December's New Titles

A nice batch of movies debuted on Amazon Prime in the last week, mixing new releases with classics, silents, foreign, and titles by some of cinema's top directors. There are horror films, musicals, blaxpoitation flicks, and even a lone James Bond movie (but catch it quick—it expires at the end of the month).

Nick Cave broods in 20,000 Days on Earth

Recent releases

Among new and recent releases are the acclaimed Nick Cave documentary, 20,000 Days on Earth, Chris Rock's autobiographical comedy, Top Five, a new-ish film from Swimming Pool director Francois Ozon, In the House, plus a brand-new one starring Catherine Deneuve, In the Courtyard.

20,000 Days on Earth (2014)
Casual Encounters (2015)
The Details (2012)
In the Courtyard (2015)
In the House (2012)
Top Five (2014)

New in September: Movie Overload

Up In the Air

I've been trying to finish this post since last week, but there have been so many new additions to Amazon Prime since then, it's taken me much longer than expected. While Netflix is busy shedding older catalog titles left and right in favor of exclusive content, Prime continues to bulk up its film library with an enormous assortment of new arrivals. A number of them (such as The Captains, The Blair Witch Project, and Up In the Air) also just showed up on Netflix, but unlike Netflix—who's letting its licensing agreement with Epix expire on September 30—Prime won't be losing those titles at the end of the month. Amazon also seems to have picked up a major chunk of the hundreds of 2nd- and 3rd-tier older titles Netflix began shedding without warning back in July.

Here for one month only

That doesn't mean Amazon is entirely off the hook, however. Once again Prime picked up a number of older films that already come with an expiration date. Those include notables like Street Smart, The Gambler, Racing with the Moon, and West Side Story. Why this behavior, which also occurred last month, is being repeated is a mystery (to those of us on the outside, anyway), but we can only hope it doesn't become the new normal. In the meantime, here are the new titles marked to expire on 9/29. If their status changes or you find any others, please let me know in the comments.

The Bellboy (1960)
The Gambler (1974)
Ghoulies (1984) / Ghoulies II (1988)
Invasion U.S.A. (1985)
Nobody's Fool (1995)
Racing with the Moon (1984)
Sliver (1993)
Some Kind of Hero (1982)
Street Smart (1987)
West Side Story (1961)

Mid-August Arrivals (Now with More Troma!)

Steve Carell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin

Some fun new titles were made available for streaming on Amazon Prime in the past week, including Judd Apatow's unrated cut of the very funny The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Clair Denis' extreme 2001 vampire flick, Trouble Every Day, Clint Eastwood's White Hunter, Black Heart (a fictionalized account of director John Huston big-game hunting while making The African Queen), and the 1946 Barbara Stanwyck-Kirk Douglas film noir, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Those titles alone show a nice range of the old and the new(ish) that seem to be hitting Prime with increasing regularity.

Among even newer releases are Kevin Pollak's documentary, Misery Loves Comedy (2015), exploring the psyche of comedians; A Most Violent Year, a 2014 thriller starring Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac, from the director of All Is Lost; the drama If I Stay (2014), starring Chloë Grace Moretz; and a pickup from Netflix, the Japanese music documentary, We Don't Care About Music Anyway (2013).

Television arrivals include The Forsyte Saga (which expired from Netflix mere days ago), the return of 2012's Masterpiece Mystery: Endeavour, which was among June's PBS casualties, and the (long-awaited?) debut of Toxic Crusaders, the 1991 animated series featuring a kid-friendly version of Troma's very own Toxie, a.k.a., The Toxic Avenger.