The 10 best movies on Prime Video in November 2021

Cuarón directs Children Of Men with remarkable long takes and indelible images, but it isn’t the kind of craft that immediately calls attention to itself; Cuarón moves the story along with an intensity that makes it hard to pay attention to anything else. It’s a film of astonishing immediacy, with all the urgency of a late-night phone call, but the human element drives it. Owen begins a broken man with little to sustain him beyond his relationship with a paternal Michael Caine, whose activism has devolved into a vague hopefulness and a routine of smoking pot, listening to music, and caring for his semi-comatose wife. By the film’s end, Owen has been transformed and the possibility raised that the world might change with him. Cuarón has created a dire warning of the world that could be, but he’s also made a film about faith, love, sacrifice, and all the other hard-won virtues that keep the world alive. It’s a heartbreaking, bullet-strewn valentine to what keeps us human. [Keith Phipps]

“I’m a driver,” says Ryan Gosling in Drive, and he doesn’t need to say another word. With that simple utterance, Nicolas Winding Refn’s minimalist thriller defines its aesthetic—lean, efficient, and sharpened to the finest point. At a time when action films routinely pass off freneticness as excitement, Drive is a reminder of how powerful the genre can be when every shot and every line of dialogue has a purpose, deployed for maximum impact. Owing a debt to the Zen-like simplicity and nocturnal L.A. ambience of Walter Hill’s The Driver—which, in turn, took a page from Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï—the film is little more than an exercise in style, but it’s dazzling and mythic, a testament to the fundamental appeal of fast cars, dangerous men, and tension that squeezes like a hand to the throat. [Scott Tobias]

Oscar Grant was the unarmed, 22-year-old Oakland man who, on the morning of January 1, 2009, was shot and killed by a police officer of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. The event made international headlines, in no small part because it was captured from multiple angles by several phone cameras. Fruitvale Station, which won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, looks past the media frenzy to the life of the victim, portraying him as an ordinary guy with friends and family who loved him. [A.A. Dowd]

Child-abduction stories are a sticky proposition, because their inherent suspense invites the most sickening sort of exploitation, as audiences are left to wonder what’s being done to an innocent, defenseless creature. But Gone Baby Gone, based on the Dennis Lehane novel and directed with steady assurance by Ben Affleck, works hard to defuse this tension in favor of a deeper, more unexpected meditation on parenthood. Behind the camera, Affleck’s presence is as modest and workmanlike as his performances in front of it have often been brash; as a Bostonian and a new father, he has a strong connection to the material that makes itself felt in the well-tended performances and the authentic portrait of working-class Dorchester. There’s little pretense to it, and none of the Method distractions that nearly sabotaged Clint Eastwood’s recent Lehane adaptation Mystic River. The film simply dives headlong into a swamp of ambiguities and considers how to do right in an imperfect situation. [Scott Tobias]

Maybe nerds are smart, but there’s a lot more to it than that, something Anderson and Schwartzman seem to innately understand. In 1998, nerds were well on their way from genuine outcasts to more socially acceptable, often romanticized underdog figures who might, say, get zany revenge over the jocks. Anderson’s detour from that redemption path starts with young Schwartzman’s willingness to make himself look like a real teenager, in that he’s perched awkwardly between child and self-possessed young man. Anderson emphasizes this physicality with plenty of lingering close-ups. He also assigns Max a perfectly observed faux-sophistication, which looks particularly inept when he uses it in the attempted wooing of actual adult Miss Cross (Olivia Williams), which sparks a rivalry with Max’s millionaire mentor Herman Blume (Bill Murray). [Jesse Hassenger]