10 Best Movies To Watch on Amazon Prime Video on October 2021

New films from classics to musicals to, well, Die Hard, are there for the taking each month with your Amazon Prime subscription. But with so much to scroll through, it can be a daunting task to just find something good to watch. Don’t worry, we are here to help you through. Take a look at this list below to see what is the best movies to watch on Amazon Prime Video in October 2021.

1. Die Hard (1988)

Photo: 20th Century Fox

IMDb score: 8.2/10

Bruce Willis plays New York police detective John McClane, in Los Angeles for an uneasy reunion with his semi-estranged wife, having failed to support her career move out there. While at her office building, owned by a Japanese corporation, the whole place is taken over by fanatically armed German extremists, an unfortunate juxtaposition of Axis powers. The intruders are led by Hans Gruber, a renegade German terrorist with links to Northern Ireland’s “New Provo Front”. It’s a glorious scene-stealer for Alan Rickman, though it’s a credit to Willis’s cheeky charisma that his scene is not in fact stolen.

Singlehandedly, covered in sweat and muscles, wearing nothing on his top half but a manly vest and finally not even that, McClane hides in the elevator shaft and takes down Gruber and his whole hideous crew, one by one. The only help he has from the outside is a tough, capable LAPD cop, Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson). The stuffed shirts of the FBI are certainly no help and the TV news media are needless to say the terrorists’ contemptible useful idiots. Finally, his wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) introduces herself to Al using her married name, and the natural order of things is restored.

It’s an incredible 80s time capsule, with Hans fondling a Filofax as he silkily addresses the hostages and a coke-snorting office worker describing the situation in terms of a hostile takeover: with talk of “Greenmail”, “Poison pill” and “white knight”. An innocent pleasure.

2. Atonement

Photo: Universal Pictures

IMDb score: 7.8/10

"Atonement" begins on joyous gossamer wings, and descends into an abyss of tragedy and loss. Its opening scenes in an English country house between the wars are like a dream of elegance, and then a 13-year-old girl sees something she misunderstands, tells a lie and destroys all possibility of happiness in three lives, including her own.

Each period and scene in the movie is compelling on its own terms, and then compelling on a deeper level as a playing out of the destiny that was sealed beside the fountain on that perfect summer's day. It is only at the end of the film, when Briony, now an aged novelist played by Vanessa Redgrave, reveals facts about the story that we realize how thoroughly, how stupidly, she has continued for a lifetime to betray Cecilia, Robbie and herself.

The structure of the McEwan novel and this film directed by Joe Wright is relentless. How many films have we seen that fascinate in every moment and then, in the last moments, pose a question about all that has gone before, one that forces us to think deeply about what betrayal and atonement might really entail?

Wright, who also directed Knightley in his first film, "Pride and Prejudice," (2005) shows a mastery of nuance and epic, sometimes in adjacent scenes. In the McEwan novel, he has a story that can hardly fail him and an ending that blindsides us with its implications. This is one of the year's best films, a certain best picture nominee.

3. The Bad News Bears (1976)

COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

IMDb score: 7.3/10

The Bad News Bears is a 1976 American sports comedy film directed by Michael Ritchie and written by Bill Lancaster. It stars Walter Matthau as an alcoholic ex-baseball pitcher who becomes a coach for a youth baseball team known as the Bears. Alongside Matthau, the film's cast includes Tatum O'Neal, Vic Morrow, Joyce Van Patten, Ben Piazza, Jackie Earle Haley, and Alfred W. Lutter. Its score, composed by Jerry Fielding, adapts the principal themes of Bizet's opera Carmen.

Released by Paramount Pictures, The Bad News Bears received generally positive reviews. It was followed by two sequels, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training in 1977 and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan in 1978, a short-lived 1979–80 CBS television series, and a 2005 remake.

4. Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)

Photo: 20th Century Fox

IMDb score: 8/10

Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford) are two outlaws who rob trains in the Old West. As the country gets more civilized, a special posse is hired to hunt them down - so the pair, and their girl (Katharine Ross), flee to a new life in Bolivia.

Newman, his dazzling blue eyes never more piercing, is Butch, leader of the notorious Hole In The Wall Gang and a visionary bank robber. Redford, famously held in close-up by director George Roy Hill to establish his presence, broods with all the good nature of the Fastest Gun In The West, staring the camera down and providing a perfect foil - both comic and serious - for Newman. (And to think, Warren Beatty turned down the role, Steve McQueen bailed at the 11th hour and Newman was originally down to play the Kid until he suggested swapping roles with Redford - which just goes to show how haphazard making a classic movie can be.) Ross, meanwhile, fresh from The Graduate, radiates as the woman behind - and often between - the two outlaws, providing both a physical and mental romantic interest for our two decidedly heterosexual heroes.

Coming as it did at the end of Hollywood's love affair with the romantic notion of the West, and on the cusp of its later dissection of the Western archetype, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid avoids falling between these two stools; instead it finds the Western, like its central characters, in transition. Hell, it's kept William Goldman in work for over three decades, even though he's only written a handful of decent screenplays since. Year Of The Comet, anyone?

There are, of course, the points against: Newman's bike riding to B. J. Thomas redefines the word 'twee', and George Roy Hill could be held singlehandedly responsible for begetting what we now perceive as the 'buddy movie' (with the director and his star re-teaming for The Sting a mere four years later), and its influence can still be felt today in everything from the Lethal Weapon franchise, to Thelma And Louise and beyond.

5. Garden State (2004)

Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures

IMDb score: 7.4/10

Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) is a TV actor who lives in Los Angeles and is having a hard time keeping his life on track. For example, he's constantly late for his job as a waiter in a Vietnamese restaurant. One reason for this forgetfulness is that he's been heavily sedated for years. After a traumatic family incident, his father Gideon (Sir Ian Holm) put him on lithium. Now Large (that's his nickname) returns to the Garden State for the funeral of his mother, a paraplegic.

One of the first people he hooks up with is his old buddy Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), a stoner who works as a gravedigger and is in no rush to become a respectable member of society. This peeves his pothead mother, Carol (Jean Smart), who is dating a classmate of his who works as a knight at a local medieval-themed restaurant. The level of Mark's ambition can be seen in his high hopes for cashing in on his collection of Desert Storm trading cards. Large gets together with some other high school friends including Albert (Denis O'Hare,) who has become a millionaire after inventing silent Velcro.

As you have probably intuited by now, this is a very funny and touching romantic comedy populated by some colorful characters. Writer and director Zach Braff manages to consistently surprise us with visual treats and snippets of clever dialogue. Back home in suburban New Jersey after nine years on the West Coast, Large stops in to see Dr. Cohen (Ron Leibman), a sensitive neurologist who gives him some good advice on how to handle the flash headaches that have been upsetting him lately. In the waiting room, the actor meets Sam (Natalie Portman), a young woman whose quirks are vividly on display along with her joie de vivre. She connects with him immediately and soon they are soulful friends.

6. Fight Club (1999)

Photo: 20th Century Fox

IMDb score: 8.8/10

David Fincher’s fourth feature, Fight Club, is impeccably made but constitutes a deeply fascist art. Nihilistic and uncompromising, the movie is fascinating though hypocritical, a brazen denunciation of billboard culture that itself utilizes glamorous stars and new technology in making possible its realization. Unmistakably a work of its time, of the culture, of Hollywood, the movie demands a certain attention and is not easily dismissed, but there is something deeply unsettling about a work that uncritically espouses brutality as a function of alienation and nonconformity.

Fight Club seems precisely the kind of Hollywood product targeted in the clamor for greater responsibility and morality in the post-Columbine national debate. Whether the film’s delayed release date, moved from early August to mid-October, was a response to that or the fact it simply wasn’t finished in time (the movie screened here without closing credits), Fight Club has the primary requisites of success: commercially proven director, big-name stars, edgy material to attract young crowds and the inevitable controversy engendered by the subject matter. But its appeal is as limited as the film is confused, and the movie is bound to polarize critics and audiences.

The movie synthesizes Fincher’s previous two works, Seven and The Game, exploring the roots of man’s capacity for depravity and the inexplicable juxtaposed against the ironic, postmodernist examination of form and content, of control and the elaborately make-believe. But part of the movie’s confusion stems from the struggle over authorship among the four principals — Fincher’s direction, Jim Uhls’ script from the Chuck Palahniuk novel and the sometimes conflicting performance styles of Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. So what begins promisingly as satire turns increasingly abstract, becoming allegory and cautionary fable until its final third, when it devolves into an apocalyptic Hollywood thriller with an unconvincing last-act plot revelation.

7. Minority Report (2002)

Photo: 20th Century Fox

IMDb score: 7.6/10

All good science fiction is really speculation about social and political trends. Thus, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, a rousing film-noir suspenser set in a world of labor-saving devices and McLuhan-esque technology, is a thought-provoking inquiry into just how far we as a society want to go to make our environment safe.

Spielberg poses the question in one of his most compelling and entertaining films ever. Following A.I. Artificial Intelligence, he continues to push into new fictional terrain that is grittier, creepier, and edgier than the warm-and-fuzzy science fiction of his early career. And he is willing to leave an audience unsettled. Even with something of a happy ending, Minority Report is the most troubling kind of speculative fiction. There is much to absorb here, almost too much for a single viewing, which probably means the kind of repeat business on which box-office bonanzas are built.

For star Tom Cruise, too, the point of reference is his last film, Vanilla Sky, where he also played a man caught in a technological nightmare in which his very identity and destiny get thrown into confusion. While going over the top in that film, here he delivers one of his most controlled and suggestive performances. Pain and hysteria stay bottled up within his character, a man who completely buys into a crime-prevention system then finds himself outside that system, battling the very thing that gave him self-worth.

8. The Graduate (1967)

Photo: Embassy Pictures

IMDb score: 8/10

If ever a movie captured the audience’s imagination with its musical soundtrack, it was The Graduate, that irresistibly watchable 1967 classic, now re-released in cinemas, starring Anne Bancroft as the sexy and jaded fortysomething Mrs. Robinson, who seduces 21-year-old Ben, played by the young Dustin Hoffman – that muddled young man whose sentimental education begins only after he graduates college.

Simon and Garfunkel’s eerie and sublime The Sound of Silence perfectly captures both Ben’s alienation and bewilderment about what he should do with his life, and then his postcoital disenchantment and self-loathing. And Here’s to You Mrs. Robinson, with its gentle reassurance that Jesus loves her, provides a note of final gentleness and forgiveness for this character that is really nowhere in the script. It is, incidentally, very different from Billy Paul’s woozily sensual soul song Me and Mrs. Jones, which came out four years later.

Watched in the present day, the element of predatory abuse is inescapable. You cannot see it without wondering how it might look and feel if the sexual roles were reversed. But a modern audience might also, paradoxically, be much less content with the villainous role the film finally assigns to Mrs. Robinson, be more sympathetic to her midlife crisis, and remember the pathos of her abandoned interest in art. Calder Willingham and Buck Henry’s screenplay, adapted from Charles Webb’s 1963 novel, cleverly allows you to wonder if Mr. Robinson was, in some conscious or subconscious way, complaisant in his wife’s adventure. The excellence of Katherine Ross as Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, Elaine, is often overlooked. A hugely pleasurable film.

9. Prometheus (2012)

Photo: 20th Century Fox

IMDb score: 7/10

Be careful what you wish for, especially if it involves figuring out who invented humankind.

That’s the warning at the heart of Prometheus, a visual feast of a 3D sci-fi movie that has trouble combining its high-minded notions about the origins of the species and its Alien–based obligation to deliver oozy gross-out moments. Ridley Scott‘s third venture into science fiction, after Alien in 1979 and Blade Runner in 1982, won’t become a genre benchmark like those classics despite its equivalent seriousness and ambition, but it does supply enough visual spectacle, tense action and sticky, slithery monster attacks to hit the spot with thrill-seeking audiences worldwide.

The Greek titan Prometheus got in trouble for stealing fire from Zeus and putting man on the same level as the gods. Presuming that humans won’t rest until we discover where we came from and how we got here, Prometheus proposes that not very long from now, in 2093 to be precise, a plausible source of human life will not only be found but reached by space explorers backed, not surprisingly, by private, not government, interests.

10. Raising Arizona (1987)

Photo: 20th Century Fox

IMDb score: 7.3/10

The Coen brothers' sophomore effort sees Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter going to desperate lengths to achieve parenthood. The couple, an ex cop and an ex con, steal a baby from a set of quintuplets to raise as their own. However, not all goes according to plan as they attempt to keep the theft a secret whilst protecting the wee bairn from the collection of reprobates they have surrounded themselves with.

Following up a movie like 'Blood Simple' was never going to be an easy task, but Joel and Ethan succeed admirably, with Arizona setting the precedent for many of the quirky trademarks that have punctuated their subsequent efforts and giving John Goodman his first great Coen role.

Best remembered for Cage's hysterical 'baby-chasing' sequence, and small bunnies being blown up by The Lone Biker Of The Apocalypse.

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