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GQ's list of the best Amazon Prime Video movies and TV shows is updated monthly.
These days, all it takes is a monthly direct debit and all your cares can melt away under the harsh blue glare of potentially thousands of films and TV shows at your instant disposal. But with greater choice comes greater indecision, particularly when it comes to Amazon Prime, which has invested in top original content, Hollywood blockbusters old and new and classic faves that scratch that persistent nostaliga itch.
That’s why we’ve trawled through its catalogue to round up its best watches. Slide down Saltburn's bath drain and hit the underrated gems like Hacks and Fellow Travelers, prestige classics like The West Wing and Mad Men and guilt action pleasures like Jake Gyllenhaal's new Road House remake on the way down. Here are the best things to watch on Amazon Prime Video. And if you're looking for our guides to Netflix series and movies, then look no further.
Brooke Palmer1/20Reacher
Reacher is a social experiment in testing just how large a person can be to fit on your small screen. Alan Ritchson – maybe the most swole man in Hollywood right now – plays the titular character in this new take on the Lee Childs series, Jack Reacher (a marked difference from when Tom Cruise played him on the big screen!). Jack Reacher is a former military policeman who takes down bad guys as he traverses the country. It's your classic lawman shtick, but with two seasons that both landed at the top of Amazon's watch lists when they were released, it's probably the best version of that we have going right now. You can watch Reacher on Amazon.
- Courtesy of SHOWTIME2/20
Fellow Travellers
Tired of sex scene discourse? Watch Fellow Travelers, with its gluttonous number of passionate sex scenes shared between Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey. The show chronicles the decades-long romance between two men who first strike up a relationship against the backdrop of 1950s McCarthyism. It's a gorgeous historical series that centres on a topic not usually afforded such lengthy exploration – the love between two men as society slowly catches up with progress. You can watch Fellow Travelers on Amazon.
- Courtesy Everett Collection3/20
Anatomy of a Fall
If you've heard all about Messi, the hottest dog in Hollywood right now, and want to see what all the fuss is about (spoiler: it's worth it!), then luckily Anatomy of a Fall, the Oscar-winning French courtroom drama is now available to stream. Sandra Hüller plays Sandra, a woman accused of pushing her husband out of their attic window and killing him. Much of the meat of this film comes in its screenplay, which picked up a coveted little gold man. It's a rich legal drama that will have you switching sides the whole way through until the very end. You can watch Anatomy of a Fall on Amazon.
- Laura Radford4/20
Road House
Jake Gyllenhaal's remake of this Patrick Swayze classic arrived in March with the urgency of a surprise throat rip. This isn't a particularly faithful retelling of the 80s guilty pleasure, really only taking its core premise of being about a hench bouncer who beats up bar thugs. In a modern twist, Gyllenhaal plays an ex-UFC fighter whose career washed up after pummeling a guy to death in the ring. Expect bare Gyllenhaal pecs, wince-inducing fight scenes and a vaguely homoerotic square-up between Gyllenhaal and Connor McGregor. You can watch Road House on Amazon.
- 5/20
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
If you jump ship over to Netflix this month, you'll see Guy Ritchie's latest offering The Gentlemen. But if you want to see where it all began, stick around in Jeff Bezos-land to watch Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Before Ritchie-an hallmarks were cemented in cinema (read: quirky geezer ensembles, rapid-fire cockney banter, gun POV) they percolated in this almost-debut. In classic Ritchie fashion, it's about crime, specifically a ragtag gang of robbers looking for a score to settle a gambling debt to a duplicitous crime lord. Among other stellar intros, it gave us Vinnie Jones, actor (who you'll also see now in The Gentlemen). You can watch Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels on Amazon.
- 6/20
Hacks
Real Hacks-heads here will understand the instant surge of joy that came with the first trailer for its upcoming third season recently dropped. For many, it's the best show that not enough people have seen. It revolves around an ageing Vegas comedienne (think Joan Rivers-lite) who reluctantly enlists the help of a queer, gen z comedy writer to punch up her material for the current climate. It's essentially an odd-couple pairing (starring Jean Smart and Hannah Einbeinder) and one that, with every episode, will make you wish we weren't in an era of eight-episode seasons anymore. You can watch Hacks on Amazon.
- 7/20
Joy Ride
Since the halcyon, pie-fucking days of American Pie, the sex comedy has rarely ventured far from the male lens, other than a few outliers like Girls Trip and Blockers. Joy Ride is the female sex comedy we've been hankering for with more than a healthy side-portion of feel-good, heartfelt emotion. It follows Audrey (Ashley Park), a Chinese adoptee in the US who, while on a business trip in Beijing, ends up on a mission to find her birth mother with her three best friends. OK, the logline sounds pretty light on the sex, but it's there in spades. As well as being just extremely funny, it's groundbreaking in its all-Asian cast and the focus on Asian women's sexuality, something often not given its own POV in mainstream movies. You can watch Joy Ride on Amazon.
- 8/20
Drive
If you can believe, Drive hit cinemas 13 years ago (world's biggest gulp!). It introduced us to Ryan Gosling as a getaway driver with no name, one of the sickest soundtracks of all time and a plague of silk bomber jackets; one we're still recovering from as a global community. Not many things that were deemed cool a decade ago are still cool today, as is the circle of generational dunking, but Drive is still very, very cool. It's a slick crime thriller that somehow stands the test of time. You can watch Drive on Amazon.
- 9/20
Reality
Sydney Sweeney's flashier roles in recent years - like Euphoria, The White Lotus and Anyone but You - may have taken some of the spotlight away from what is arguably her best performance to date in Reality. In the film, she plays Reality Winner, a US Navy vet who leaked classified documents about Russia's interference with the US Presidential elections in 2016. The leak had global ramifications and landed Winner in prison for the longest time under any government leak. Sweeney's portrayal of Winner is vulnerable and intimate, and it's a shame more people didn't get to see it when it was unceremoniously released on HBO Max without much fanfare. You can watch Reality on Amazon.
- Rex Features10/20
Catch Me if You Can
If you're a person that sees sense, you'll probably recognise Catch Me if You Can as the film that Leonardo DiCaprio should have won his Oscar for (no offence to The Revenant). Maybe he was just too young, hot and in demand to be given the little gold man, but it's those traits that make his performance in Stephen Spielberg's crime caper so good. In this true story, DiCaprio plays Frank Abagnale Jr, a con man who posed as a pilot, doctor and lawyer and cashed millions of dollars worth of forged cheques all while the FBI was on his tail. Oh, and all before his 21st birthday. Tom Hanks co-stars, naturally, and it's just a wholly enjoyable and thrilling ride from start to finish. You can watch Catch Me if You Can on Amazon.
- 11/20
The West Wing
We'd never be as naive to suggest that US politics in the '90s was a hopeful place, however, looking back at the West Wing with the context of the absolute dumpster fire we've existed through in the last decade or so, you can't help but feel a wistful sort of ‘halcyon days’ feelings for its optimistic approach to those in power. Aaron Sorkin's political series followed the daily grind of the senior staff of The White House, from the press secretary, played by Alison Janney, to the Democrat President, played by Martin Sheen. It's still considered, to this day, one of the best TV shows ever made (at least until Sorkin left after the fourth season). You can watch The West Wing on Amazon.
- ©AMC/courtesy Everett Collection12/20
Mad Men
In a TV landscape that's now bursting at the seams with prestige hit after prestige hit, it says something that the sleek excellence of Mad Men still hasn't been touched. The world of 60s advertising – with its whiskey lunches and 20-pack-a-day pitch meetings – headed up by a revelatory Jon Hamm barely wavers in quality throughout its seven seasons, making it one of the most satisfying investments of time. If you haven't seen it in a while, it's good to be reminded of how great TV can be. If you somehow missed it the first time around, prepare to lose weeks of your life (and come out the other end with only a mild disdain for the concept of men as a whole). You can watch Mad Men on Amazon.
- Everett Collection13/20
Bottoms
We support gay rights, but we also support gay wrongs, such as starting up a high school fight club so you can hit on (and get hit by) hot cheerleaders. That's the conceit of Bottoms, the chaotic brainchild of Rachel Sennott and director Emma Seligman. The film stars Sennott and Ayo Edebiri as two lesbian losers looking lose their virginities before they graduate, so they concoct a bonkers plan to set up an all-female after school self defence club in the hopes of luring their crushes under the endorphins of being beat up. It's dumb in the best possible way. You can watch Bottoms on Amazon.
- 14/20
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Mr. & Mrs. Smith takes the familiar conceit introduced by Brangelina in the '00s – what if two spies were married and had to kill each other? – and grounds it in something deeper and richer over the course of nine episodes. Rather than purely sleek and sylish, Donald Glover and Maya Erskine turn the plot on it's head slightly by introducing us to two spies who knowingly enter a sham marriage as a front, only to end up actually falling for each other. But what happens when the secret boss overlord you work for finds out you might want to leave it all behind? You can watch Mr. & Mrs. Smith on Amazon.
- 15/20
The Curse
The Curse is probably the best show you won't enjoy watching right now, which is true to Nathan Fielder's form. The king of cringe teams up with Emma Stone and Benny Safdie for this take on the cult of home improvement TV culture, but because this is Fielder and Safdie we're talking about, it's far from your usual satire. Fielder and Stone play a married TV host couple who, while filming a virtue-signalling series called Flipanthropy, worry they've been inflicted with a curse. Whether or not the curse is real, or just the fear that it might start manifesting in their daily lives, is one of the questions posed by this series. The other is how the hell did this even get made? It's a career-best performance from Emma Stone, which is saying something as she's currently one of the frontrunners for a second Oscar this year. You can watch The Curse on Amazon.
- Warner Bros. Pictures16/20
Saltburn
By now, you won't have been able to avoid all the twists and turns that Saltburn has to offer if you've spent even a nanosecond on the internet. Maybe it's just been in passing, but you've surely heard vague horrified utterings about bathwater and freshly dug graves. We'll let you discover those shocks for yourself if you haven't got around to watching yet. Emerald Fennell's peak into the upper echelons of Britain's upper class is told through the eyes of its strange little outsider protagonist, played by Barry Keoghan. After being taken under the wing of an ethereal-looking Jacob Elordi, Keoghan's character is dragged into the gilded doors of Saltburn, a sweeping, rural estate. What he does after that, well, let's just say you'll need a bath after. You can watch Saltburn on Amazon.
- 17/20
Fleabag
Phoebe Waller-Bridge's magnum opus follows a 30-something-year-old navigating life and love in London while managing crushing grief. Considering its regular gut punches and oft-cringe set pieces, the series has become an unlikely comfort watch. Both seasons are available to watch now, including the one where Andrew Scott's hot priest made us all take moral pause for a hot second in 2019. You can watch Fleabag on Amazon.
- 18/20
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood
In Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino trues to change history. Revolving around the murder of Sharon Tate at the hands of Charles Manson's compound of hippies, the film introduces a star on the verge of being washed up, Rick (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double, Cliff (Brad Pitt), who manoeuvre the sun-drenched decay of 60s Hollywood and end up in the right place at the right time. You can watch Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood on Amazon.
- 19/20
Palm Springs
With time loop stories, you basically know what you're getting. Someone is stuck repeating the same day over and over again, changing bits of it to see how things change only to wake up the next day to do it all again. Palm Springs very much sticks to this framework, but it's made excellent by its anchoring stars Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti who play wedding guests fated to experience the same festivities until the end of time. You can watch Palm Springs on Amazon.
- 20/20
Zodiac
David Fincher's Zodiac is about as scary as you can get without being a full-blown horror. The film revolves around the hunt for the Zodiac Killer, a serial killer who wreaked terror on California in the 60s with a series of puzzles and cyphers. Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo star as a group of reporters and detectives on the hunt for the murderer who, by the way, has still never been identified. With its neo-noir stylings, Zodiac is chilling and tense and you will probably want to double-check the bolts on your windows before you go to sleep, just in case. You can watch Zodiac on Amazon.