Zola.
Photo: Courtesy of Anna Kooris/A24
Action, sci-fi, two animated masterpieces, and a horror movie you probably haven’t seen! Amazon’s Prime Video continues to be the most unwieldy streaming service with literally hundreds of titles getting added and dropped every few days. How does one even begin to find what’s actually worth watching? Well, that’s why we’re here. Let us guide the way with a dozen movies you need to see.
Year: 1988
Runtime: 2h 12m
Director: John McTiernan
Prime Video is doing that weird thing where it only drops one movie in a hit franchise, hoping users will be enticed enough to pay for the rest. In this case, it’s tolerable since the first film in the Die Hard franchise is still the masterpiece, a film that truly rewrote the rules for the genre, shifting it more to Everyman characters like Bruce Willis and away from muscular stars like Sly and Ah-nuld. It’s held up perfectly, as entertaining today as when it came out. ➽ Streaming now.
Year: 1996
Runtime: 1h 34m
Director: Joel Coen
Joel and Ethan Coen’s masterpiece is only one of the best films ever made, a story of violence and redemption in the Great American North. The Coens won Best Original Screenplay, and Frances McDormand took her first Oscar home for playing the unforgettable Marge Gunderson, a Minnesotan cop who gets entangled in a car salesman’s deeply inept foray into the criminal world. ➽ Streaming now.
Year: 2010
Runtime: 1h 38m
Director: Chris Sanders, Dean DeBlois
The movies based on the book by Cressida Cowell composes one of the best trilogies of the 2010s. It all started with this DreamWorks adventure film about a boy (Jay Baruchel) who befriends a dragon named Toothless, despite his people’s fear of the flying creatures. A classic tale of never judging a book by its cover, this a beautiful adventure tale, a movie with an equal measure of heart and spirit. ➽ Streaming now.
Year: 2014
Runtime: 2h 49m
Director: Christopher Nolan
As the world is being reminded with the insane success of The Odyssey, no one else makes movies like Christopher Nolan, a man who took his superhero success and used it to get gigantic budgets to bring his wildest dreams to the big screen. Who else could make this sprawling, emotional, complicated film about an astronaut (Matthew McConaughey) searching for a new home for humanity? It’s divisive among some Nolan fans for its deep emotions, but those who love it really love it, and that group seems to grow larger every year. ➽ Streaming now.
Year: 2021
Runtime: 2h 7m
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
A controversial nominee for Best Picture at the beginning of 2022, P.T. Anderson’s latest is exclusively on Prime Video right now, just waiting for people to rewatch in the wake of the master’s One Battle After Another. And they should. Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman are transcendent in this story of a teenager who falls for a 20-something woman and the odd adventures that somehow keep falling into their lives. It’s a lyrical, gorgeously shot period comedy about those hazy days when anything seemed possible. ➽ Streaming now.
Year: 2025
Runtime: 1h 26m
Director: Peter Hall, Paul Gandersman
Every time you think that the found-footage trend has mercifully ended, a low-budget film will come along to show imitators how it should be done. That’s the case with this indie gem about a YouTuber who finds a tape of himself as a child, and, well, it’s not normal. An investigation begins that sends the characters in this flick down an internet rabbit hole inspired by David Lynch, John Carpenter and the like. ➽ Streaming now.
Year: 1994
Runtime: 2h 28m
Director: Quentin Tarantino
There are certain tentpoles of American film history that changed the form forever, and this is undeniably one. Heck, we’re still getting Tarantino riffs almost 30 years later, as everyone wants to make a movie as effortlessly cool as his masterpiece. What more could possibly be written about Pulp Fiction? You know you love this and want to see it again. ➽ Streaming now.
Year: 2013
Runtime: 2h 6m
Director: Bong Joon Ho
Bong Joon Ho became a household name when he won the Oscar for Parasite, but he had a hit before that in this sci-fi action flick starring Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Tilda Swinton, Octavia Spencer, and John Hurt. It’s a brilliant allegory for society: A train has been divided into classes per car, and the peasants form a revolt. Visually striking and narratively ambitious, this is a film that only seems to grow in esteem with each passing year, especially now that Bong is increasingly famous. ➽ Streaming now.
Year: 1999
Runtime: 1h 42m
Director: John McTiernan
Pierce Brosnan gave his best non-Bond performance in this stellar remake of the 1968 film of the same name (which also happens to be on Prime). Stepping into the shoes of Steve McQueen is no easy feat, but Brosnan does so with style as Thomas Crown, a billionaire art thief who falls for the insurance investigator chasing him, played by the wonderful Rene Russo. The timing is right to catch up with this as Michael B. Jordan’s remake drops early in 2027. ➽ Streaming now.
Year: 1995
Runtime: 1h 41m
Director: Bryan Singer
An Oscar winner for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor, this mid-’90s classic thriller really shifted the landscape, ushering in an era of twist endings that blew people’s minds, although few could match a script that the WGA named the 35th-greatest screenplay of all time. If you haven’t seen it (and how lucky you are), it’s the story of a group of criminals brought in by the cops after a massacre on a boat. Nothing is what it seems. ➽ Streaming now.
Year: 2024
Runtime: 1h 41m
Director: Chris Sanders
This award-winning adaptation of the novel of the same name by Peter Brown is a gift to viewers of all ages. A blend of Monet and Miyazaki, it stars Lupita Nyong’o as Roz, a service robot who ends up mothering a goose named Brightbill (Kit Connor). It’s a gorgeous, moving piece of family filmmaking. ➽ Streaming now.
Year: 2020
Runtime: 1h 26m
Director: Janicza Bravo
The movie based on a Twitter thread is like nothing you’ve ever seen. Aziah “Zola” King started a story on Twitter back in the days when it was still fun and good in 2015, recounting a tale too crazy not to be true. Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, and a stunningly great Colman Domingo star in the film version of that tale, the journey of a stripper and her friend to Tampa, where things go wrong in wild and unpredictable ways. ➽ Streaming now.