3 movie masterpieces buried on Amazon Prime Video to watch right now
From a legendary thriller to a true-crime doc you haven't seen plus the funniest movie of 2024, these are thee of the best movies on Prime.
These days, I turn to Amazon’s Prime Video streaming hub to watch more movies than Netflix, Hulu, and Disney Plus combined. The service has “the goods” (i.e. movies made before 2011, tons of schlock). But, boy, the interface stinks. Whether navigating on a TV device or a laptop or a phone, trying to find something half-decent on the service is often a chore. So let me do you a favor.
Instead of spending 30 minute clicking through reams of Prime Video’s movie listings, hoping, praying you’ll land on the right genre page, here are three amazing movies you can watch right now on the service.
3 The Night of the Hunter
Image: Kino
I have heard it many, many times from people who genuinely love art: “I can’t watch black-and-white movies.” But can you really ignore one of the all-time great serial-killer dramas, endorsed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro, Spike Lee, and the Coen Bros, just because the shadowy cinematography lacks the blues, reds, and greens of everyday life? As if.
Night of the Hunter is notorious for being actor Charles Laughton’s only directorial effort, and Robert Mitchum operating at absolute-zero levels of iciness. Told from the perspective of two soon-to-be-orphaned children, whose innocence turns Laughton’s adaptation of the Davis Grubb novel of the same name into a kind of dark fairy tale, Night of the Hunter finds genuine preacher-psycho Harry Powell (Mitchum) slip into the role of stepdad in order to unearth $10,000 cash he believes his hidden away in the children’s house. There’s seemingly no one Powell won’t murder to get his prize, which sends the children on the run through the undertow of backwoods West Virginia.
It’s like The Terminator interrupted To Kill a Mockingbird, or the kind of movie David Fincher might make if he were at the top of his game in the 1950s. Yes, it’s a black-and-white film from a bygone era, but the thrills pulsating through every stoic image — swirling religion, sexuality, misogyny, and stark human bloodthirst —feels modern in its influence.
2 Grizzly Man
Image: Lionsgate/courtesy Everett Collection