The 30 best movies to stream on Prime Video UK

Director: RaMell Ross

Cast: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater

Adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into an impressionistic collage of images, memories and dreams, the debut narrative feature from documentarian RaMell Ross does nothing less than reinvent the language of cinema. Shot entirely from first-person perspective, it follows two Black teenagers whose lives intertwine at a brutal reform school in the Jim Crow South. Far more than wallowing in the horrors of institutional racism, Ross’s bold formal approach engenders a radical sort of empathy. A true triumph.

Director: Jonathan Glazer

Cast: Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Johann Karthaus

Jonathan Glazer reinvents the Holocaust drama in startling fashion, dispassionately observing the home life of Auschwitz camp commander Rudolph Höss (Friedel) and his family. Within the walls of their dreamhouse, which conveniently abuts the father’s place of work, genocide is merely a career path, the din of screams and gunshots from next door forming a background noise no different than the sounds of big-city traffic. In showing the true banality of evil, Glazer dispels the notion of Nazism as a historical aberration — the Hösses could be you, me, anyone, and exist at any time, even now. 

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Albert Brooks, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston

Before he was Just Ken, Ryan Gosling was just the Driver, an anonymous, nearly mute Hollywood stuntman-turned-criminal getaway driver trying to break free of the gangster he’s fallen in with. Nicolas Winding Refn’s icy-cool action-noir is, as the kids might say, the vibiest movie of the 2010s, with a retro-synth soundtrack, sudden outbursts of ultraviolence and the most badass satin jacket in movie history. Adding to the vibes is Albert Brooks, playing a villain for the first time in his career and absolutely crushing it. 

Director: Greg Kwedar

Cast: Colman Domingo, Clarence Maclin, Sean San José

A group of prisoners at New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility find hope and meaning through a penitentiary theatre program. Sound like middlebrow Sundance stuff? Think again. Casting actual alums of the program alongside the tremendous Colman Domingo lends the film an unfakeable emotional authenticity. Maclin, in particular, deserved an Oscar nomination as much as Domingo.

A movie about the election of a new pope sounds like a solemn affair, but not with these messy bitches. Edward Berger’s papal drama contains all the shady dealings of a political potboiler, with twists straight out of a daytime soap. (Call it All My Cardinals.) The uniformly excellent cast plays it straight, while Berger supplies a handful of stunning visuals. It’s divine entertainment.

Director: Sidney Lumet

Cast: Henry Fonda, Lee J Cobb, Ed Begley

Sidney Lumet started his legendary filmmaking career by making one of the greatest legal dramas of all-time. A young Puerto Rican boy is on trial for murder. Only one member of the all-male, all-white jury (Fonda) believes he’s innocent. Can he convince the others to change their vote? Lumet somehow makes 90 minutes in a single room listening to a volley of arguments and deliberations as riveting as any war film. 

Director: Luca Guadagino

Cast: Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist

Sports and sex are interchangeable in Luca Guadagino’s hot-blooded menage a trois of manipulation, competition and the occasional three-way kiss. Zendaya is an injured tennis phenom projecting her scuttled career ambitions onto her husband (Faist), whose own comeback is complicated by the re-emergence of his estranged former doubles partner (O’Connor), who also happens to be his wife’s ex. It’s Guadagino’s most ‘pop’ movie, but also probably his horniest – which is saying something.

Director: Regina King

Cast: Leslie Odom Jr, Eli Goree, Aldis Hodge, Kingsley Ben-Adir

Oscar-winner Regina King's strong directorial debut feature is an instant classic of the "what if" genre in which Cassius Clay (Goree), Jim Brown (Hodge), Malcolm X (Ben-Adir) and Sam Cooke (Oscar nominee Odom) spend an electric night together amid the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement they each impacted in a very different way. 

Director: Michael Showalter

Cast: Kumail Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan, Holly Hunter, Ray Romano

Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani, the real-life couple who penned this film, give us a Pakistani-American culture-shock romance that isn’t awash with clichés. We meet Emily (Zoe Kazan plays Gordon’s on-screen surrogate) and Kumail (Nanjiani plays a version of himself) just before Emily falls into a coma. Suddenly for Kumail, there’s heartache, hospitals and parents to deal with.

Director: Osgood Perkins

Cast: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood

A throwback to the dark FBI procedurals of the 1990s, the first great movie from writer-director Osgood ‘Son of Anthony’ Perkins opens a pit in your stomach in the first minutes, then proceeds to backfill it with an almost nauseating sense of dread in every scene that follows. Nic Cage, looking like a cross between Marilyn Manson and a crazy cat lady, is the titular serial killer who purports to serve ‘the man downstairs’, but the true star is It Follows’ Maika Monroe, mesmerising (and seemingly hypnotised) as the rookie agent tracking him down.

Director: Michael Winterbottom

Cast: Steve Coogan, Lennie James, John Thomson

Michael Winterbottom’s document of the Manchester punk scene of the late ’70s and ’80s plays as fast and loose with the facts as the bands did with their music, which is really the only accurate way to depict an era in which everybody was either perpetually soused, pilled-up or prone to grandiose mythmaking. And then there’s Steve Coogan, reliably hilarious as Tony Wilson, the TV presenter who became the scene’s unlikely benefactor, bringing Joy Division to the world then overseeing the dawn of rave culture. All in all, it’s the only music biopic that matters.

Director: Na Hong-jin

Cast: Jun Kunimura, Jung-min Hwang, Kwak Do-won

A police officer (Do-won) scrambles to find a cure for a mysterious illness ravaging a small Korean town before it can claim his daughter. At nearly three hours, The Wailing scans as a formidable watch, and it moves slowly enough that it will cause the impatient to fidget. But give yourself over to its trancelike pace, and you’ll realise why the film has been hailed as a masterpiece of atmospheric horror.

Director: David Lowery

Cast: Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton

Although it was snubbed during award season, this artful retelling of the Arthurian legend was one of the standout films of 2021. It’s the sort of imaginative, large-scale cinematic adventure that plays equally well for literature nerds and mass audiences. (Too bad it came out when the theatres were still closed due to Covid.) Patel is excellent as Sir Gawain, impetuous nephew of King Arthur, who decides to test his mettle against a formidable knight with supernatural powers. 

Director: George A Romero

Cast: David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H Reiniger

George A Romero invented the modern zombie movie with Night of the Living Dead, then reinvented it ten years later. Where the first film used the undead as an allegory for the American racial strife of the late 1960s, its sequel, set in a Philadelphia shopping mall, tackles consumer culture, with more (ahem) biting humour and advanced levels of gore courtesy of splatter master Tom Savini. 

Love The Studio? Robert Altman’s Hollywood satire is required follow-up viewing. For one thing, Bryan Cranston’s loopy, drug-hoovering CEO, Griffin Mill, is named after Tim Robbins’ character here, a paranoid studio exec threatened by a disgruntled screenwriter. Beyond that, the show shares similar themes, namely the cynical operating procedures of the movie industry – and it features many cameos from celebrities playing themselves, including Cher, Bruce Willis and Burt Reynolds. 

Director: Emerald Fennell

Castr: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike

Whatever you think of Emerald Fennell’s so-far polarising filmography, you certainly think something. In her ambitious follow-up to 2020’s Promising Young Woman, a broke Oxford student (Keoghan) ingratiates himself to an uber-wealthy classmate (Elordi), getting invited to spend the summer with his weirdo family at their sprawling estate. Admittedly, the wheels fall off the plot in the third act. Luckily, there’s much more to latch onto, from the lush cinematography to the idiosyncratic performances to Keoghan’s buns-out dance routine set to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’.

Director: Jason Woliner

Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Maria Bakalova

What’s that saying? ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice? Very nice!’ How Sacha Baron Cohen, in the guise of bumbling Kazakh reporter Borat Sagdiyev, could prank America again, after his first mockumentary was one of the biggest comedy films of the aughts, is hard to fathom. But then, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the Proud Boys and Rudy Giuliani. Special commendation goes to Maria Bakalova, as Borat’s teenage daughter, whose commitment to going all the way for a joke rivals Coen’s own.

Director: Max Barbakow

Cast: Andy Samberg, Christin Milioti, JK Simmons

This hipster take on Groundhog Day arrived at the exact moment most of us felt trapped in an infinite, inescapable time loop. Turns out its delirious, inventive and endearing tale of disaffected thirtysomethings forced to relive a destination wedding over and over was exactly what we all needed. 

Director: Michael Showalter

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Nicholas Galitzine, Ella Rubin

A movie was bound to feature a Coachella meet-cute eventually, but who would have guessed it’d involve a pop star and an attendee’s mother? And who thought the film itself would turn out to be so tender, thoughtful and funny? Michael Showalter, director of The Big Sick, has a way of finding genuine humanity within improbable romcom setups, and this viral hit, starring Nicholas Galitzine as a Harry Styles avatar and Anne Hathaway as the single mother who enraptures him, is another winner.

Director: J Blakeson

Cast: Rosamund Pike, Peter Dinklage, Diane Wiest

For the first time since Gone Girl, Rosamund Pike breaks bad — really, really bad — in this hyper-stylized black comedy with ice coursing through its veins. Pike stars as a lioness of a con-woman who oversees court-appointed conservatorships (sound familiar?), only to bilk the elderly for all they're worth. Unfortunately for her — and fortunately for us — her latest mark has ties to a particularly violent gangster, pitting the rotten-to-the-core Pike in a game of cunning against all manner of sharks. 

Director: Dario Argento

Cast: Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini

Giallo master Argento's best-known work remains a marvel, taking a incomprehensible story about a ballet school lorded over by a murderous witch and turning it into the most vivid fever dream of its era. Guided by an iconic score by Italian prog rock outfit Goblin, the film is delirious and unforgettable, packed with bold colors and boundary-pushing kills that liven up its acid-trip fairytale intensity. Amazon's Luca Guadagnino-directed 2018 reimagining is worth a look too, but Argento's vision remains essential viewing. 

Director: Darius Marder

Cast: Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Paul Raci

The great Riz Ahmed gives a revelatory, career-best performance in this somber, touching drama about a heavy-metal drummer coming to terms with the fact that his hearing is deteriorating at a rapid pace. With its landmark sound design and stunning central performances, the film is an absolute stunner, at once heartbreaking and uplifting. 

Director: Ben Affleck

Cast: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman

If Jerry Seinfeld’s Pop-Tart movie is the nadir of the ‘consumer-product origin story’ trend, then its height was this dramatisation of Nike’s pursuit of Michael Jordan and the creation of the most iconic sneaker of all-time. Ben Affleck, as director and in the role of company founder Phil Knight, infuses this ’80s-set corporate underdog tale with the appropriate amount of energy, humour and garish tracksuits. Sure, you can argue it’s still a crass monument to capitalist idolatry, but who doesn’t think Air Jordans are one of mankind’s greatest inventions?

Director: Kenneth Lonergan

Cast: Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams

American director and playwright Kenneth Lonergan's film isn't about rebounding as much as coping. That’s what makes it so dark and courageous; it says that, for some people, there won’t be any moving on from grief. Moveover, Casey Affleck burns the screen in the early scenes, building up a portrait of a solitary existence. It's a film of almost unbearable honesty.

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Cast: Terence Stamp, Peter Fonda, Luis Guzmán

Coming right before the legacy-cementing run of Erin Brockovich, Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven, Steven Soderbergh’s relatively small crime dramedy has wound up largely overshadowed within the director’s filmography, but it’s as good as anything he’s done. Terence Stamp is a British ex-con fresh out of jail who travels to LA to investigate the suspicious death of his estranged daughter. Stamp is terrifically intense, with a thick Cockney accent that’s hilariously difficult to understand. But the film itself is funny, violent and sad in equal measure.

Director: Tina Satter

Cast: Sydney Sweeney, Josh Hamilton, Marchant Davis

Sydney Sweeney, in her first real chance to prove herself away from the teensploitation soap opera of Euphoria, impresses as Reality Winner, the NSA translator convicted of leaking classified government documents related to Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election. Based on Tina Satter’s own stage play, itself a verbatim transcript of Winner’s FBI interrogation, the film plays out as a tense verbal tête-à-tête, with a few touches of surrealism. Otherwise, all eyes are on Sweeney, and she’s never less than riveting. 

Director: JC Chandor

Cast: Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto

You don’t need a finance degree or a subscription to The Economist to be gripped by this recession thriller. Documenting the sudden implosion of an investment bank over the course of 24 hours, it’s an impressively smart corporate procedural that refuses to talk down to the audience, but also never goes over its head, and the all-star cast ensures everyone gets the message.    

Director: Felix van Groeningen

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Steve Carell

Timothée Chalamet does major things in this new movie – things that no other actor of his generation is attempting – in this film about a college-bound kid derailed by drugs based on the dual father-son memoirs of David and Nic Sheff. 

Director: Doug Liman

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Daniela Melchior, Conor McGregor

Did the world need a remake of Road House, the stupid-awesome ’80s classic where Patrick Swayze works as a bouncer at the most violent bar in America? Not really. But if you’re going to do it, it’s best to retain the original’s meatheaded, pain-don’t-hurt spirit — no pseudo-intellectualising, no ‘gritty reimagining’. In that regard, Doug Liman’s MMA-infused reboot, with Jake Gyllenhaal assuming the Swayze role, does right by its predecessor, and the results aren’t half bad. Pity no one got paid for it.

Director: Paul Downs Colaizzo

Cast: Jillian Bell, Jennifer Dundas

Jillian Bell shines as the titular character in this enearing and earnest film about self-acceptance and body positivty that, thanks to some complex comedy about health, fat-shaming and the relentless forward momentum of being a New Yorker, sidesteps any cheesy pitfalls.