remembers.

Riz Ahmed's performance is one of the best performances by any actor in any medium in the past decade. The movie is about accepting the conditions of your life rather than fighting them until you destroy everything else. It is also, more quietly, about what it costs to be a certain kind of person in a world that does not accommodate that person easily. Watch it with good headphones or speakers.

The sound design requires the right setup. Headphones are ideal.

BEST SCIENCE FICTION ON PRIME

Arrival

2016 · STREAMING · SCIENCE FICTION

Denis Villeneuve's movie about a linguist recruited to communicate with alien visitors is the best science fiction movie of its decade. Amy Adams plays Dr Louise Banks, and the movie is centrally about language: how it shapes thought, how it might work across species, and what it would cost to understand something that no human frame of reference had prepared you for. The movie's final act reframes the entire story.

Arrival is one of the few science fiction films that takes its ideas seriously without sacrificing its emotional core. The relationship between Banks and her daughter is the movie's beating heart, and the movie's treatment of time is among the most formally ambitious in mainstream cinema. This is a movie that rewards a second viewing more than almost anything else currently on Prime.

Pay attention to the structure of the scenes with Banks's daughter from the very beginning. The movie is telling you more than it appears to be.

ALEX GARLAND

Annihilation

2018 · STREAMING · SCIENCE FICTION / HORROR

Alex Garland's adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's novel follows a team of four women entering a mysterious zone called the Shimmer, where the laws of biology have changed. The movie is not interested in explaining what the Shimmer is. It is interested in what it feels like to enter a space where identity and memory and biology become unstable, and what that experience might mean about the nature of the self.

Annihilation is the most formally ambitious science fiction movie since 2001: A Space Odyssey and one of the most genuinely frightening. The lighthouse sequence is among the most unsettling scenes in recent cinema. The movie was taken from Garland by Paramount's international distribution partner and released on streaming without a theatrical run outside North America. That is a loss. Watch it on the largest screen available.

The movie does not answer its questions. That is not a flaw. The questions are the point.

ROBERT EGGERS

The Lighthouse

2019 · STREAMING · PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR

Robert Eggers's second movie stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as two lighthouse keepers stranded on a remote island off the New England coast in the 1890s. Shot in black and white in a nearly square 1.19:1 aspect ratio, it is a movie about isolation, madness, mythological obsession, and the specific way that two men destroy each other when there is no one else. It is also very funny in places.

The Lighthouse is the most formally controlled horror movie of the past decade. Every frame looks like a woodblock print. Dafoe and Pattinson both give career-best performances in a movie that asks everything of them. The dialogue draws on 19th-century maritime diaries and sailor journals, and the result is something that sounds unlike anything in contemporary cinema.

The aspect ratio is intentional. It creates a sense of confinement that is part of the movie's effect.

ARI ASTER

Midsommar

2019 · STREAMING · FOLK HORROR

Ari Aster's folk horror movie follows a group of American graduate students to a remote Swedish village for a midsummer festival. Unlike most horror movies, it takes place almost entirely in daylight. The horror is visible from the first scenes, hidden in plain sight beneath flowers and flags and communal rituals. Aster is interested in grief, codependency, and what it means to be an outsider in a place that is reading you very carefully.

The director's cut, which adds nearly thirty minutes, is the better version. Several scenes that feel decorative in the theatrical cut become essential in the extended version. Midsommar is also, beneath its horror mechanics, a breakup movie. Florence Pugh carries the emotional weight of the whole movie, and the final scene is one of the most complicated to interpret of any movie in recent memory.

Seek out the director's cut if it is available in your territory. It is worth the extra time.

LUCA GUADAGNINO

Suspiria

2018 · STREAMING · ART HORROR

Luca Guadagnino's remake of Dario Argento's 1977 movie is not a straightforward remake. It is set in 1977 Berlin and uses the horror of a dance academy to think about political violence, guilt, collective memory, and what Germany was still carrying thirty years after the war. Tilda Swinton plays three characters, including an elderly male psychiatrist. Dakota Johnson plays the American student who arrives to train at the Markos Dance Company and finds something wrong.

Suspiria is the most ambitious horror movie Guadagnino has made and the most divisive. It is very long and very strange and its final act commits to its horror mythology in a way that is either triumphant or excessive depending on your tolerance for complete formal commitment. It is worth watching for the dance sequences alone, which are among the finest in any movie of this decade.

The movie's political subplot becomes clearer on a second viewing. It is doing more than it appears to be on first watch.

BEST DIRECTOR CANNES

Cold War

2018 · STREAMING · ROMANCE / DRAMA

Pawel Pawlikowski's movie follows two people across fifteen years and four countries: a musician and the singer he falls in love with in 1949 Poland, across Berlin and Paris and Yugoslavia and back to Poland, as the Cold War shapes and separates and reunites them. Shot in black and white in the Academy ratio, it is 88 minutes long and covers more emotional ground than most films twice its length.

Cold War won Best Director at Cannes and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Movie at the Academy Awards. It is one of the most beautiful-looking films of the past decade and one of the most emotionally concentrated. If you have not heard of it, that is the reason it is on this list. It is the best movie currently on Prime that most people have not seen.

Watch Pawlikowski's earlier movie Ida afterward. They make a remarkable pair.

SAFDIE BROTHERS

Uncut Gems

2019 · STREAMING · THRILLER / CRIME

Benny and Josh Safdie's movie about a New York jeweller and compulsive gambler spiralling toward catastrophe is the most anxious movie on this list. Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, and the performance is one of the best by any American actor in the past decade. The movie's structure is a sustained act of controlled escalation: every scene adds pressure, every resolution creates a worse problem, and the ending is the only ending that could have satisfied its own internal logic.

Uncut Gems runs at a pitch that is exhausting in the way that being around someone who cannot stop gambling is exhausting. That exhaustion is the point. The movie was ignored by the Academy Awards in a way that is now widely understood as a significant oversight. It is currently on Prime and is essential viewing.

Watch Good Time first if you have not seen it. The Safdies' earlier movie is also on Prime and shows them developing the same technique.

ALSO ESSENTIAL

Good Time

2017 · STREAMING · THRILLER / CRIME

The Safdie Brothers' movie before Uncut Gems stars Robert Pattinson as a small-time criminal who spends a single night in New York City trying to raise bail money for his brother, who has been arrested. The movie takes place almost entirely across that one night and never relaxes its grip. Pattinson's performance signalled a transformation in how seriously he was taken as an actor.

Good Time is a more contained movie than Uncut Gems but no less technically accomplished. The cinematography by Sean Price Williams and the score by Oneohtrix Point Never are inseparable from the movie's effect. It is eighty-six minutes long and has no wasted moments. Watch it before or after Uncut Gems and you will understand what the Safdies were building toward.

The opening scene establishes everything the movie is going to do. Pay attention to it.

NOT THE MOVIE YOU EXPECT

Pig

2021 · STREAMING · DRAMA

Michael Sarnoski's debut feature stars Nicolas Cage as a truffle forager living in the Oregon wilderness whose prized pig is stolen. The premise suggests a revenge thriller. The movie is not a revenge thriller. It is a quiet, precise, and deeply moving movie about grief, authenticity, what we lose when we make compromises with our own nature, and what it costs to build a life that is actually your own.

Cage's performance is the opposite of every performance that gave rise to the meme version of Nicolas Cage. It is restrained, specific, and completely controlled. Pig is the most surprising movie on this list because it is so thoroughly not what its synopsis suggests. It is one of the best films of 2021 and currently on Amazon Prime.

Go in knowing as little as possible. The movie's power is entirely in what it refuses to do.

TOM FORD

Nocturnal Animals

2016 · STREAMING · THRILLER / DRAMA

Tom Ford's second movie tells two stories at once: a Houston art gallery owner receiving a manuscript from her ex-husband, and the violent thriller story within that manuscript. Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal star in both narrative strands. The movie is about cruelty, regret, and the way that creative work can be an act of revenge or an act of love depending on how it is received.

Nocturnal Animals is the most formally elegant movie on this list and the one most interested in surface. Ford is a designer first and that sensibility is everywhere in the movie, from the opening sequence to the final shot. Michael Shannon's supporting performance won the Silver Lion at Venice. The ending is the right ending, however unsatisfying it seems at first.

The two narrative strands comment on each other. Keep both in mind as each develops.

LULU WANG

The Farewell

2019 · STREAMING · DRAMA / COMEDY

Lulu Wang's semi-autobiographical movie follows a Chinese-American family who return to China for a fake wedding, staged so that the family can say goodbye to their dying grandmother without telling her she is dying. The movie does not take sides in the ethical debate this raises. It trusts the audience to sit with the discomfort of a situation that has no clean answer.

Awkwafina's performance as Billi, the American granddaughter caught between cultures and expectations, is one of the most emotionally precise performances of its year. The movie is funny and sad in the specific way that family gatherings under pressure tend to be. It is one of the best American films of 2019 and it is on Prime and it has a much smaller audience than it deserves.

The movie is based on a real event. Wang has spoken publicly about what happened. The context enriches the movie.