50 Best Movies That Amazon Prime Has but Netflix Doesn’t

50 Best Movies That Amazon Prime Has but Netflix Doesn’t

March 26, 2024

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Accumulating subscriptions doesn’t make you immune to not knowing to watch, it might even make it more frustrating when you don’t find where to watch that great movie you’ve heard about. To get away from all that, you can cross match our Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu databases — and to make things easier we will be running a series of lists with the best movies on each that the other ones don’t have.

Our purpose at agoodmovietowatch is to reference movies you haven’t yet seen, that you can watch immediately and love. To do this, we only recommend movies that have received a high rating on IMDb combined with a high score on Rotten Tomatoes. This means that these movies have been appreciated by both critics and viewers, so you can trust that they’re awesome. We also only suggest movies that didn’t make a huge splash at the box office or which didn’t get the attention they deserved, so there is little chance you have already seen them. Below we count down our best movie suggestions available on Prime US but not on Netflix (US).

1. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008)

best

9.6

Country

United States of America

Director

Kurt Kuenne

Actors

Andrew Bagby, Bob Bagby, David Bagby, Dr. Andrew Bagby

Moods

Discussion-sparking, Dramatic, Emotional

Get ready to cry your eyes out, scream in anger, but also rejoice at the powerful love that exists in our world. We will not spoiler the premise of this documentary and urge you not to do so yourself. Instead, we recommend watching it and prepare to be changed forever. Call it true crime if you will, but this documentary is much more. Hailed as one of the most important documentaries of the 2000s, it is a testament to friendship and love, a real-life thriller, and a political denouncement all in one.

2. Love and Mercy (2014)

best

9.5

Country

United States of America

Director

Bill Pohlad

Actors

Bill Camp, Brett Davern, Carolyn Stotesbery, Dee Wallace

Moods

Depressing, Emotional, Sunday

If you’re a fan of the Beach Boys’ legacy, or you want to find out more about Wilson, the person, this movie will give you what you need. It has been widely praised as being true to the facts – even by Bryan Wilson himself. But thanks, in part, to the incredible writing by Oscar-nominated Oren Moverman and the work of director Bill Pohlad, this is much more than a fact-based fictionalization of a famous musician’s biography. It is a singularly convincing account of the artistic process and the effects of mental illness.

Love and Mercy tells the tale of two Bryan Wilsons: the first of a young and slightly square-looking musical pioneer in the 1960s, when Wilson was working on Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys’ most ambitious and ground-breaking album. Paul Dano’s performance here is nothing short of perfect. And, second, the tale of the tormented, middle-aged Bryan Wilson, played by John Cusack, during a time when he was under treatment for his deteriorating mental health in the late 1980s. The juxtaposition of these two very different people and the brilliant performances of Cusack and Dano will completely absorb you and change the way you look at things. A unique and beautiful film!

3. Return to Seoul (2022)

best

9.5

Country

Belgium, Cambodia, France

Director

Davy Chou

Actors

Guka Han, Hur Jin, Kim Dong-seok, Kim Sun-young

Moods

Character-driven, Emotional, Lovely

In both documentaries and films, adoptees meeting their biological parents for the first time is an event often painted in a sweet light. Never mind the child’s mixed feelings about it or the tragic reality that caused the split in the first place—it’s a reunion between family members, so it must be unequivocally special. In Return to Seoul, director Davy Chou doesn’t just debunk that myth, he subverts it by making the adoptee, Freddie, as unapologetically complex and emotionally enigmatic as possible. She resists affection but wallows in loneliness. She craves reinvention but stays in the same place for years. She’s in constant motion while being absolutely stuck in life. In other words, she’s a realistic embodiment of a person struggling to find some semblance of home. Chou displays an intimate understanding of the foreign experience, and he couples it with captivating cinematography, a rousing soundtrack, and fantastic performances across the board to make a daring, inventive, and thoroughly exciting film. 

4. The Handmaiden (2016)

best

9.2

Country

Korea, South Korea

Director

Chan-wook Park, Park Chan-wook

Actors

Bae Il-hyuck, Cho Jin-woong, Choi Byung-mo, Choi Jong-ryul

Moods

Dramatic, Thrilling, Weird

The 2016 outing of South-Korean auteur director Park Chan-wook (maker of Oldboy and Stoker) once again shifts attention to the dark side of what makes us human: betrayal, violence, and transgression. Based on the 2002 novel Fingersmith by British author Sarah Waters, The Handmaiden revolves around the love of two women and the greedy men around them. Park shifts the novel’s plot from Victorian London to 1930s Korea, where an orphaned pickpocket is used by a con man to defraud an old Japanese woman. Routinely called a masterpiece with comparisons made to the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, this is a stylish and meticulous psychological thriller that packs enough erotic tension to put a crack in your screen. If you love cinema, you can’t miss this movie. You might even have to watch it twice.

5. Cold War (2018)

best

9.2

Country

France, Poland, UK

Director

Paweł Pawlikowski

Actors

Adam Ferency, Adam Szyszkowski, Adam Woronowicz, Agata Kulesza

Moods

Depressing, Romantic, Tear-jerker

While barely 90 minutes long, Cold War is epic in scope and a modern testament to what cinema can be. Whether we are feasting our eyes on the decaying post-war landscape of Poland, the patinated streets of East Berlin, or the delicate magic of a historic Paris, Cold War offers its viewers meticulously staged black-and-white beauty, conceived by Polish wunderkind director Paweł Pawlikowski and his trusted cinematographer Łukasz Ża. Winner of a slew of prestigious awards, this is a film made for the silver screen, so we recommend leaving your iPhone on the table and getting your hands on the biggest screen you can muster for watching this. The plot is essentially about the obsessive attraction between musician Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and the young singer Zula (Joanna Kulig), who is recruited as the newest member of the former’s state-sponsored folk music band. Cold War follows their impossible love for fourteen years and across many European countries on each side of the Iron Curtain. It is a statement on how far artists go for their art, especially when they become constrained not only by dictatorship but also love. A poetic, sexy, and gorgeous movie without a wasted moment. A work of art.

6. The Salesman (2016)

best

9.1

Country

France, Iran

Director

Asghar Farhadi

Actors

Babak Karimi, Ehteram Boroumand, Emad Emami, Erfan Barzin

Moods

Dramatic, Thought-provoking, Thrilling

Echoing Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesmen, Oscar-winning writer-director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, About Elly) tells the story of a loving middle-class couple who live in Tehran, Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), who are forced to move out of their apartment. After arriving at their new place, violence erupts, upending their life and straining their previously happy relationship. Farhadi does what he does best here, delivering simmering tension, complex realism, and unaltered emotion. Originally titled Forushande, every scene of The Salesman is a privileged look for Western viewers into Iran’s collective consciousness. And even with all that aside, the film still stands out as an extraordinary drama with a tense plot and outstanding performances across the board. Another incredible addition to Farhadi’s first-class filmography.

7. Shoplifters (2018)

best

9.1

Country

Japan

Director

Hirokazu Kore-eda, Hirokazu Koreeda

Actors

Aju Makita, Akira Emoto, Chizuru Ikewaki, Hajime Inoue

Moods

Heart-warming, Smart, Sunday

The title of this 2018 Palme D’or winner is not to be taken metaphorically: Shoplifters is about a marginalized family of day workers, crooks, and small-time outlaws, who live on the fringes of Japanese society. Osamu (Lily Franky) and Nobuyo (Sakura Andô) both have jobs but spruce up their low-wage income by committing petty crimes. One day in winter, Osamu takes in a bruised girl he finds outside in the cold and introduces her to the family in his ramshackle house. But when the second-youngest member of the family, Shota (Kairi Jyo), finds himself teaching her how to shoplift, he faces a moral dilemma that threatens to unravel the family’s fabric. If you were hitherto unfamiliar with the unique storytelling and social realism of Hirokazu Koreeda, we really recommend checking it out—as well as his other movies, namely, Still Walking, Like Father, Like Son, I Wish, and After the Storm. His 2018 outing features the last ever performance of Kirin Kiki, who plays the elderly matriarch and passed away that same year. Like many of Koreeda’s works, Shoplifters is an understated, beautiful, and mysterious study of the effects of poverty and trauma and a delicate portrait of a family in Japan’s urban underbelly.

8. Sound of Metal (2020)

best

9.1

Country

Belgium, United Kingdom, United States of America

Director

Darius Marder

Actors

Alan Resnic, Bill Thorpe, Chelsea Lee, Chris Perfetti

Moods

Challenging, Emotional, Gripping

Ahmed plays Ruben Stone, a heavy metal drummer, who plays in a band and lives in a tour bus with his girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke). Quickly after meeting the couple, we witness the touring musician drastically losing his hearing. As recovering addicts with little financial means, they soon run out of options. Lou desperately wants to prevent Ruben’s relapse into addiction and so she helps him retreat to a deaf community group home, run by the illustrious Joe, a truly amazing character played by the equally amazing Paul Raci, himself the hearing son of deaf parents. There is something deeper going on though: the question of what disability is, and how, despite how it drastically changes Ruben’s life, it might not be his biggest problem. In addition to the stellar acting and delicate writing, we experience his condition through the incredible sound design used by director Darius Marder, complete with muffled conversations, garbled noises, and piercing silence. This is a movie to be taken in completely. Above all, it’s about Riz Ahmed’s performance. He learned to play drums, sign language, and studied deafness ahead of the shooting, and he does not strike a wrong note.

9. What Maisie Knew (2012)

best

9.0

Country

United States of America

Director

David Siegel, Scott McGehee

Actors

Alexander Skarsgård, Amelia Campbell, Andrea Bordeaux, Breanna Lakatos

Moods

Depressing, Well-acted

From the producers of The Kids Are Alright comes another excellent family drama starring Juliane Moore. She plays a hot-headed rock singer who battles her divorced husband, a narcissistic art dealer, expertly played by the unlikely Steeve Coogan, for custody of her daughter Maisie. When one of them marries the girl’s nanny, the other rushes into marriage as well. Based on Henry James’ titular novel from 1897, it tells the story of a quiet, sensitive young girl coping with being used as a pawn by egotistical parents who spite each other. It is sometimes hard to watch the girl get caught up in all this but the young actress playing Maisie, Onata Aprile, plays the part brilliantly. The screenplay adaption of the ahead-of-its-time material of the book by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright also hits every note with passion. A harrowing but powerful film.

10. A Man Called Ove (2015)

best

9.0

Country

Norway, Sweden

Director

Hannes Holm

Actors

Anna Granath, Bahar Pars, Borje Lundberg, Chatarina Larsson

Moods

Easy, Feel-Good, Heart-warming

Based on Fredrick Backman’s 2012 best-selling book of the same name, this Swedish hit comedy-drama introduces us to Ove, an elderly man who feels like his life is over. After losing his wife, the short-fused retiree spends his days grumpily enforcing block association rules in his neighborhood. He is your typical unhappy, old neighbor, somebody you would try to avoid. One new family does not give up and befriends Ove, played by an impeccable Rolf Lassgård, despite his best intentions to put them off. As the plot unfolds, however, you learn more about the story behind the man, and, in classic walk-a-mile-in-his-shoes fashion, start to find him rather loveable. After all, nobody is born grumpy and cynical. Naturally, this is a sweet and sentimental film. But an amazing lead performance and a charming, darkly funny script rescue it from drifting too far off the shore. The result is a wholesome, fun, and thoughtful dramedy with a beautiful message.

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