The 50 best movies on Prime Video Australia
Incorporating the fabled MGM, a Hollywood studio literally 100 years old, Amazon Prime Video has a huge and eclectic selection of movies available to stream. Critic Craig Mathieson lists 50 of the best.
There was always going to be a film version of George Orwell’s enduringly influential novel of totalitarian dominance in the year of its iconic title. Thankfully filmmaker Michael Radford was able to capture its dystopian extremes with John Hurt as the bureaucrat who dares to grasp at freedom and Richard Burton, magnificent in his final screen role, as the ruling system’s unyielding tormentor.
A ramshackle residence in 1979 Santa Barbara inhabited by a single mother (Annette Bening), her teenage son (Lucas Jade Zumann), and various tenants comes alive—with conversation, dance, ideas, hopes—in Mike Mills’ coming-of-age drama. These lives unfold with tender insight and a sense of personal histories being discovered in the moment.
One of the great Australian debuts of all time, and an equally great horror film from Jennifer Kent, where the monster is not only under the bed but also inside Essie Davis’ besieged parent. Whether it’s fear of love or love of fear, this claustrophobic thriller lodges itself where it can’t be ignored.
Italian neorealism was born out of the rubble of World War II, as young filmmakers found a stripped-down means of expression on the barely liberated streets of Rome. Shot on location with actors and non-actors, Vittorio De Sica’s classic is a story of poverty’s grasp, the paternal bond’s painful parameters, and lost illusions.
David Lynch’s psychosexual classic has many thriller elements including police corruption, a kidnapped child, and Isabella Rossellini’s mysterious woman. It also has an obsession with sexual innocence and discovery, a perverse fascination for American piety, and Dennis Hopper as an explosive sociopath. It’s a bracing masterpiece, direct and unadulterated.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s finest creation, bumbling Kazakhstani journalist Borat Sagdiyev, returns to the scene of the crime as he tours Donald Trump’s America for a candid camera documentary that reveals xenophobia and the paranoid conspiracy mindset. There’s a shocking moment with a notable Trump associate as Borat continues to be both a hilarious figure and a deeply incisive mirror.
Australia’s belief in defining itself through the deeds of soldiers is torn apart in Bruce Beresford’s ground-breaking examination of war crimes, scapegoats, and imperial hypocrisy as a trio of Australian combatants fighting in the Boer War—memorably played by Edward Woodward, Bryan Brown, and Lewis Fitz-Gerald—face a court-martial.
Raunchy without being provocative, yet never afraid to examine the dynamics between female friends, Paul Feig’s breakout hit turned the cast into comic movie stars. Co-writer Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, and Rose Byrne all shine, as preparations for a wedding collapse from one mishap to the next.
Based on the real-life story of two Mafia associates—Robert De Niro’s shrewd numbers cruncher and Joe Pesci’s brutal gangster—given the run of Las Vegas in the 1970s, Martin Scorsese’s organised crime epic reveals the yin and yang of his masculine longing. There are numerous sequences that pulse with the purest of filmmaking pleasure, but the transformative note is played by Sharon Stone as a Vegas insider who moves between the two men, even though she knows the fix is always in.
Directed and shot with irresistible clarity and momentum by Steven Soderbergh, this apocalyptic procedural follows a deadly new virus arriving in America (via
Gwyneth Paltrow’s patient zero) and collapsing society. Marr Damon’s dad hunkers down, Kate Winslet’s public health worker fights back, and Jude Law’s prescient blogger shills conspiracy theories. Deeply authentic; deeply scary.
Robert Connolly’s outback noir thriller about culpability and regret stars Eric Bana as a financial crimes police officer who returns to the hometown he fled as a teenager to investigate a horrific crime attributed to his best friend. Less interested in plot twists than allowing the drought-stricken landscape and its frayed inhabitants to take hold, it’s a masterful Australian genre piece.
If you’ve ever had a bad thought about Tom Cruise, this alien invasion blockbuster is the film for you: his character, callow soldier William Cage, endlessly dies in a daily loop tied to an alien attack in Europe. Respawning like a video game character, William trains with a hardnosed warrior, Emily Blunt’s Rita Vrataski, as the battlefield carnage becomes the blackest of jokes and dying becomes the only way to stay alive.
A film in which the possibility that everyone gets out alive is as horrifying as no-one, this immersive and empathetic slow burn thriller took the filmmaking team—and lead actors—Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead into the mainstream. The pair play brothers who revisit the rural home of the cult they fled a decade prior, discovering unknown forces that could be economic inequality or Lovecraftian monsters—or a mix of the two.
WATCH ON PRIME VIDEORidley Scott’s revival of the swords-and-sandals genre is a canny blockbuster, focusing on the noble Roman general Maximus (Russell Crowe), who’s supreme in battle but betrayed by politics. Cast into slavery by a jealous new emperor (Joaquin Phoenix), he uses success as a gladiator to steer him toward revenge and a satisfactory death. It’s a doomed scheme, but the digital spectacle helps render it heroic.
WATCH ON PRIME VIDEOSergio Leone’s classic spaghetti western—with Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach as the titular gunslingers—is the epitome of grisly frontier elegance. The final instalment of the Italian filmmaker’s Dollars trilogy is a study in widescreen panoramas and sweat-strewn close-ups. It’s a masterclass in direction. 
This star-studded epic about a mass breakout from a German prison camp during WWII is full of immersive details and cockily composed star turns. Steve McQueen and his motorbike will forever be iconic, but James Garner, James Coburn, and Richard Attenborough all chip in, and director John Sturges maintains diligent momentum all the way to a tragic coda.
A heady mix of Arthurian legend, folk horror, mediaeval comedy and revisionist fantasy, David Lowery’s incantatory epic stars Dev Patel as Gawain, a knight forced into a fantastical quest to determine his identity and survive. Unexpectedly challenged at each turn, his very existence is a mystery.
A comedy so perfectly crafted that it appeals after countless viewings, Harold Ramis’ classic stars Bill Murray as an abrasive weatherman trapped in a day that he lives on endless repeat. The existential conundrum is both hilarious and telling, complete with Andie MacDowell as the perfect foil.
Michael Mann’s riveting crime saga—which places Robert De Niro’s master thief and Al Pacino’s driven police detective at professional odds—criss-crosses Los Angeles with procedural intricacy, underworld twists, and taut action set pieces. It’s a tale of cops and crooks told with startling personal intimacy; the women connected to these men are crucial characters.
“Dear diary, my teen angst bullshit now has a body count.” The seminal satire of the teen movie genre, Michael Lehmann’s scorching black comed—determined to bite every hand that would even think of feeding it—offers a bleakly hilarious high school critique with note-perfect performances from Winona Ryder and Christian Slater.
Gillian Armstrong reunited with her My Brilliant Career star, Judy Davis, for this bittersweet and beautifully observed drama about three generations of women—Claudia Karvan’s teenage daughter, Davis as a long-absent mother, and Jan Adele’s wary grandmother—reunited in a wintry New South Wales coast town. It’s an essential Australian movie.
Is there a better screwball comedy from Hollywood’s Golden Age? Absolutely not. Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell are aces together as a pair of divorced newspaper reporters whose farewell gets side-tracked by a breaking story. With wisecracks and witticisms delivered at madcap speed, this is a timeless Howard Hawks classic.
Quentin Tarantino, as is his wont, turns World War II’s textbook facts and the role of cinema into an alternate history spaghetti western where in 1944 a unit comprised of Jewish-American soldiers commanded by Aldo “Apache” Raine (Brad Pitt), campaign behind German lines in occupied France while Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy come to Paris for a film premiere. Christoph Waltz got an international career out of his mercurial Nazi sadist, Colonel Hans Landa.
Set in the end days of an apocalyptic pandemic that’s left a palpable sense of fear among the few survivors, this psychological horror film from Trey Edward Shults about one sequestered family taking in another is menacingly suggestive.
By my count Keanu Reeves’ retired assassin kills 76 people as an act of revenge, after his beloved pooch is murdered by a crime lord’s son. But what’s notable is how stuntmen turned directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch eschew jump cuts for lengthy tracking shots. The head shots and vicious stabbings are as choreographed as a Busby Berkeley routine.
This madcap brick symphony is a riot of visual and verbal gags, in which blocky everyman Emmett Brickowski (Chris Pratt at his most goofily appealing) learns that creativity is right and corporate tie-ins can be repurposed for hilarious laughs. Blockbuster conventions are busted, while the likes of Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett, and Liam Neeson add exemplary voice work.
Watch on Prime VideoBill Forsyth’s idiosyncratic 1983 comedy is the source code for successive generations of quirky independent features about small towns and their eccentric populace charming outsiders. But it remains the first and the best, with Peter Riegert as the American envoy of Burt Lancaster’s Texan oil magnate, who is sent to purchase a tiny Scottish town and quickly becomes unstuck.
Peter Jackson and a small army of New Zealand collaborators set the modern ideal of the fantasy epic in stone with this epic middle instalment of the Tolkien trilogy where good and evil clash on both vast and intimate levels and the technical skill—as much physical as digital—brings a world into being.
An ode to ennui and wearing Marc Jacobs, Sofia Coppola’s now totemic second feature has some brief cultural cliches, but they’re easily overcome by the platonic bond created by Bill Murray’s ageing movie star and Scarlett Johansson’s becalmed young wife. The duo pal around Tokyo’s neon nights and ponder their lives, sharing a bittersweet cinematic moment as the future looms.
The American neo-noir thriller gets unbound desire and fantastical flourishes in this bracing update from English filmmaker Rose Glass, which tells a deception-laden story about the lesbian relationship between a gym clerk (Kristen Stewart) and an itinerant body builder (Katy O’Brian). Roid rage takes on a whole new meaning.
The team of director Nadia Tass and screenwriter David Parker nailed a mix of gentle whimsy, unlikely friendship, and madcap set-pieces for this eccentric heist comedy about a shy Melbourne engineering genius (Colin Friels)—he builds his own tram!—who takes on an ex-con (John Hargreaves) as a boarder and finds himself in a criminal enterprise. An absolute pleasure.
Appearances can be deceiving: Todd Haynes turns this drama about an actress (Natalie Portman) embedding herself in the family of the woman she’ll be playing in a biopic (Julianne Moore), who was jailed for having sex with a boy and subsequently marrying him when grown up (Charles Melton), into a terrifying black comedy about control, role-playing, and the past’s imprecise but cruel grip.
In Christopher Nolan’s noirish second feature, Guy Pearce plays a man whose memory has stopped working, so he tattoos facts on his body. The picture is run in reverse, each scene followed by the one that chronologically preceded it, giving you the same information as Leonard has—i.e. none—and a sense of how unsettling that is. It’s thrilling puzzle; every piece hurts.
Patty Jenkins’ dramatization of the adult life and crimes of Eileen Wuornos, the roadside prostitute who was convicted of killing six clients and subsequently executed in Florida in 2002, has an enthralling double act in Charlize Theron as Wuornos and Christina Ricci as her needy girlfriend Selby. Optimism and bitter manipulation unexpectedly collide, cutting deeper than any criminal transgressions.
Using point-of-view shots to show us not only what a character sees, but how they feel and remember, RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel about a Black teenager sent to a detention centre in segregated 1960s Florida is an often staggering exploration of history and hope. The movie is vivid, beautiful, and heartbreaking.
At 219 minutes, this is the cut of Sergio Leone’s gangster epic that the revered Italian filmmaker originally submitted. Robert De Niro and James Woods play Prohibition mobsters, matched through illuminating flashbacks as penniless childhood from New York’s slums, in a richly textured vision of American greed and violence.
Australian director Justin Kurzel shows a disciplined mastery of genre tropes with this lean, satisfying crime thriller, based on historic events from 1980s America. Jude Law, in full character actor mode, plays the weary FBI agent who discovers a white nationalist clique, inspired by Nicholas Hoult’s menacingly charismatic leader.
Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti are aces together in this barbed time loop romantic comedy, where a wedding party in the titular American resort town soon turns into one guest trapping another in his endlessly repeated life. This is Groundhog Day, but it’s a first-rate riff that makes much of the leads and hits on unexpected twists and realisations. It manages to be both funnier and sadder than you expect.
After a decade outside Hollywood, director Robert Altman made the perfect return with this tart satire about a Hollywood studio executive (Tim Robbins) being blackmailed by a scorned writer. It’s a black comedy awash in celebrity cameos and bit parts, as Altman and writer Michael Tolkin send up storytelling tropes and the heroic leading man.
Director Michael Mann and masterful Italian cinematographer Dante Spinotti used high definition digital cameras to remove the past from this 1930s gangster drama. There’s a narrative immediacy and dynamic verisimilitude to the historic exploits of John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), a bank robber and calculate charmer pursued by Christian Bale’s Melvin Purvis, an agent with the nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In Woody Allen’s terrific Depression era comedy, a struggling waitress named Cecilia (Mia Farrow) escapes her dismal life by basking in the glow of Hollywood movies. Then a character from her favourite screwball comedy (Jeff Daniels) walks off the screen and professes his love for her. Chaos erupts, in multiple realities, in a sweetly delirious comedy with just a touch of existential fear.
The wonderful New Zealand actor Bruno Lawrence, best known to Australian audiences as the conniving producer in television’s Frontline, gives a magnetic performance as a scientist who wakes one day to discover that his project has erased the world of other people. Freedom and fear spin out of control, with director Geoff Murphy making the possibilities feel claustrophobic.
An underseen Australian classic, this modern-day western is a palpably direct B-movie that offered a prescient depiction of how misogyny can metastasise into sexual violence. Deborra-Lee Furness is the motorcycle-riding barrister who stops in a small town for repairs and discovers that the community condones by silence a group of young men gang-raping local girls. Her defiance is both inspirational and costly.
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s sublime family drama, which rightfully collected the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, unfolds on the tucked away margins of Japanese society, where a multi-generational clan lives in a tiny apartment. Observed with tender, telling detail, their lives spill out of the overcrowded home in much the same way that a need for caring and connection spills out from their hearts.
A horror film told through female endurance, Denis Villeneuve’s crime thriller stars Emily Blunt as an FBI door-kicker seconded to a drug cartel task force, menacingly staffed by Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro, whose purpose is at odds with her belief and, ultimately, her safety.
No-one expected Jonathan Demme to follow Something Wild and Married to the Mob with a grisly immersion in the methodology of serial killers. But his tender, inquisitive eye created the chaste bond between a determined rookie FBI agent (Jodie Foster) and an incarcerated monster (Anthony Hopkins). Horror’s gaze and masterful performances give the story a gripping resonance.
Paul Feig updates the camaraderie and competition of female friendship for the influencer age with this wildly knowing and genre-defying melodrama about school mums—Anna Kendrick’s over-achiever and Blake Lively’s flamboyant publicist—whose friendship becomes a mystery when one of them disappears.
The cruel dictates of inequality are magnified to rousing heights in a dystopian allegory about mankind’s return to feudal ranking aboard a train circling an otherwise frozen globe. Chris Evans leads the oppressed masses through the carriages, heading towards the 1% and unpalatable truths about power, propelled by the coiled energy of director Bong Joon-ho.
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher witheringly dissect online culture and venture capitalism through the origin tale of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg). With women’s verdicts bookending the movie, the drama moves from Harvard to Palo Alto, echoing previous American studies of wealth and power, such as Citizen Kane.
Forget the sequels. James Cameron’s lean, pulsating B-movie, made cheap and propulsive, is still a science-fiction classic that makes perfect use of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the relentless cyborg from an apocalyptic future pursuing Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn’s desperate fugitives.
Long before the middle-aged deduction of CSI: Crime Investigation, a young William Petersen was a bravura force of nature. His most committed—as in, unhinged—performance was in William Friedkin’s action thriller, playing a Secret Service agent who breaks the law to catch Willem Dafoe’s kinky counterfeiter. Does Friedkin top his The French Connection car chase? He gives it a serious try.
Walkabout (1971)
WATCH ON PRIME VIDEONicolas Roeg, a British filmmaker of peculiar originality, set the scene for the Australian New Wave with this revered classic about a pair of white children stranded in the outback. Their journey with the Aboriginal teenager who aids them (David Gulpilil, in a remarkable debut performance) is defined by striking imagery, cultural exclusion, and nature’s primal grasp. A timeless survival film.
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