Yahoo Finance The 47 Best Movies on Amazon Prime UK
You are what you watch, and by that we mean that selecting films that show you something outside your comfort zone is a great way to educate and entertain yourself. The big screen might be a hard ask right now, but you can still bring cinema home.
As such, we've put in the time and sifted through Amazon Prime Video to pick out the best films you can stream without leaving home. These include critically acclaimed movies like 1917 and Almost Famous, indie gems Palm Springs and Compliance, and foreign language masterpieces like Parasite.
If you're only using your Amazon Prime membership to expedite a crate of loo roll to your house, you're missing out.
Best drama movies on Amazon Prime UK
Point Break
Keanu. Swayze. Surfboards. Heists. Masks of Presidents. Mooning. If it's been a while since you watched Kathryn Bigelow's crime drama, these are the bits that stick in your brain. But it's so much more than those moments. Noob FBI agent (and quarterback) Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) goes undercover to infiltrate the surfer community linked to a string of bank robberies. Around the heist-procedural plot there are some properly majestic surfing and sky-diving sequences, and underneath it all, a philosophical heart.
Once Upon a Time in America
Sergio Leone's sprawling Prohibition-era crime saga originally ran to 10 whole hours before eventually being trim to a lean three and three-quarter hours. Fair warning: it is LONG. But give it the time and you'll be rewarded. Robert de Niro is Noodles, a street kid from New York City's Lower East Side who starts putting together a gang of petty criminals running liquor and nicking bits and pieces here and there. But things quickly get a lot more serious. It's a graphic, brutal film – especially to its women – and one which continues to divide critics, but the master of the Western brings all his lyricism to the heart of a dark city.
A Hard Day's Night
If you're on a bit of a Beatles on film jag after watching The Beatles: Get Back, start with the scene on the train here. "I fought the war for your sort," huffs an old colonel as he confiscates Ringo's radio. "Bet you're sorry you won," Ringo snaps back.
Alun Owen, the Welsh playwright who had written the 1959 television play No Trams to Lime Street – a favourite of the band, not least because it was extremely Scouse – was picked to follow them around while they toured Ireland, trying to pick up their gags, their slang and their vibe. He did it brilliantly, and along with Dick Lester's anarchic direction and some genuinely excellent comic turns from the band – especially George, witheringly dismissing a teen TV confection: "She's a drag, a well-known drag. We turn the sound down on her and say rude things."
And, obviously, there are bangers to spare. For a bit more on the Fabs' on-screen adventures, see our complete guide to the Beatles on film.
Joker
Depending on exactly how much of a stomach you have for what is essentially mid-Seventies Scorsese fan fiction, you'll either find Joker a startlingly adventurous departure from the standard comic book template or a ridiculously po-faced couple of hours of portentous shallowness. Either way, you've got to admit Joaquin Phoenix is excellent in the main role, his maladjusted Travis Bickle-alike Arthur Fleck magnetic even if you aren't into the pompousness that can creep into things. But a lot of people like it! It made a billion quid! So! There you go!
Django Unchained
For our money, Quentin Tarantino’s last unequivocally belting film. The Hateful Eight had its moments, and the ellipsis lovers’ fave Once Upon A Time in… Hollywood had Brad, Leo and one great 25-minute story, but seven or eight fairly dull ones too. But the action-leaning neo-Western Django Unchained couples OUATIH's enjoyably hammy Comedy Leo up to an absolutely barnstorming central performance from Jamie Foxx. Foxx is Django, an enslaved man who's bought by bounty hunter Dr King Schulz (an excellent Christoph Waltz) because he's got intel on the Brittle Brothers, overseers in Django's old plantation. Soon they're tracking down Django's wife, Broomhilda, to the house of DiCaprio's moustache-twirling Calvin Candy. It's explosive, righteous, wildly entertaining stuff.
Wild Mountain Thyme
Right, usually we have a no spoilers policy in our film round-ups. Usually. However, Wild Mountain Thyme is not a film it's possible to really enjoy without a spoiler. It looks like a wistful, quirky Irish romance in which Jamie Dornan and Emily Blunt moon Irishly at each other over foggy, soggy moorland.
But it is not. It is a film you put on at 10pm on a Friday night after a bottle of wine and scream yourself hoarse at. It is Mamma Mia; it is the Princess Diana musical.
It is very, very silly indeed. The accents are absolutely insane. Christopher Walken pretending to be a County Mayo farmer sounds exactly like you'd think Christopher Walken County Mayo farmer would sound like. Jamie Dornan – who is Irish! – does not sound Irish. And, most of all, the drama hinges on the fact that (SPOILER ALERT) Jamie Dornan's character can't commit because he thinks he's a bee.
HE THINKS HE'S A BEE.
JAMIE DORNAN THINKS HE'S A BEE.
JAMIE DORNAN.
CAN'T GET HIS HORN ON.
BECAUSE HE THINKS.
HE'S A BEE.
The Green Knight
Dev Patel’s turn as the super-serious decapitationist Sir Gawain has got a lot of acclaim, and it arrived on Amazon Prime at the same time as it did cinemas. After a challenger whose head he chopped off unexpectedly hops up from the floor and says he’ll see Gawain in a year’s time for his own swing, Gawain has to find a way to survive while maintaining his honour. David Lowery’s expansive, immersive visuals add a burning intensity to Gawain’s quest. One minor quibble: the original poet wrote in a dialect native to the Wirral, so it’s a slight shame nobody took the chance to go full medieval Scouse.
The Mauritanian
The story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the 50-year-old who was detained at Guantanamo Bay for 14 years without being charged with a crime, is dramatised in this slow-burning movie featuring a breakthrough role from The Serpent's Tahar Rahim, as well as performances from Benedict Cumberbatch and Jodie Foster. While it might be the kind of hardboiled drama which isn't as successful at the Oscars these days, it's still a fascinating, and troublingly relevant, story.
Sound of Metal
What does deafness sound like? This is the complicated and moving question at the heart of this film about a drummer whose tinnitus causes him to suddenly lose his hearing; overnight cutting him off from both his music and his girlfriend. Riz Ahmed gives a career-best performance as the lead character, and there's also an excellent, Oscar-nominated appearance from Paul Raci, a journeyman actor who grew up the child of deaf adults. Sound of Metal is a reminder that deafness is not something that needs to be fixed, showing that listening to someone is about more than hearing them.
The Hunt
No, not the one about a war between liberal elites and rightwing nutters – instead this 2012 film sees Mads Mikkelsen play a schoolteacher whose world is rocked when a student of his claims she witnessed him engage in a lewd act. From danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg – the director of Another Round, for which Mikkelsen is currently nominated for an Oscar – this slow-burning drama is a compelling character study anchored by a performance from one of cinema's most versatile actors.
Short Term 12
Two years before Brie Larson took home the Oscar for her role in Room, the actress gave a commanding lead performance as a counsellor to at-risk teenagers at a group home in California in Short Term 12. Written and directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, the film is adapted from his short of the same name which followed one day in a care unit, based on his experience at a facility. The film shows how tensions rise amongst the teenagers and Larson's Grace begins to unravel as she is reminded of her own past. There's also a strong performance from LaKeith Stanfield in this multiple award winner.
Gone Girl
David Fincher's 2014 thriller, based on Gillian Flynn's best-selling novel of the same name, is both a visual feast for cinephiles and a gripping blockbuster that will suck you in. The story concerns the disappearance of Amy Dunne and how her husband Nick is blamed for the murder, in a film with brilliantly hairpin twists and turns, and two excellent performances from Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike.
I Care A Lot
Fyre Festival, Anna Delvey, the impossibility of cancelling a free trial – the age of the scammer is truly upon us, and this Rosamund Pike-fronted drama will scratch just that itch. The crime drama follows a woman who tricks elderly people into appointing her as their legal guardian before making off with their money. The enterprise comes unstuck when she targets a victim who has ties to a gangster, played by the wry Peter Dinklage. What appears a slick drama ends up making salient points about our obsession with wealth and hustling.
Heat
Heat might not have been recognised at the Oscars of its day, but the 25 years since its release have seen Michael Mann's crime thriller cemented as the classic of the genre. Robert De Niro and Al Pacino are a formidable pair in this story of a detective trying to catch a seasoned criminal pulling his very last heist. Mann spent nine months shadowing an LAPD officer every Friday and Saturday night in the run up to Heat, responding to calls across the city to get a taste of what the crime there really looked like. The result is a film which exploits every hidden corner of the city in a relentless game of cat and mouse, with what we'd wager is the best telephone scene in cinema history.
Parasite
It is no understatement to say that Bong Joon Ho's satirical horror, and masterpiece of class warfare, is the best film of 2020. Winning the Korean auteur four Academy Awards, and in doing so becoming the first foreign-language film to win the 'Best Picture' Oscar, it's hard to overstate its impact. As well as being an important dissection of privilege and the precarious nature of modern life, it is also hugely entertaining for the farcical story, which just keeps ramping up. If you haven't yet seen it, it's best to go in uninformed, but the story follows two families living in South Korea – one rich, one poor – and slowly shows us the folks at the bottom invading the beautiful, sprawling home of their wealthy compatriots. Parasite is a film with such bite it leaves you feeling wounded for days.
One Night in Miami
A fictional account of a real night in history, One Night in Miami imagines the conversations which took place behind closed doors when Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown met in a hotel room after Ali's win against Sonny Liston in 1964. Adapted by Kemp Powers from his play of the same name, and directed by Regina King, the film creates a four-way verbal boxing match between the men as they discuss activism, art and politics and the burden on famous Black men to speak up against injustices. Powers's story taps into the lesser-known, more private aspects of these infamous men's personalities, tackling some of the myth and in doing so showing us more of the men behind them. A gorgeously shot and slow burning drama which draws an unfortunate line from the civil rights movement to our polarised present day.
24 Hour Party People
Michael Winterbottom's film manages to conjure the full madness of Factory Record's semi-mythic journey from grotty punk club night to the very heart of everything that mattered in youth culture in a way no mass of BBC4 talking heads ever could. Steve Coogan plays prime mover Tony Wilson, who narrates the whole trajectory, while a ludicrously strong ensemble, including John Simm, Shirley Henderson, Paddy Considine and Andy Serkis, bring life to the gigantic characters around the label. In a meta twist, real Hacienda and Factory figures like Dave Haslam, Dave Pickering, Howard Devoto and Tony Wilson himself pop up too. "I'm being postmodern," Coogan's Wilson explains, "before it was fashionable."
A Man Called Ove
Based on Fredrik Backman's 2012 book of the same name, this Swedish film is about a grumpy, lonely named Ove (Rolf Lassgård) who spends his days telling off his neighbours. It takes the energy of the young to bring him back to life, as a young family move in next door to him and a friendship begins when they accidentally flatten his mailbox. Wry and heart-warming without being mawkish, A Man Called Ove is uplifting but still wonderfully dour.
Compliance
A fascinating, terrifying true crime thriller about how a hoax caller convinced a manager at a fast food chain to interrogate one of her employees following a theft. This dramatisation of the story, from Mare of Easttown director Craig Zobel, looks at the alarming ways in which we submit to authority and how this overrides our instincts, even when what we are being told to do seems to make no sense. It also features a brilliant performances from Dreama Walker as the compliant employee and Ann Dowd as a Karen-before-her-time manager.
The Salesman
Emad and Rana are a young couple living in Tehran, Iran, who are forced to move out of their apartment, and the history of their new building by chance brings a violent encounter to their doorstep which threatens to undo them. The recipient of two awards at Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award, The Salesman simmers with a tension that always feels about to boil over.
Appropriate Behaviour
Desiree Akhavan directs and stars in this indie drama about an Iranian-American living in Brooklyn who is struggling to come to terms with breaking up with her girlfriend and keeping her bisexuality hidden from her family. Like New York hipster dramas Tiny Furniture and Frances Ha, Appropriate Behaviour mixes heart and humour effortlessly while painting a modern picture of sexuality.
Hustlers
Jennifer Lopez may have never got her Academy Award nomination for Lorene Scafaria's excellent 2019 film, but this strobe-lit dive into the strip clubs and shopping mall excesses of pre-crash New York City shines without a gold statue. Based on a New York Magazine article about strippers who drugged and robbed their clients when they stopped spending, Hustlers is a slick, funny and compelling look at bending the rules when the system is broken.
The Report
Long-time Steven Soderbergh screenwriter Scott Z Burns makes his directing debut in the compelling true story of Senate staffer Daniel J Jones, the man who forensically compiled a report into CIA Detention and Interrogation Program, a scheme which saw the brutal torture of suspects in the wake of 9/11. Adam Driver is excellent as Jones, a character who makes the case for speaking truth to power even at extreme personal cost.
Beautiful Boy
Chronicling a boy's descent into meth addiction and the repeated relapses that follow, Beautiful Boy is told through the eyes of David (Steve Carell), a father who watches his son, Nic (Timothée Chalamet) gradually be consumed by the drug. A role in which Chalamet cements his status as one of the most exciting actors of the moment after his Oscar-nominated performance in Call Me By Your Name.
Fight Club
The first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club.
Crown Heights
Adapted from an episode of the podcast This American Life, Crown Heights looks at the flaws in the criminal justice system through the story of incarcerated Colin Warner. Warner was wrongfully charged with murder after being arrested in Brooklyn and served 20 years for a crime he did not commit. The film focuses on Carl King, Warner's best friend who battles to clear his name and prove his innocence, giving the prison drama format a new angle by showing the people left behind on the outside.
Se7en
David Fincher's 1995 movie, featuring a particularly good performance from Brad Pitt (maybe you've heard of him?) is an edge of your seat tale that has stood the test of time, hitting all of the dramatic beats that a thriller should. The gleefully dark plot follows two detectives (Pitt and Morgan Freeman) who investigate a string of murders in which the victims are killed in gruesomely creative forms, each linked to one of the seven sins. It also features the best cardboard box scene in cinematic history, not that we imagine there's much competition for that particular trophy.
Best comedy movies on Amazon Prime UK
Palm Springs
Does any genre capture the repetitive mundanity of the pandemic better than the time-loop movie? This millennial update on Groundhog Day manages to be much more than that by using the format as a mechanism for both comedy and darkness. The romantic comedy follows a couple who end up trapped at someone else's wedding and struggle to free themselves from the saccharine speeches and bad dancing, much as they try. Forced to relive the same events over and over again, they realise they must face their past in order to move into the future.
Bridesmaids
For decades the stag do was the go-to template for a story of raucous excess and regrettable partying, while hen parties were seen as tame affairs which ended with a nice girly chat. In this extremely funny dive into the duties and obligations of female friends when they are anointed as bridesmaids, we see the laughable and performative rituals which women submit to with much hidden ire. The story follows Annie (Kristen Wiig) who is contending with insufferable roommates and a dead-end job when her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) announces she is getting married. The subsequent carousel of parties and trips to celebrate the nuptials sees Annie competing with Lillian's new best friend in a tale of envy which has surprisingly moving thoughts on how we grow apart from the people we love.
The Big Sick
Arguably one of the great romantic comedies of the last decade, this Academy Award-nominated film is based on the real-life romance between Pakistani-born comedian Kumail Nanjiani and his partner Emily, played in the film by Zoe Kazan. Balancing laugh-out-loud moments and sucker-punch moments of sadness as Emily's health deteriorates, The Big Sick is a story that stays with you.
How To Build a Girl
Caitlin Moran's childhood in Wolverhampton and early years as a music journalist in London are relived in this adaptation of her 2014 novel of the same name. Ladybird and Booksmart's Beanie Feldstein offers up another brilliant female coming-of-age story, this time as lead Johanna Morrigan, a teenage recluse from a large, mad family who wants to escape the Midlands and forge a path as a rock critic, despite knowing nothing about the genre. Feldstein's accent might be a little off the mark, but the story here is moving and entertaining nonetheless.
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
Almost 15 years after terrorising America, Kazakh television presenter Borat Sagdiyev is back to do it all over again. His 2020 update finds him returning to America in the run up to the Presidential election, and having to don disguises thanks to how recognisable he has become around the world. Again, Borat stages outrageous provocations and stunts in a shockumentary which exposes the anti-semitism, racism and misogyny rife across America, as well as showing the sad reluctance of anyone to step in. Of course, we knew all this already, but it's still a worthwhile reminder of how far things have slipped.
Best horror movies on Amazon Prime UK
Cannibal Holocaust
Now, Cannibal Holocaust isn't a particularly good film. It's sleazy and grotty and grubby and gross, and director Ruggero Deodato was an absolute arsehole to pretty much everyone while making it. But it absolutely is a fascinating piece of film history. In the UK this Italian exploitation horror is known as one of the original 'video nasties', unrated and unregulated VHS tapes which sparked a moral panic in the early Eighties. The idea is that an American film crew retrieves documentary footage from the Amazon rainforest apparently showing real murder, rape, torture and massacres. In terms of pure gore you've probably seen worse, but the found footage thing is smartly done and would be picked up and run with by another word-of-mouth sensation 20 years later: The Blair Witch Project.
Scanners
The recent uptick in the amount of skull trauma in horror films is mostly to do with Ari Aster’s clear glee in bonking his characters on the head, but David Cronenberg was handing out pulverized noggins before Aster has belted his first soft-boiled egg to pieces as a toddler. Scanners is about a tiny and apparently dangerous group of said ‘scanners’, people who have telekinetic and mind-reading powers. They can also, if you cross them, make your head explode. One scanner, Cameron, is enlisted to infiltrate and take down a particularly militant sect of scanners, who have been attacking dissenting scanners.
Dawn of the Dead
George A Romero returned to the zombie apocalypse for a second time after the incomparably excellent Night of the Living Dead with this one, which really is incomparable to its predecessor. Where Night of the Living Dead was a visceral scream which sank its teeth into single one of 1968’s flashpoint issues, Dawn of the Dead is altogether jollier, more colourful and more thoroughly laced with a sly humour, but still with a satirical edge. This time, a group of survivors hole up in a shopping mall and discover that – whoda thunk? – buying stuff won’t make you happy. Or, you know, immune to zombies. Make sure you’re watching the 1978 version, by the way.
Saint Maud
The debut from British director Rose Glass's is a horror as supernaturally freaky as The Exorcist, one which echoes Ingmar Bergman's faith trilogy while also conjuring an aura that feels totally its own. We meet young Maud (a chilling debut from Morfydd Clark), a disturbed nurse caring for elderly dancer Amanda (Jennifer Ehle) who spirals into madness as she becomes obsessed with her patient. From the sickly green palette of the seaside town to the array of horrific sounds on display, Saint Maud is truly stomach-turning stuff.
Best documentaries on Amazon Prime UK
Amazing Grace
In 1972, Aretha Franklin recorded her live gospel album, Amazing Grace, at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles. There were plans to turn it into a concert film too, but director Sydney Pollack couldn't sync everything up and it languished in a vault for 50 years. It took Franklin's death for the project to get another life. She had sued to stop its release twice in her lifetime – which is slightly bewildering, given that it shows her on absolutely scorching, righteous, imperious form. If there were ever any doubt that Franklin was the greatest of the greats, Amazing Grace demolishes it.
Make Us Dream
There are a lot of moon-eyed sports docs out there, and Steven Gerrard's hits most of the usual notes. You've seen him bang in that equaliser in the 2006 FA Cup final before. You know how the 2005 European Cup final ended. However, there is one thing that elevates it. It's all framed from his dotage in Los Angeles, where he was doddering around for LA Galaxy, giving everything an elegiac, king-across-the-water feel.
Class of 92
Anyone who's still narked at how decidedly United-centric the BBC's Fever Pitch, a retelling of the early years of the Premier League, ended up will want to give this one a miss, but if you've even the tiniest of soft spots for the buccaneering Manchester United of the Nineties then there's a lot to enjoy here. It goes back into the archives to show how this motley crew of wild and crazy guys came through the youth ranks and ended up forming the spine of the Treble-winning team of 1999. There's beautiful, charming David Beckham; taciturn Nicky Butt; taciturn Ryan Giggs; taciturn Paul Scholes; giddy Gary Neville; and the permanently pie-eyed Phil Neville, who says everything with the slightly incoherent fervency of a 15-year-old who's just watched his first Jordan Peterson TED Talk. Most affectingly, the gang all get back together for a kickabout where everyone except Beckham looks like the middle-aged dads they are.
The Four Year Plan
This documentary is a time capsule in a couple of ways. For one thing, Queens Park Rangers' attempts to launch themselves into the riches of the Premier League back in 2007 now seem to belong to a far less giddily inflated era. (The big masterplan is to spend £250,000 on Gavin Mahon? Look out, Europe!) For another, the advent of the glossy brand-polishing exercises for Manchester City, Juventus, Leeds United and other clubs means The Four Year Plan now stands as the last of the great fly-on-the-wall docs, a British mini-industry which brought us mud-splattered gems like Premier Passions, Chester City: An American Dream and Orient: Club For a Fiver. The Four Year Plan has that blend of wild-eyed ambition and thundering incompetence which made those docs so gripping.
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Diego Maradona
Asif Kapadia, the director behind hard-hitting and acclaimed documentaries about Amy Winehouse and Ayrton Senna, here turns his attention to the footballing legend Diego Maradona and tries to untangle the man who became more than a myth. Made before Maradona's death, Kapadia gets access to the man himself, though he is typically evasive and contrarian. What is more interesting is hearing from his coaches and family members and understanding how a boy from a shantytown on the outskirts of Buenos Aires went on to become the greatest footballer ever. The story has it all: shady mobsters, a secret love child, a godlike figure who fell from grace and the “Goal of the Century”, at least according to FIFA.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
The level of craft that goes into making some of the world's best sushi becomes almost ASMR porn in this charming documentary about Jiro, the 94-year-old owner of a three-Michelin star restaurant in a Tokyo subway station. Telling the story of the pressure his two sons face in trying to live up to his name and continue the family business, Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a moving family portrait which unpacks the customs of cooking in Japan.
Time
This love story tells of the two decade battle of mother Fox Rich to free her husband from Louisiana State Penitentiary, where he is serving a 60-year prison sentence for a robbery they both committed in the early Nineties in an act of desperation. Garrett Bradley's beautifully shot black and white documentary shows Fox attempting to survive while raising for her six sons, the film's title a nod to the sentence Rob G Rich must serve, as well as representing the passage of time which his wife is condemned to suffer without him. Time is a reminder of the people behind bars, and a condemnation of the brutal prison industry.
The Dissident
A true crime documentary that works backwards, The Dissident begins with the murder that shook the world in the story of how Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated while inside an embassy in 2018. From the director of Oscar-winning Icarus, the story then tracks back to show how the group of people responsible knew they would get away with it, a belief which has been proved tragically correct.
Halston
2021 brought us a new mini-series version of the storied designer, but this 2019 documentary offers a less Ryan Murphy, more forensic look at the life of Roy Halston Frowick. Threading together rare archival footage as well as interviews with the friends and family members who knew him best to paint a portrait of the man who upended the fashion scene, it transports you to Seventies New York in the process.
Super Size Me
When Morgan Spurlock's fast food jeremiad was released back in 2004, it revealed the pushy practises deployed by McDonald's to shift ever-increasing quantities of junk food on people, putting their health at serious risk. The Sundance-winning documentary sees Spurlock spend a month chowing down solely on food from the golden arches, watching as he rapidly gains weight, struggles with his energy levels and other, more worrying, side effects. The clean eating and wellness movements might have swept in in the time since Super Size Me, but the reliance on quick and affordable food has only grown as wealth inequality has spiralled. As such, this exposé on the food many people have no choice but to eat is still sadly relevant today.
Whitney
Part of a rarefied group of stars who are identifiable by just their first name, the legend of Whitney Houston is demystified in this powerful 2018 documentary about her life. The film comes from director Kevin McDonald, who won an Oscar for his doc about the 1972 murder of 11 Israeli athletes, One Day in September, and here McDonald expertly uses interviews and archival footage to show a different side to Whitney. Contrasting the media portrayal of the singer with the troubles she faced in private, Whitney follows in the footsteps of documentaries like Amy in rewriting the public perception of the figures people think they know.
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