Under the Silver Lake.
Photo: A24

Amazon’s Prime Video believes in a kind of shock-and-awe approach to streaming, often dropping dozens of titles in a single day throughout the month. But the dirty secret is most of them are awful. It can be tough to dig through the streamer’s overwhelming amount of junk to find the stuff worth watching, and that’s where we come in. Every month, we highlight a dozen or so titles that just landed (or are about to land) in the free-to-subscribers section of Prime Video. This month, we have an incredible array of tones, including essential works from Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Soderbergh, alongside a few movies you may not have heard of yet.

Year: 1989
Runtime: 1h 50m
Director: Spike Lee

More than 35 years after its release, Spike Lee’s masterpiece feels as urgent and current as the day it premiered. If it divided critics then, it has since proved to be one of the most enduring films to tackle American race relations. “Some of the advance articles about this movie have suggested that it is an incitement to racial violence. Those articles say more about their authors than about the movie,” the critic Roger Ebert wrote in 1989. ➽ Streaming now.

Year: 1990
Runtime: 2h 26m
Director: Martin Scorsese

One of the best films of the 1990s, Martin Scorsese’s movie about Henry Hill changed the language of how we tell stories about mobsters, and it’s a work that feels more like a classic with each passing year. GoodFellas has held up perfectly over the past three decades, partially owing to how much of what followed has tried to hollowly repeat it. But it’s still a wildly entertaining piece of work, a movie with more life in any five-minute stretch than most films have in their entire runtime. ➽ Streaming now.

Year: 1995
Runtime: 2h 50m
Director: Michael Mann

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino star in one of the best movies of the ’90s, a stunning cat-and-mouse game between a career criminal and a workaholic cop. The book release of Heat 2 in 2022 (and subsequent in-production movie) brought a lot of people back to this flick, one that has held up remarkably well over the nearly three decades since its release. It’s a masterpiece. ➽ Streaming now.

Year: 2007
Runtime: 2h
Director: Edgar Wright

The center of Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy (with Shaun of the Dead and The World’s End) remains the best film in the bunch — and they’re all on Prime, by the way. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost play a pair of ordinary police officers who get sucked into a crazy case involving multiple murders in their small English town. Both a parody of action films and a legitimately great action film on its own terms, this is one of the best genre hybrids of the aughts. ➽ Streaming now.

Year: 2014
Runtime: 1h 57m
Director: James Gray

James Gray co-wrote and directed this 2013 period piece with a fantastic ensemble anchored by Joaquin Phoenix, Marion Cotillard, and Jeremy Renner. Cotillard plays a Polish woman who comes to Ellis Island in 1921 with her sister and falls under the spell of a theater owner played by Phoenix and a performer played by Renner. With gorgeous period detail, this is a film that casts a spell. ➽ Streaming now.

Year: 1999
Runtime: 1h 28m
Director: Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh directs a searing performance by Terence Stamp in this 1999 thriller about a Brit who comes to California trying to find his missing daughter and those who may be responsible for hurting her. Soderbergh rarely missteps, and this is one of his most underrated films — a perfectly paced angry shout of a movie that matches its captivating leading man. ➽ Streaming now.

Year: 1994
Runtime: 1h 22m
Director: Penelope Spheeris

The director of Wayne’s World tackled comedy history in this film version of the beloved Our Gang shorts from generations ago. Including some remakes of classics most viewers first saw rebroadcast on television, this is a big-hearted comedy that could introduce your little ones to a whole new world of classic characters. ➽ Streaming now.

Year: 2025
Runtime: 1h 41m
Director: Wes Anderson

This wry comedy didn’t get enough attention last summer when it landed in theaters shortly after its Cannes premiere. It’s pretty damn wonderful. Benicio del Toro plays businessman Zsa-zsa Korda, who takes the most recent of several assassination attempts seriously. A dissection of business and faith, this is high-tier Wes and includes maybe the best performance of Michael Cera’s career. ➽ Streaming now.

Year: 2024
Runtime: 1h 54m
Director: Meredith Hama-Brown

This has to be the film you haven’t heard of yet in this roundup, but it belongs here. “Do you need a reason to be unhappy?” asks Sarah Gadon’s Carol in this study of depression and grief and how we often don’t need reasons to be struck by them. A couples retreat hinges on the recent loss of a matriarch while the kids battle their growing emotions in very different ways from group therapy. Smart, moving, and visually striking, it’s an indie you should seek out. ➽ Streaming now.

Year: 2018
Runtime: 2h 19m
Director: David Robert Mitchell

A24 had no idea what to do with David Robert Mitchell’s follow-up to It Follows, holding it for almost a year after its Cannes premiere and then giving it a modest release. The lack of exposure sucked at the time, but this Los Angeles–set neo-noir, in which a slacker (Andrew Garfield) must track down a missing neighbor (Riley Keough), has quietly developed a loyal following. It’s one of those movies that everyone will tell you they always loved a decade later. ➽ Streaming now.

Year: 2023
Runtime: 1h 45m
Director: Jonathan Glazer

The 2024 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film is now available on Prime and couldn’t be timelier. Based on the novel of the same name by Martin Amis, it’s the story of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family, who reside just outside the concentration camp. As they profit off horror, the sights and sounds of the Holocaust give the film a terrifying, unsettling foundation, reminding us how often true evil can exist right next door. ➽ Streaming now.

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