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.
The Night of the Hunter
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.
Grizzly Man
Today’s streaming platforms are dominated by sensational stories strung together through archival footage and iPhone videos — whatever horrors you want to dunk your head into, you can do it 24/7 on Netflix, Prime Video, or other. So maybe Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man won’t look as revelatory as it did back in 2005, when peeking into the self-shot lives of others was basically contained to America’s Funniest Home Videos.
But I doubt it: As is the case with many of his documentaries, Herzog goes deeper into the psychology of his subject, conservationist Timothy Treadwell, and allows viewers to peer deeply into recovered footage. Treadwell spent a good portion of his later life in Katmai National Park, Alaska, where he studied — and became increasingly close to — the local brown bear population. But in 2003, Treadwell and his girlfriend were mauled and reportedly consumed by one of the elder bears. It was the first known incident of a bear killing a human in the park.
What happened? Herzog’s questions go beyond your typical 20/20 exposé, creating a dimensional portrait of Treadwell, who expressed a love for the bear population and a fear of poacher activity. Was he losing his mind, a mad genius who got closer than any human ever could to the bears, or both? Herzog doesn’t come to any easy answers, but instead basks in Treadwell’s personal filmmaking.
Snack Shack
I debated putting Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation or Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men in this third slot because they are both unobjectionable masterpieces. Instead, I will recommend Snack Shack, a profane story of friendship molded in the shape of 1980s horndog comedies that would never in a million years be grouped in a collection of “masterpieces,” but should be. What a feat of compassion and comedy — that basically no one saw in 2024!
Gabriel LaBelle (The Fabelmans) and Conor Sherry (Happy Gilmore 2) star as two high-school grifters who will do anything to score a few bucks and smoke a few cigarettes. In the future, they will either be bums at the local horse track or billionaire CEOs — but in the summer of 1991, they are the accidental new owners of their pool’s snack shack, a pit they turn into a goldmine operation.
Writer-director Adam Carter Rehmeier has a strong handle on how to portray a Real Teen Boy — they drink, they cuss, they melt in the face of genuine emotion. Like a classic summer movie, the boys get into plenty of trouble and meet a girl who will warp their lives forever. So yeah, Snack Shack follows the trope-y beats of a teen comedy, but like a classically trained pianist pounding out Mozart. Even the movie’s sappy melodramatic turns got me in the end. A masterpiece of a genre.
