The 10 best movies on Prime Video in November 2021

Are you one of those people who thinks November 1 is a little early to be decorating for the holidays? Looking for something to watch in November that doesn’t involve Christmas cheer and/or a harried big-city businesswoman learning how to love again with the help of a hunky lumberjack? Then turn to Amazon’s Prime Video, whose robust catalog brings a diverse selection of celebrated films from directors Steve McQueen, Wes Anderson, Robert Zemeckis, Alfonso Cuarón, Ryan Coogler, Ridley Scott, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Mike Mills to the platform.

Deeply, and unsentimentally, 12 Years A Slave delves into the unpleasant details of Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir, taking a few dramatic liberties along the way. Yet it’s more than just a litany of sorrows, the ultimate slavery movie it’s already been dubbed. Channeling the evils of human bondage through the experiences of one weary figure, [director Steve] McQueen has constructed another intensely physical character study about a man trapped in his own flesh. [A.A. Dowd]

Robert Eggers: I decided I didn’t want to choose something that was barely a horror movie, and Alien is just great. I think it’s a masterpiece. It’s one of my top two Ridley Scott movies. It’s extremely suspenseful and entertaining and from a craft standpoint, it’s incredibly impressive. It’s not a great script, but Ridley Scott was able to totally reinvent what we understood an alien to be by using H.R. Giger. It holds up visually. There’s only three moments that don’t hold up today.AVC: I have to ask: What are those?RE: When the chest-burster runs across the floor, that’s a little funny. Obviously, the chest-bursting sequence is incredible. But that little zip across the floor doesn’t hold up for me. Then there’s a cut between Ian Holm’s severed head and a prosthetic head that sort of shows the artifice in a way. And I don’t like seeing the alien in the wide shot.AVC: Really?RE: Yeah, I was going to say. That one is arguable. [Laughs.] That’s the only time he looks like a guy in a suit to me. Everything else is utterly convincing. The Giger alien planet—it’s insane how that doesn’t seem like a set. It’s the most otherworldly thing you could possibly imagine, and it doesn’t seem like a set at all. It’s so impressive.AVC: You have to give a lot of credit to Giger for Alien. For how well it works.RE: Of course, it’s Giger’s design. But Ridley Scott has good taste, visually, and he saw what would work. And the performances are really good. You buy them as people immediately, which makes it scarier and more effective. [The A.V. Club]

With his two features to date, director Mike Mills traipses along an extremely thin line between the endearingly offbeat and the insufferably twee. , his debut, was at least one Polyphonic Spree score on the wrong side of that divide. But his new film, Beginners, winds up firmly on the winning side, in spite of the presence of a Jack Russell terrier with subtitled thoughts. The difference is that Beginners remains fundamentally rooted in the authentic, enormously affecting story of Mills’ father, whose late-life revelation of his sexual orientation had profound ramifications for his son’s life, too. As the title suggests, the world becomes new for both men, which is destabilizing and difficult in some respects, thrillingly unmoored in others. And Mills, who also wrote the screenplay, explores these developments through an achronological structure that feels appropriately liberated. [Scott Tobias]

Director Robert Zemeckis had an eventful 2000, releasing the Hitchcockian thriller What Lies Beneath in the summer, followed by the more contemplative, comparably experimental Cast Away for the holidays. He actually began work on Cast Away first, shooting the first half of the movie following the travails of FedEx company man Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks), who lives for his on-the-go job until a plane crash leaves him stranded on an uncharted island somewhere in the Pacific. To accommodate the mid-movie four-years-later time jump, Zemeckis halted filming for six months so Hanks could lose weight and appear more realistically gaunt. He made What Lies Beneath during the break, then jumped back to finish off Cast Away. [Jesse Hassenger] 

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]