If you’re looking to have a quiet, chill New Year’s Day (maybe to recover from an abundance of joy on New Year’s Eve), there are worse ways to spend the day than by catching up on a movie or two. If you’re looking for some movies to check out, though, Prime Video may have exactly what you need.
There are plenty of titles worth checking out on the service, but we’ve selected three that are particularly great. From a recent Oscar juggernaut to one of the funniest heist movies ever made, these are three movies you should definitely watch on New Year’s Day.
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Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
If you haven’t caught up with 2022’s Best Picture winner yet, New Year’s Day might be the perfect excuse to catch up with this movie and kick off the new year on the right foot. Everything Everywhere All at Once tells the story of a laundromat owner who becomes ensnared in a multiversal battle for the fate of the universe and, most importantly, realizes how beautiful her simple, stressful life is.
Featuring the kind of raw imagination that few movies even attempt, Everything Everywhere is a hilarious comedy, a riveting drama, and a great action movie all rolled into one package. Add in wonderful central performances from Stephanie Hsu, Ke-Huy Quan, and especially Michelle Yeoh, and you’ve got a recipe for one of the best Best Picture winners in recent memory.
Memento (2001)
Christopher Nolan fully announced that he would be a director to watch with 2001’s Memento, which contains the seeds of much of what the director would eventually be fascinated with over the course of his career. Telling the story of a man with short-term memory loss who wants desperately to find the man who killed his wife, Memento tells its story both backward and forward in time, with the two timelines converging in the center of the narrative.
All of that may sound like the recipe for an insanely convoluted story, but Memento always feels crystal clear. That clear narrative throughline makes Memento work and signals what a great director Nolan would eventually become with movies like The Dark Knight and Oppenheimer.
A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
A crime comedy the likes of which we simply don’t get anymore, A Fish Called Wanda tells the story of a diamond heist gone wrong and the aftermath of that messy heist. The brilliance of the movie, though, is that it makes almost no attempt to take its central criminals seriously.
Instead, it gives each member of its cast a chance to show what they’re truly made of by putting them in a series of increasingly farcical situations, including one running bit in which a man tries desperately to kill an old woman who witnessed the heist and fails in increasingly convoluted ways. Kevin Kline won an Oscar for his performance here, and he’s far from the only member of this ensemble cast who is doing Oscar-worthy work.
