While Netflix secured this year's Best Picture and most successful Oscar winner, Oppenheimer, Amazon Prime Video now has a few Academy Award 2024 champions of its own – including one of my favourite movies of the last twelve months and also arguably the year's toughest watch (...in a, er, good way).
So if you're a Prime Video subscriber looking for a quality pick for this weekend's movie night, or have been waiting for a good time to activate the service's 30-day free trial or make the jump from a Netflix catalogue you feel you've wrung dry, perhaps one or more of the movies below will sway your decision.
Anatomy Of A Fall
Winner of an Original Screenplay Academy Award and a Palme d'Or, Justine Triet's French psychological thriller is a masterclass in suspense. When a man is found dead in the snow outside a chalet in the Grenoble mountains, his wife is put on trial and their blind son becomes roped into a tricky investigation that embroils him in a moral dilemma.
Part courtroom drama, part murder mystery and part relationship dissection, Anatomy Of A Fall is a perfectly weighted and scrupulously told, edge-of-your-seat tragedy drama that compels far beyond its initial 'did she, didn't she' premise. Stellar driving-seat performances from an ice-cold Sandra Hüller and emotionally spent Milo Machado-Graner couldn't, quite frankly, be bettered.
Following a limited theatrical release in October (US) and November (UK), the utterly riveting Anatomy Of A Fall is now on Amazon Prime Video
The Zone Of Interest
Just when you thought the 70 or so years of World War II dramas had every orifice of the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust covered, along comes Jonathan Glazer's unsettlingly serene depiction of some of the German regime's cruellest figures.
Following the family of the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, who live idyllic lives on the other side of the camp walls, a stone's throw from the gas chambers, The Zone Of Interest is the core-chiller that its premise promises, exposing the inexplicable human capacity for evil as Höss and his wife exist in a happy state of wilful disregard as they bring up their brood, tend to their garden and want for nothing, seemingly indifferent to the neighbouring suffering.
The Oscar winner for International Feature Film, Glazer's disturbing drama, loosely based on Martin Amis' 2014 novel, gets under your skin and makes for a hard, but necessary, watch.
Watch The Zone Of Interest on Amazon Prime Video
American Fiction
Unlike the previous two picks, Cord Jefferson's directorial feature debut has already spent a couple of months in the Prime Video catalogue, but if you haven't yet jumped on the Adapted Screenplay Oscar winner, consider this your reminder to.
A scathing satirical comedy that holds a mirror to society's obsession with stereotypes, the Amazon Original sees a novelist-professor write a ridiculing satire on the offensive tropes propelled by "Black" entertainment that he is frustrated by, only for him to become swept up in the madness he disdains when it gets mistaken for, and critically acclaimed as, a serious piece of work.
Poignant yet playful, American Fiction manages to be genuinely laugh-out-loud in its shrewd parodying of identity politics, and Jeffrey Wright is wonderful as the cast's leading light.
Watch American Fiction on Amazon Prime Video
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