There are many advantages to owning a major movie studio, as Amazon can doubtless privately attest, but it's certainly great if you're trying to convince everyone that yours is the best streaming service on the market.
Amazon owns MGM, after all, and that means that its movies can make their way to Prime Video more quickly than they would elsewhere, as demonstrated by one of 2024's very best films.
After doing well in cinemas, American Fiction is available now on Amazon Prime Video in the UK, and will also be arriving for those in the US on 14 May, so no one's left behind (well, except literally by a couple of weeks, US friends).
The movie stars Jeffrey Wright in electric form, and he was rightly nominated for an Oscar thanks to his performance as Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a frustrated novelist. Tired of his cerebral novels consistently failing to find an audience (or the corresponding sales success) he quickly writes a slapdash but scathing satire of what he sees as modern Black fiction.
When that earns him almost immediate plaudits, phenomenal sales and financial freedom, but forces him into a bizarre persona to sell the book's reality, Monk starts to wonder what the point of it all is, bouncing off his brother (Sterling K. Brown) and another young writer (Issa Rae).
It's a super entertaining and thought-provoking movie, and won a deserved gong at this year's Oscars, scooping Best Adapted Screenplay for writer and director Cord Jefferson (he adapted it from a Percival Everett novel).
The dialogue is as smart as anything you'll find, and American Fiction also has the bravery to go in some pretty interesting directions as it reaches the end of its runtime, so it's absolutely worth checking out if you're a Prime member.
The movie also features some terrific needle drops (as you'd hope when it features a character named basically Thelonious Monk). This means we'd really advise watching it with some great speakers or a soundbar (perhaps one from our detailed best soundbars round-up).
Here's hoping that Amazon can keep pumping out movies of this quality because American Fiction is exactly the sort of picture that makes a streaming service feel indispensable.
