11 movies to check out on Prime Video in September
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Clockwise from top left: A Thousand And One (Focus Features), A Million Miles Away (Amazon), Red Eye (DreamWorks), Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant (MGM) Image: The A.V. Club
As the SAG and WGA strikes drag on and bring movie production to a halt, the studios have started to delay theatrical releases in part because their actors aren’t available to promote the movies. This means streaming services such as Amazon’s Prime Video are the ticket to seeing fresh releases. Sure, Prime Video added plenty of catalog titles in September, and the ones worth checking out that you maybe haven’t already seen 100 times include Red Eye, Army Of Darkness, Deep Blue Sea, Riddick, Sinister, Wild Things, and many more. But there are also several new releases, including Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant starring Jake Gyllenhaal, the powerful drama A Thousand And One, and Michael Peña in the biographical sci-fi drama A Million Miles Away.
Army Of Darkness (1992, available September 1)
The fifth installment of the Evil Dead horror franchise, Evil Dead Rise, premiered in 2023 and received an overall solid reaction from fans. Still, we prefer the original Sam Raimi-directed trilogy starring Bruce Campbell as Deadite slayer Ash Williams. In Army Of Darkness, Ash has time-traveled to the Middle Ages, where he must retrieve the Necronomicon and battle an army of the dead. The A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias writes, “[Army Of Darkness] has Campbell at his swarthy best, with chain saw affixed to arm; wave after wave of Harryhausen skeletons coming to life; and at least five or six one-liners that seem to pause, deservedly, for a round of applause from the audience. What else do you want?”
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Red Eye (2005, available September 1)
If you’re suddenly interested in Cillian Murphy now that you’ve seen him in Oppenheimer, check him out in the underappreciated Wes Craven thriller Red Eye. Murphy plays Jackson Rippner, a domestic terrorist who kidnaps a hotel manager (Rachel McAdams) mid-flight and pulls her into a plot to assassinate the United States Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. The A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias 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.”
Riddick (2013, available September 1)
David Twohy’s Riddick is the third installment of the Chronicles Of Riddick series, following Pitch Black and The Chronicles Of Riddick. Vin Diesel plays Riddick, the last survivor of the Furyan race and a notorious outlaw who had a “shine job” in prison to allow him to see better in the dark. In Riddick, he is left for dead on a desert planet and contends not only with predatory aliens, but two different spacecraft that respond to his emergency beacon. A sequel currently titled Riddick: Furya is reportedly in development.
Sinister (2012, available September 1)
In Sinister, Ethan Hawke stars as a true-crime writer who discovers disturbing super-8 videos at his new home that are tied to the murder case he’s researching. The A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias writes, “An ideally cast Ethan Hawke brings dimension to the role of a true-crime writer whose egomaniacal quest for another bestseller lands his family in terrible trouble. Sinister moves with a full-throttle intensity—and residual creepiness—that’s occasionally shameless and overwrought, but hits like a battering ram.”
Wild Things (1998, available September 1)
Before you say goodbye to summer, revisit the steamy neo-noir thriller Wild Things starring Matt Dillon, Kevin Bacon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards, Theresa Russell, Robert Wagner, and Bill Murray. In this Florida-set story about teen girls who accuse a guidance counselor of rape, nothing is what it seems. The A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias writes, “The whole movie is in quotation marks: It knows the genre inside and out—if you can look past the gratuity, the mechanics of the plotting are impeccable—but everything that’s implicit in a classic noir has become shamelessly explicit here. So instead of Barbara Stanwyck descending a staircase wearing an anklet, there’s the doe-eyed Denise Richards sopping wet in translucent white, making her intentions very, very clear.”
Zack And Miri Make A Porno (2008, available September 1)
In Kevin Smith’s Zack And Miri Make A Porno, platonic friends Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) decide to make an adult movie together to help solve their cash problems but soon discover that having sex—even for a movie—may reveal more feelings for each other than either realized. The A.V. Club’s Noel Murray writes, “But while its romantic-comedy elements are by-the-numbers, the romance is touching, and the sequence where the two leads shoot their big sex scene takes some touching turns as it shifts from hilarious to something richer. Most importantly, Smith ties the love story to the idea that his leads pull out of their life slump by embracing their creative, industrious sides.”
Inside (2023, available September 12)
In a world full of sequels, remakes, reboots, and requels, Inside, starring Willem Dafoe, stands apart as something we guarantee you haven’t seen before. Dafoe plays Nemo, a high-end art thief who becomes trapped in a New York penthouse after a botched heist. The A.V. Club’s Tomris Laffly writes, “The greatest asset of the picture is Dafoe’s finesse in a part that’s both physically demanding and fiendishly fun to witness. It’s like someone dropped him in the middle of an antique shop with a baseball bat and said, ‘Go to town!’ And that he does.”
A Million Miles Away (2023, available September 15)
In the Amazon Studios film A Million Miles Away, Michael Peña plays Jose Hernandez, the first migrant farmworker to ever travel to space. The movie, directed by Alejandra Márquez Abella, follows Hernandez’s journey from a rural village in Michoacán, Mexico, to the fields of the San Joaquin Valley to the International Space Station. The movie is also getting a limited theatrical release on September 8.
A Thousand And One (2023, available September 19)
In the heavy drama A Thousand And One, directed by A.V. Rockwell, Inez (Teyana Taylor) kidnaps her own child from the foster home where he was placed while she was incarcerated. She and her son try to make a new home and reclaim their identity in a constantly changing New York City in this movie that won the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival.
Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant (2023, available September 22)
In Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, an Afghan interpreter (Dar Salim) risks his life to carry the injured Master Sgt. John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) across dangerously grueling terrain during the war in Afghanistan. The A.V. Club’s Murtada Elfadl writes, “It’s an action movie set during an unpopular war that becomes a survival story before finally morphing into a rescue-and-escape caper. Only Salim, in a performance of quiet strength, gives the audience something to latch onto.”
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