The 15 best films hitting Amazon Prime in May 2022

Stanley Kubrick had a long gestating project based on a 1969 short story entitled Supertoys Last All Summer Long. Such was sadly the case for many of Kubrick’s projects, his habit of taking forever on each movie severely limited his time and output. Still, Kubrick looped in pal Steven Spielberg on the adaptation and eventually decided Spielberg was the one who should actually direct it. The result is 2001's hit and miss A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Haley Joel Osment stars as an android who—almost cruelly—is designed with the ability to love. While much of the movie is excellent, there are a few Spielbergian sections which detract from it as a whole. In his 2001 review, Keith Phipps said “with A.I., he [Spielberg] has created what history should confirm as , a compelling, moving inquiry into the most basic elements of existence, told with fear and awe in a vocabulary exclusive to moviemaking.

If you want to get a really great taste of social norms in the mid-’70s, look no further than the 1976 classic The Bad News Bears. An alcoholic pool cleaner (played with spectacular hangdoggedness by Walter Matthau) takes on a kids’ baseball team full of misfits and eventually gets his estranged daughter to sign on as a ringer. Sexism! Misogyny! Racism! This film has it all and yet remains charming and funny because the only thing worse than the aforementioned is the toxic parenting on display. In a review noting the film’s 40-year anniversary, The A..V. Club’s Gwen Ihnat said, “, as sports parents may be worse now than they were in the ’70s, and who doesn’t like to drink beer while running their pool-cleaning service?”

John Sayles wrote and directed a big league hit with Eight Men Out, his take on the 1919 Chicago White Sox scandal which rocked baseball, and America. After realizing they were being severely underpaid as opposed to players on other teams, many members of the Sox decided to take matters into their own hands by taking a fat bribe and deliberately throwing games in order to lose the World Series. The film succeeds due to an outstanding ensemble cast led by John Cusack while Sayles makes you realize what the team is doing isn’t right but also makes it so you really don’t blame them for tanking. In her 2013 review of the film, The A.V. Club’s Tasha Robinson said “.”

A truly great hidden gem, Bill Paxton’s 2001 family drama Frailty will blow you away. Told in flashback, the film revolves around a man (Fenton Meeks, played by Matthew McConaghey) who shows up at an FBI Office to recount a traumatic childhood in which his zealot father convinced him and his brother to murder people perceived to be demons. Due to this, Meeks begins to believe that his recently deceased brother Adam (Levi Kreis) may be a serial killer known as “The God’s Hands Killer.” There’s way, way more to the story than that and Paxton (no, I still cannot believe he’s been dead for five years) shows a deft hand with a complicated plot. Don’t read any more about it, just go watch it. In his 2002 A.V. Club review, Keith Phipps said Frailty “.”

While many consider Curtis Hanson’s 1997 gem L.A. Confidential to be his best film, his 2000 follow up Wonder Boys actually holds up a little better. Michael Douglas stars as Grady Tripp, a teacher who’s also a blocked writer. Over the course of a weekend, the life he’s barely holding together begins to rapidly fall apart. Katie Holmes, Frances McDormand, Tobey Maguire and Robert Downey Jr. round out a great cast that pulls some wonderful stuff out of Steve Kloves’ script, which is based off a Michael Chabon novel. In his review, The A.V. Club’s Keith Phipps said “, Hanson’s leisurely but stylish direction allows his cast to deliver convincing, fleshed-out performances.”

The backstory as to how David Lynch wound up directing 1980’s The Elephant Man is nearly as fascinating as the movie itself. Produced by Mel Brooks, the film is a weird and melancholy one about the struggles of John Merrick (John Hurt), a severely disfigured man who wants what everyone wants, to be loved and accepted. Filmed in antique-feeling, grainy black and white and based on a true story, The Elephant Man is as heartbreaking as it is strange. But Roger Ebert found the film overly sentimental, adding “I kept asking myself what the film was really trying to say about the human condition as reflected by John Merrick, and .”

While Netflix saw fit to drop the Rambo reboots this month, Amazon Prime decided to throw all five original Rocky movies up on their service. Well played, Amazon. The films are all beloved even though some are obviously much, much better than others. The original Rocky (1976) is truly a prestige film and each subsequent film drops the bar a little lower until 1990’s Rocky V, which featured the late Tommy Morrison (a real boxer and a real bad actor) as the worst Rocky nemesis, Tommy Gunn. Still, the idea of binging all of the Rocky movies in a row sounds pretty fun to me. In a 2015 retrospective of the films for The A.V. Club, Jesse Hassenger (who also ranks the films) said “, it’s likely that narrative would be more interesting to watch than the movies themselves.”

Where have you gone, Richard Kelly? After a massive smash in 2001 with Donnie Darko, Kelly floundered with his post-apocalyptic Southland Tales in 2006. While the film was indeed a huge bomb, it certainly didn’t put Kelly in “director’s jail,” and he rebounded in many ways with The Box in 2007. The film is based on Richard Matheson’s short story Button Button, and features Cameron Diaz and James Marsden as a couple who get a box that can change their lives for the better, but are they willing to bear the cost? Many viewers sought to label the film an overlong Twilight Zone episode but Kelly, as always, was grappling with some larger themes about morality, mortality and life. He also hasn’t made a film since, and seems to have nothing on the horizon. In his 2009 review, Keith Phipps said “ even when it isn’t clear what’s going on. Which is good, since it’s seldom clear what is going on.”

It’s impossible to separate The Crow from the fact that Brandon Lee died tragically on set during filming. That shocking and harrowing accident adds a layer of sadness and grim mortality to the film itself. The Crow is a rape-revenge thriller with a twist in that the hero, musician Eric Draven (Lee), is murdered as his fiancé is attacked. One year later, Draven returns from the grave as the titular character, and he’s seeking revenge. While a solid film overall, The Crow remains steeped in sadness, a reminder that Lee was a young star in the making who was lost far too soon. In a 2018 review for The A.V. Club, Tom Breihan said The Crow “ that it’s almost hard to look at it as a real movie, rather than some mystic totem.”

Kathryn Bigelow brought her journeyman career as a director to the next level with The Hurt Locker, arguably the best film of 2008. The film offers an intense portrait of fearless Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), a specialist at diffusing bombs during the Iraq War. James pushes back against colleagues (Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty in particular) and superiors who don’t agree with his dangerous style. The film tries to determine whether James is just a nutter, or a man so deeply entrenched in an adrenaline pumping job that he can no longer function as a “normal” person. While Mark Boal’s screenplay parses this conundrum, Bigelow announces her presence (after 40 years in the business) with a bang. In his review, where he gave the film an A-, The A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias said “Since the infamous bar sequence in 1987’s Near Dark, Bigelow has always thrived on graphic intensity, and in the early going especially, .”

Amazon Prime itself produced this underrated Richard Linklater film, an unofficial sequel to Hal Ashby’s outstanding 1973 film The Last Detail. While Last Flag Flying changes the names from that film, it’s a very thinly disguised followup. The Last Detail starred Jack Nicholson as rebel Navy man Billy “Badass” Buddusky who, alongside fellow disgruntled seaman Richard “Mule” Mulhall get a BS assignment to bring a young Navy recruit (played smartly by Randy Quaid before he lost his mind) to the brig. Last Flag Flying brings us up to date with these characters. It’s quite a good film, but the modern day cast of Bryan Cranston as Buddusky, Laurence Fishburne as Mule and Steve Carell as the now adult recruit just don’t match up to the originals. In his 2017 review, The A.V. Club’s Ignatiy Vishnevetsky said “: uniforms, clerical clothes, motel rooms, a faded tattoo, an airplane hangar, a flag-draped coffin, the back of a rented box truck, snow.”

In the 16 years since Al Gore’s global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth arrived in theaters, many more people have tried to warn us against our upcoming doom if we don’t start taking better care of the planet. While it was never really a great piece of filmmaking, it’s an excellent Power Point presentation, and the information here is more relevant than ever. This somewhat dated plea for action to be taken against global warming probably won’t wake people up, but what other choice do we have? In his 2006 review for The A.V. Club Scott Tobias called the doc “terrifying,” adding that the film is “: A 30-second soundbite on global warming could easily be brushed off as tree-hugging rhetoric, but after 100 minutes of level-headed elaboration, it’s chillingly undeniable.”

While the “fish out of water” comedy has been around forever, these types of films always deliver best when the fish is a really weird one. Enter Back to School starring Rodney Dangerfield as a wealthy father who decides to enroll in college as a way to inspire his son. Gee, when you write it out like that, the film sounds pretty bad. And, to be honest, it’s not great. But Rodney Dangerfield is. In addition to being blessed with excellent comedic timing he possesses a unique ability to project as a person with zero self-awareness. You can’t teach that in college! In a 1986 review of the film, Roger Ebert examines Dangerfield, eventually concluding that “Beneath his loud manner, under his studied obnoxiousness, there is a real need. .”

I personally think there’s a good movie version of Cameron Crowe’s much maligned Elizabethtown (2005) out there somewhere. I think this because the film premiered at Cannes as a longer version than what was released and, while it didn’t blow audiences away, it certainly didn’t get the critical lambasting that Elizabethtown received when it finally came out in theaters. If nothing else, there are some inspired moments to be found here. Plus, the film spawned the Hollywood urban legend that a few weeks after hiring Ashton Kutcher as the lead, Crowe asked Kutcher if he might be down for acting lessons before cameras rolled. Orlando Bloom then took over the role. Keith Phipps says it best in his 2005 review, “.”

Summer is just around the corner and what could be better than a little trip down to sunny Florida circa 1976, before things got really weird down there. Burt Reynolds made his directorial debut with Gator, and he stars alongside Lauren Hutton. The film centers on a man fresh out of prison who is coerced into helping the government capture a corrupt politician. But Gator isn’t really about plot. It’s more about Reynolds’ blistering star personae and a ton of boat and car crashes. Gator is a hoot. In his review, Roger Ebert says the film “, even though a summary of its key scenes is like a laundry list of action-’n’-romance cliches.”