10 movies to check out on Prime Video this April

If seeing Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire in theaters reminded you of how much you enjoy seeing movies about giant monsters knocking buildings over, revisit Matt Reeves’ tense found-footage monster film Cloverfield, which sparked its own franchise. The A.V. Club’s writes: “The filmmakers have gone to great lengths to keep the nature of the threat a secret, so let’s just say that it couldn’t have existed without H.P. Lovecraft, H.R. Giger, or Ishirô Honda, the director who gave Japan an embodiment of its then-recent nuclear attacks with Godzilla. Also, it’s absolutely terrifying, and it’s all the more effective for the way it lets viewers spend time getting to know the terrified stars, and the emotions and regrets behind their seemingly futile efforts to survive. It puts human faces on the victims of mass destruction, faces that might easily have been yours or mine, staring down the maw of something we don’t understand.”

Martin Scorsese’s controversial religious drama The Last Temptation Of Christ imagines the thoughts Jesus (Willem Dafoe) might have had while dying on the cross, including marrying Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey) and having a family. The movie with a haunting score by Peter Gabriel also stars Harvey Keitel, Harry Dean Stanton, and David Bowie. It’s ironic that after Christians screamed “blasphemy” and marched in protest against The Last Temptation Of Christ when it premiered in 1988, Scorsese next wants to adapt Shūsaku Endō’s A Life Of Jesus. Although the Oscar-winning director’s second stab at a Jesus movie might not incite as many protests, it will prove difficult to surpass The Last Temptation Of Christ’s arresting visuals, mesmerizing music, and brave performances by Dafoe and Hershey.

Guillermo del Toro takes our collective fear and revulsion of cockroaches to the next level in Mimic starring Mira Sorvino, Jeremy Northam, and Josh Brolin. The A.V. Club’s writes: “In a New York stricken with a cockroach-transmitted child-killing disease, entomologist Mira Sorvino develops a strain of insects designed to kill off the carriers, little suspecting that they’d evolve into man-sized killers. That they begin to resemble their human enemies is the best part of an already clever horror premise, and throughout its first half, Mimic creates a tense atmosphere that feels like a cross between Aliens and Seven.” Mimic spawned two direct-to-video sequels, but neither compares to the grotesquely effective original.

Cillian Murphy just won an Oscar for his performance in Oppenheimer, and Amazon is adding the Wes Craven-directed Red Eye to its library in April. In the taut thriller, Murphy plays a terrorist who threatens a hotel manager midflight played by Rachel McAdams whom he needs to help carry out the assassination of the United States Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. The A.V. Club’s writes: “If constructing a thriller could be likened to building a house, then Wes Craven’s Red Eye is a perfect piece of architecture: It’s clean-lined and soundly structured, without a foot of wasted space or any materials left unused.”

Based on the 1966 short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick, Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi action opus Total Recall starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Ronny Cox, and Michael Ironside still holds up today as talk escalates about humans traveling to Mars. The A.V. Club’s writes: “Judged as a straight-up ’80s action movie, Total Recall is, quite simply, one of the best. It has levels of body horror that must’ve seemed bracing even to the desensitized audiences of 1990. It has Sharon Stone as a future-noir femme fatale. It has one death via jackhammer and another via Martian-atmosphere face explosion. It has ‘consider that a divorce,’ one of Schwarzenegger’s most iconic one-liners. It has neck-snap noises that are as loud as gunshots. It has great, brutal fights like the one where Schwarzenegger and Stone beat the absolute shit out of each other. It has an old lady cussing at Schwarzenegger. It has a prostitute with three boobs. If you happened to be, say, an 11-year-old boy in 1990, Total Recall was an absolute garden of delights.”

This prequel to 2019's Pet Sematary stars Jackson White, Forrest Goodluck, Jack Mulhern, Henry Thomas, Natalie Alyn Lind, Isabella Star LaBlanc, Samantha Mathis, Pam Grier, and David Duchovny. The official description reads: “In 1969, a young Jud Crandall has dreams of leaving his hometown of Ludlow, Maine behind, but soon discovers sinister secrets buried within and is forced to confront a dark family history that will forever keep him connected to Ludlow. Banding together, Jud and his childhood friends must fight an ancient evil that has gripped Ludlow since its founding, and once unearthed has the power to destroy everything in its path. Based on the untold chapter from Pet Sematary, Stephen King’s chilling novel, Pet Sematary: Bloodlines is a terrifying prequel and the untold story of why sometimes dead is better.”

The romantic comedy Música stars Riverdale actress Camila Mendes, who had plenty of opportunities on the CW show to demonstrate her singing and dancing talents. The official description of Música reads: “Based on writer, director and star Rudy Mancuso, Música is a coming-of-age love story that follows an aspiring creator with synesthesia, who must come to terms with an uncertain future, while navigating the pressures of love, family, and his Brazilian culture in Newark, New Jersey.” The Amazon MGM Studios film also stars J.B. Smoove and Francesca Reale.

With The Exorcist: Believer, director David Gordon Green tried to replicate the success he had in rebooting the Halloween franchise. Although the public’s appetite for foul-mouthed, possessed little girls seems to have waned since the 1973 original, The Exorcist: Believer still has a few devilish delights for fans of The Exorcist, including Ellen Burstyn reprising her role as Chris MacNeil and a cameo by original head spinner Linda Blair as the formerly possessed Regan MacNeil. The official description reads: “When two girls disappear into the woods and return three days later with no memory of what happened to them, the father of one girl seeks out Chris MacNeil, who’s been forever altered by what happened to her daughter 50 years ago.” The horror requel also stars Leslie Odom Jr., Lidya Jewett, Olivia O’Neill, Jennifer Nettles, Norbert Leo Butz, and Ann Dowd.

As rumors swirl about Aaron Taylor-Johnson possibly becoming the next James Bond, revisit one of Daniel Craig’s best turns as 007 in Sam Mendes’ SPECTRE. From the opening sequence during a Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico City, SPECTRE places Bond in visually arresting real-life settings that aren’t fully generated on a Mac like with other modern action movies. The A.V. Club’s writes: “Each new movie inches [Bond] closer to Ian Fleming’s original conception of the lady-killer with a license to kill—which is to say, further away from the comparably compassionate superspy that Craig embodied in his first outing. The more he resembles the Bond of legend, the further gone he looks.” SPECTRE also stars Christoph Waltz, Léa Seydoux, Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris, Dave Bautista, Monica Bellucci, and Ralph Fiennes.

Alexander Payne’s comedy-drama The Holdovers set during Christmas in the early 1970s won Da’Vine Joy Randolph a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as bereaved prep school cafeteria manager Mary Lamb. The official description reads: “The Holdovers follows a curmudgeonly instructor (Paul Giamatti) at a New England prep school who is forced to remain on campus during the holiday break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them — a damaged, brainy troublemaker (newcomer Dominic Sessa) — and with the school’s head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).” The A.V. Club’s writes: “Laced with questions about mental health, trauma, privilege, and entitlement that are rightly anchored in its 1970 setting but which ring all the more true in 2023, Payne reaches for a simple imperative to leave us with: let us be gentle with others (and ourselves) lest we build a world where only assholes are allowed to thrive.”