The 15 best films hitting Amazon Prime in July 2022

After the shaky reception for Iron Man 2, Jon Favreau cleansed himself with , a charming road movie about a chef getting back to his roots after suffering a very public, job-losing meltdown. A thinly veiled allegory for his experience on the MCU sequel, Chef boasts an excellent cast including writer/director Favreau, Scarlett Johansson, John Leguizamo, Sofia Vergara, Bobby Canavale, Dustin Hoffman and even a tiny role from Tony Stark himself, Robert Downey Jr. In the film, Favreau’s chef decides to buy a food truck, using the opportunity to bond with his adolescent son as they drive across America, sampling awesome regional foods as they go. In his review of the film for The A.V. Club, A.A. Dowd found the film a bit , and added “seeing Favreau make something small again might be worth it—even if the results are more appetizing in theory than in execution.”

Roman Polanski’s is a must-see if you’ve yet to do so. And if you have seen it, you’re probably due for another viewing. At once wonderfully weird and creepy, it also features excellent performances from Mia Farrow, John Cassavettes, Sidney Blackmer, and Ruth Gordon, who won a Best Supporting Actress award for her role. Often looked at as a horror film, Rosemary’s Baby isn’t really that. Rather, it’s kind of a black comedy. Roger Ebert agreed, saying in his 4-star review, it’s a “. Strangely enough it also has an eerie sense of humor almost until the end.”

The recent success of Top Gun: Maverick has shown that moviegoers have a taste for speed, great action sequences and (for better or worse) nostalgia for when men were men. It also has brought something back to the cinema that’s been sorely missing for quite a few years: movies that get you fired up and pull a tear from your cynical eye. If you felt that way after Top Gun: Maverick, 1995’s is here to help you recapture that feeling. It’s hard not to root for Mel Gibson (or rather, it didn’t used to be) as Scottish patriot William Wallace, who leads his people into battle after the slaughter of his beloved. Filled with great, gritty action, strong performances, and a fairly simple manipulation of crowd emotions, Braveheart still holds up. In a review for Flick Direct, Allison Rose said “The movie is about what many believe to be a great Scotsman.”

Five different actors have portrayed Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character on TV and in films: Chris Pine (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, 2014); John Krasinski (Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, 2018); Alec Baldwin (The Hunt For Red October, 1990); Ben Affleck (The Sum Of All Fears, 2002); and, of course, Harrison Ford in 1992’s Patriot Games and 1994’s , which hits Prime July 1. While calling Jack Ryan a reluctant hero is a bit of a stretch as he’s former military and CIA, a data analyst and an all-around brilliant dude, he’d still prefer not to be risking his life. Kind of like an action-hero version of Dante from Clerks, he’s not even supposed to be there that day. While each actor is at the whim of the script and directors involved, Ford’s smart-assy resigned attitude (honed via his Han Solo and Indiana Jones characters) serve the Ryan character best. Also, skilled direction by Phillip Noyce in both Ford entries help make for solid thrillers.

There’s a strange synergy that occurs when a group of cinephiles start talking online about a movie that they think was overlooked or unfairly dismissed upon release, and then it becomes widely available on a streaming network. Such was the scuttlebutt on Twitter last month, as several people started talking about Renny Harlin’s 1995 bomb and how maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. The trailer shows a film that seems like something that should’ve worked as it looked like a more nautical-based Princess Bride mixed with some dashes of the Raiders Of The Lost Ark franchise. Harlin was coming in fairly hot after Die Hard II (1990) and Cliffhanger (1993), and the pirate spectacle of Cutthroat Island was a pretty ripe idea in 1995, very pre-Pirates Of The Caribbean craze. Perhaps one issue were the male stars of the film—Matthew Modine, while a fine actor, may not have been the ideal choice to carry the lead, and aside from recent allegations, Frank Langella isn’t a terribly daunting villain. But Geena Davis was arguably the top female star of the time, and remains an icon. So, does Cutthroat Island ? Now you can find out.

Jason Reitman had quite a directorial run in the early 2000s. While complaints of Hollywood nepotism will always unfairly dog the guy, it’s hard to knock the sequence of Thank You For Smoking (2005), Juno (2007), Up In The Air (2009) and Young Adult (2011). Of those films, mileage may vary, but is a low-key classic. Starring George Clooney as a guy who uses his charms and handsome demeanor to fly around the country firing people from their jobs, he was nominated for one of the film’s seven Oscars (which also included Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay). The film also lifted Anna Kendrick out of the Twilight mire and showed the world that Vera Farmiga can hold her own with anyone onscreen. Both of them were Oscar nominated as well. In his review for The A.V. Club, Keith Phipps grade and said, “Jason Reitman’s direction nicely translates the seductive appeal of sterile public places while letting the assured performances do much of the work.”

Very few big name actors arrive on screen in fully formed, Hollywood megastar mode, and this was very true for Bradley Cooper. After kicking around in small roles in big films, Cooper made the truly creepy film (based on a Clive Barker short story) mere months before everything changed with The Hangover in 2009. In hindsight, the lead role of Leon, a photographer obsessed with shooting the darker side of life doesn’t seem like a fit for the now massively famous Cooper. But his modern-day persona actually adds to the tension as his character takes hits most big stars don’t take in their starring roles. As he begins riding the train to try and photograph a serial killer named Mahogany (Vinnie Jones), Leon is quickly in over his head and just keeps diving deeper. In his review for The A.V. Club where he gave the film a B, Scott Tobias noted that director Ryuhei Kitamura delivered “.”

Prior to 2001’s solid biopic , Will Smith had tried, fairly unsuccessfully, to make the transition to Serious Actor. Films like Six Degrees Of Separation (1993) and The Legend Of Bagger Vance (2000) showed Smith’s potential, but he was still pretty firmly set in the “Leading Man in a Blockbuster” category. Then along came Michael Mann’s Ali, starring Smith in the titular role as Cassius Clay/Muhammed Ali, and that changed things for him as an actor. He garnered his first Oscar nomination with a Best Actor nod but lost to Denzel Washington for Training Day. While Ali is very much a by-the-books biopic with some great Michael Mann flourishes via whiplash editing and several interesting angles and film stocks, it was also amongst the first to use digital video mixed in for effect. But it’s Smith’s that really stands the test of time, a reminder of better days for the actor.

When it comes to iconic actors and iconic roles, it’s tough to find many better than Audrey Hepburn in 1961’s strange and wonderful . Hepburn plays party girl Holly Golightly (no, her name isn’t Tiffany) in Blake Edwards’ melancholic comedy classic. There’s rarely, if ever, a bad time to view the film, by the way. Hepburn, already a star by this time, takes that star power up a notch or ten in an unforgettable performance. At once magnetic and frayed, enigmatic yet vulnerable, it’s a truly great performance. George Peppard is also an outstanding stand-in for the audience as a man who wants to get to know everything he can about Holly, even placing her on a pedestal before sadder truths come forth. Yes, the film’s problematic depiction of Mr. Yunioshi remains unambiguously cringe-worthy, a blemish on its otherwise stellar reputation, but overall the film is still a joy to behold. Reading the novel by Truman Capote is also a nice way to really dig into the film, even if there are .

When it comes to the greatest film trilogies of all time, Richard Linklater’s “Before” series (Before Sunrise from 1995), Before Sunset from 2004) and (in 2013) never really finds it’s way into the conversation due to the sheer power of its blockbuster counterparts. But it’s frankly a bit of a cinematic miracle that director Linklater, alongside Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, made three damn near perfect character studies in over two decades and didn’t drop the ball once. If you haven’t seen the films or, it’s been a while (how was the last installment almost 10 years ago??) you really can’t go wrong slipping quietly into the lives of writer/failed husband/failing dad Jesse and Julie Delpy as Céline, the still gorgeous but perhaps a bit lost muse. In his review for The A.V. Club, A.A. Dowd saying, “This is not just another stellar follow-up, but the latest entry in what’s shaping up to be a grand experiment—the earnest attempt to depict the life of a relationship onscreen, decade by increasingly tumultuous decade.”

Writer/director/actress Marielle Heller dropped a well-reviewed but still underappreciated “awesome bomb” with her writing/directing debut in 2015. Pretty much universally praised for its honest, funny and fairly stark look at teenage sexuality in the 1970s (in hippy central San Francisco no less), the film doesn’t seem to have stuck with many people, despite Bel Powley’s star-making performance as horned up teen Minnie who upstages her mom Charlotte (Kristen Wiig) as a barely monitored teen in ’60s San Francisco. Ahead of his explosion into projects like Big Little Lies and The Northman, Alexander Skarsgård broke out of his True Blood shell as skeevy Monroe, Charlotte’s boyfriend and surrogate dad­­—among other unsavory things ­—to Minnie. But the real stars here are Powley and especially Heller, who shows a knack for that feels abandoned in her recent Oscar-baity films Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) and Won’t You Be My Neighbor (2019).

From the moment that stills from Ridley Scott’s dropped, everyone felt the film would be a weird must-see. Sadly, it did not necessarily meet everyone’s expectations. Made for the big screen with even bigger Italian accents, the story followed humble nobody Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) marrying into the famed Gucci family by wedding its “prince” Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) and igniting a family spiral that ended in murder. Add in more stellar casting with Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Salma Hayek, and Jared Leto, under so much prosthetics you may not realize it’s him (which is a good thing), this film should’ve been a massive hit commercially and critically. Maybe it was the victim of just too much hype, but while , it failed to get the reception garnered by Scott’s other 2021 film The Last Duel, which nobody saw either. Since Amazon Prime is first out of the gate to show House Of Gucci on streaming, what better way to give the film a fair shake a year later after all the hype has cooled down?

A smash hit out of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, Miguel Arteta’s Ed Helms starrer perfectly fits the quirky outsider feel-good indie movie mold. Helms stars as sheltered and naïve small town insurance salesman Tim Lippe, who’s forced out of his shell by his boss, the always outstanding Stephen Root, to attend an insurance conference in the big city of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. There he learns a little bit about life, love, and the pursuit of happiness via bombastic drunkard Dean (John C. Reilly) and free-spirited Joan (Anne Heche), who show Tim there’s more to life than what he’s previously known. While this setup is certainly nothing new, the cast is what brings it all together, featuring Isiah Whitlock Jr., Kurtwood Smith, Rob Corddry, Thomas Lennon, Alia Shawkat, and Sigourney Weaver, it’s a trifle of a film guaranteed to try and make you feel good. In his review of the film (which he rated a B) Scott Tobias said it, “winds itself down with deflating conventionality, but .”

Fans of David Cronenberg’s body horror films rejoiced when his latest film Crimes Of The Future probed its way into theaters in June. And while the film did indeed seem to be a return to, err, form for Cronenberg, it didn’t match the psychologically horrifying Cronenberg classic , which arguably launched Cronenberg’s second stage, combining psychological horror with body horror. Jeremy Irons stars as twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle, who utilize the fact no one can tell them apart to embark on a steady stream of womanizing. See, Elliot is the much more confident twin and finds it easy to seduce women. When he tires of them, he passes them off to Beverly until that relationship peters out. It’s a toxic male symbiosis that works well (mostly for Elliot) until they meet actress Claire (Geneviève Bujold) who elicits Beverly to try and take the lead in a relationship for once. It doesn’t go well. Or does it? In his review , Scott Tobias said the film “is, to be sure, a relentlessly chilling, grotesque, and unmistakably Cronenbergian exercise in psychological horror.”

Who doesn’t like to think back to a life once lived, much less with an early romantic partner that went their way, and you went yours? In , starring Mark Duplass and Sarah Paulson, this idea is taken a step further as his character Jim bumps into high school sweetheart Amanda, and the two spend time pretending that their romance never ended. No, not just having sex! Blue Jay is about more than that, and the way Duplass and director Alex Lehman portray it is pretty cool and performance driven. In short, Blue Jay is a small indie film designed to invoke memories and make you reflect on life. The A.V. Club’s Mike D’Angelo agrees, saying Paulsen “, while Duplass exhibits a raw vulnerability that’s sometimes harrowing to watch. Both are admirably served by first-time director Alex Lehmann’s black-and-white imagery, which suggests a timelessness very much in keeping with this exercise in turning back the clock.”