As a streaming service, Amazon Prime Video sometimes doesn’t get the credit it deserves. It has a pretty solid lineup of great movies, and some of those movies are so obviously great that you’ve either already seen them or know they’re supposed to be excellent. If you’re looking for something that’s a little bit more under the radar, though, this is the list for you.
We’ve pulled out three great underrated movies that you can check out now on Prime Video if you haven’t already seen them. Our picks range from a delightful, hilarious whodunnit to a contemplative Western, but what unites them all is that, in spite of their relatively small reputations, they pack a real punch when you finally sit down to watch them.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Telling the sprawling story of the death of Jesse James, the outlaw legend, by small-time members of his crew who were looking for a moment of glory, The Assassination of Jesse James is a brilliant character study set amid the Old West.
Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck are both outstanding as Jesse James and Robert Ford, respectively, and the cast is filled out with a roster of supporting actor all-stars including Sam Rockwell, Jeremy Renner, and Sam Shepard. Andrew Dominik, the film’s director, has often been a controversial filmmaker (he helmed 2022’s divisive Blonde), but it’s hard to deny the mastery of what he manages in this film.
Clue (1985)
Based on the popular board game of the same name, Clue is both a delightful homage to its source material and charmingly zany in its own right. The film tells the story of six houseguests who are invited to a dinner party under threat of blackmail, and given a pseudonym when they enter the house.
After each of them is given a weapon and the lights go out, they find the blackmailer has been killed, and have to discover who the killer among them is. It’s an often hilarious, hugely campy murder mystery, and it’s kept afloat from moment to moment by the brilliant performances of Madeline Kahn, Lesley Ann Warren, and Tim Curry, among others.
Coherence (2014)
A small-scale science fiction film that follows a group of eight friends at a dinner party who begin to experience strange events due to a passing comet, Coherence is thrilling, if you can keep track of exactly what’s happening.
The movie’s twists and turns are so great that it’s best to go in completely unspoiled, but if you’re someone who likes the paradoxes at the heart of something like Primer, then Coherence is for you. It’s mind-bending in the way that all great science fiction should aspire to be, and it’s also got enough time for all of its many characters to feel like fully fleshed-out people.
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