Close out August with classics like Chinatown and Galaxy Quest as they join the best movies on Amazon Prime Video right now.
We need to have a talk about the best movies on Amazon Prime Vide, because the most popular flicks on Prime Video are not necessarily the ones you should be watching. This week, the action thriller Acts of Violence has reached No. 7 on Prime Video’s top 10 list despite earning the rare 0% Rotten Tomatoes score. There are no good reviews for that movie on RT. And this week’s new No. 1, The Black Demon, isn’t much better, with a 12% Rotten Tomatoes score and shark action that makes it look like a low-budget Meg 2.
Movie lovers, you can do a lot better than that, and you don’t even have to leave Prime Video to do so. The fan-favorite sci-fi comedy Galaxy Quest is back on Prime Video and so is a true cinema masterpiece, Chinatown. These are the kind of flicks that you can expect to see among Prime Video’s new and classic titles that make the subscription worthwhile. And if you’re looking for more great films, all you have to do is read our updated list of the best movies on Amazon Prime Video right now.
We’ve also put together guides to the best shows on Prime Video, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Netflix, the best new movies to stream, and the best movies on Disney+.
Chinatown did not win the Best Picture Oscar for 1974, but as the film closes in on its 50th anniversary, it remains one of the greatest movies ever made. Jack Nicholson further cemented his Hollywood legend status as down-on-his-luck private investigator J. J. “Jake” Gittes. When Jake is hired by Evelyn Mulwray to investigate her cheating husband, the real Evelyn (Faye Dunaway) reveals that Jake has been set up and now her husband has been discredited and murdered.
As Jake closes in on answers, suspicion falls on Evelyn’s estranged father, Noah Cross (John Huston), and a land deal that someone is willing to kill in order to protect. But the surprises are far from over for Jake, as he’s forced to wonder if he can trust Evelyn.
Few films have ever married comedy and sci-fi as effectively as Galaxy Quest did over two decades ago. Somehow, it manages to both parody Star Trek while also acting as a love letter to that franchise. Tim Allen stars as Jason Nesmith, an actor who once headlined the Galaxy Quest TV series as Commander Peter Quincy Taggart. The show was so convincing to the alien Thermians that they recruit Jason to protect them on a mission in space.
Jason’s estranged cast members — Gwen DeMarco (Sigourney Weaver), Alexander Dane (Alan Rickman), Fred Kwan (Tony Shalhoub), Tommy Webber (Daryl Mitchell), and Guy Fleegman believe that Jason is taking a lucrative gig without them. But when they reunite with Jason, they soon discover that they’re on a real interstellar adventure. And they may not be able to go home.
The premise of Amazon Prime Video‘s movie Red, White & Royal Blue is a bit far-fetched: the son of the U.S. President, Alex Claremont-Diaz, must befriend his hated rival, Prince Henry, to smooth over relations between America and England. Their forced partnership quickly becomes something more, and they embark on a secret romance that, if exposed, could ruin Alex’s mother’s chances of re-election and threaten the British Monarchy.
Red, White & Royal Blue is the rare rom-com that’s actually kind of romantic and funny. As played by relative newcomers Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine, Alex and Henry have a classic love/hate relationship that carries on the rom-com tradition of the two leads grudgingly falling in love with each other as the movie progresses. Red, White & Royal Blue won’t rock your world like Oppenheimer or even Barbie, but it’s a charming diversion from a real world that has far too few buttercream cake fights and romantic walks in the moonlight.
In this summer of Oppenheimer, it’s worth looking back at a similarly themed World War II biopic, The Imitation Game. This film is a dramatization of the life of Alan Turing, the man who created a machine that could decode the wartime messages sent by Germany’s infamous Enigma Machine.
The MCU’s Doctor Strange, Benedict Cumberbatch, headlines the film as Turing. Keira Knightley also stars in the movie as Joan Clarke, the woman who loved and married Turing, and who also greatly contributed to the machine. But even Clarke’s support and Turing’s own accomplishments can protect him when the secret of his homosexuality comes out during a very unforgiving era.
In two weeks, Denzel Washington will be back in action mode with The Equalizer 3. Perhaps that’s why Prime Video has added 2 Guns to its film library. In this 2013 action thriller, Washington plays Robert “Bobby” Trench, a criminal working alongside Michael “Stig” Stigman (Mark Wahlberg) for a drug lord named Manny “Papi” Greco (Edward James Olmos).
Bobby and Stig plan to rob Papi of millions of dollars, but what they don’t know is that they are both undercover. Bobby works for the DEA, and Stig is a Navy SEAL. With so much money on the line, both men have been ordered to betray each other. But Bobby and Stig soon find that even their superiors can’t be trusted. All they really have is each other.
Believe it or not, Bones and All is not an elaborate plot to lure a disgraced actor back from the Cayman Islands. It really is a cannibal romance story starring Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell as young lovers, Lee and Maren, who share certain urges to eat human flesh. The film treats cannibals as if they were vampires, and they know each other by scent.
If it wasn’t for the great chemistry between Chalamet and Russell, this wouldn’t work at all. But sometimes chemistry is all it takes to make a romance movie click, even if the cannibal angle is really reaching at times.
Writers and directors Joel and Ethan Coen were in peak form for their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. This was 2007’s Oscar-winner for Best Film, and it’s arguably one of the greatest movies of this century. Josh Brolin stars as Llewelyn Moss, a man who stumbles across a fortune in drug money after a deal gone wrong. Unfortunately for Moss, the money belongs to criminals who have sent a hitman, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), to retrieve it.
Bardem’s performance makes Chigurth a villain for the ages. And the local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), soon finds himself overwhelmed by the violence that Chigurth and Moss leave in their wake.
Prior to seeing Skyfall, audiences had no idea that the titular word had such significance to James Bond. It’s something so personal that Bond refuses to discuss it even while he is being evaluated for duty. This film showed a more vulnerable Bond than ever before, as his physicality and his power are largely broken, and he doesn’t get them back in this film.
After being presumed dead in the field, Bond decides to retire from MI6. His retirement is cut short by the emergence of Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), a former MI6 agent turned terrorist. And Silva is targeting his ex-mentor, M (Judi Dench) for death. Can Bond protect her in his weakened state?
Given the way events play out in Inglourious Basterds, you may get the impression that Quentin Tarantino hates history. But it’s more like Tarantino loves history, he just won’t let it get in the way of telling his story. Brad Pitt headlines the large cast as Lieutenant Aldo Raine, the leader of an all-Jewish brigade that is working behind enemy lines during World War II.
Aldo and his men, including Sergeant Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), Sergeant Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth), and more have a vendetta against the Nazis and Standartenführer Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) in particular. When an even bigger target presents itself, the Basterds put their lives on the line to finish their mission.
Perhaps there’s a knock, knock joke somewhere in the premise for Knock at the Cabin, but M. Night Shyamalan’s movies aren’t really built for humor. This story is about a young girl named Wen (Kristen Cui), and her two dads, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge). Their idyllic vacation is cut short when four intruders hold them captive and make an incredible claim.
