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)

November's Notables

One very tasty Delicatessen

November may not have brought the same cornucopia of new titles as September and October, but there are still plenty of worthy additions to hit Prime in the past week. Standouts include a Who's Who of films by significant directors, including Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Looney Tunes-like sci-fi dystopia, Delicatessen, Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Michael Mann's slick, early Hannibal Lecter tale, Manhunter, Woody Allen's surprising (and very funny) recent hit, Midnight in Paris, and the Tom Hanks (and Oscar) showcase, Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia. Also on hand is Pablo Berger's 2012 silent black-and-white retelling of Snow White, Blancanieves, which is said to be haunting and quite beautiful (it's been in my Netflix queue for ages). The full list of standouts:

Awakenings (1990)
Blancanieves (2012)
Buffalo 66 (1998)
Crash (2004)
Delicatessen (1992)
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (2000)
Gods and Monsters (1999)
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009)
Manhunter (1986)
Midnight in Paris (2011)
Philadelphia (1993)

Adding to the Horror

Despite the loss of a number of horror films last week, Amazon didn't entirely forget the need for Halloween frights, adding several other scary titles to its Prime roster—including the first three Scream flicks, a slew of Hellraisers, and the suspiciously terrible-sounding Bloody Indulgent and Just the Vampire Hunter.

Also in the (non-horror) mix are the acclaimed 2010 Will Ferrell comedy-drama, Everything Must Go—based on a Raymond Carver short story—last year's Hunger Games movie, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, and Noah Baumbach's excellent comedy for grownups, the recent While We're Young.

Bonus title: the early Nicole Kidman short, 1987's Room to Move, an engaging family drama directed for Australian TV by Flirting's John Duigan, which snuck onto Prime on 9/25.

The full list of last week's notable arrivals:

October 21

Everything Must Go (2010)

October 22

Bloody Indulgent (2015)
Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1993)
Dark Places (2015)
Halloween Vi: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992)
Hellraiser IV: Bloodline (1996)
Hellraiser V: Inferno (2000)
Hellraiser VI: Hellseeker (2002)
Hellraiser VIII: Hellworld (2005)
Just the Vampire Hunter (2015)
Scream (1996)
Scream 2 (1997)
Scream 3 (2004)

October 23

The Dead Hate the Living (2000)
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (2014)
While We're Young (2015)

From September 25: Room to Move (1987)

Leaving in October: Docs, Horror, More

Sad to say, quite a few notable titles are expiring from Prime this month, many of which will be leaving as early as October 23 (as opposed to the more typical last day of the month). So if you're looking to celebrate Halloween with a good horror flick, note that several choice selections will be available on Prime only through 10/23, including standouts The Host (2006), Monsters (2010), and Trollhunter (2011).

The visual (and emotional) feast that is Melancholia

Also taking a major hit on the 23rd are documentaries, with the departure of such esteemed nonfictioners as Crazy Love (2007), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), Food, Inc. (2008), I'm Still Here (2010), Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2012), Magic Trip (2011), and Man On Wire (2008)—the inspiration for Robert Zemeckis' latest, The Walk. Horror buffs may want to check out Birth of the Living Dead (2013), a Halloween-appropriate doc about George Romero, creator of the Living Dead movies—which expires two days sooner, on October 21.

Other titles worth noting: Lynn Shelton's Humpday (2009), Lars von Trier's brilliant Melancholia (2011), the Spanish time-travel thriller Timecrimes (2007), 1992's dark, critically lauded Batman: The Animated Series, the three Back to the Future movies, Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937), Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Joss Whedon's charming Much Ado About Nothing (2013), and the cult sci-fi series, Warehouse 13.

Strangely, this month's genres and expiration dates are mostly in alignment, so I've grouped and sorted them accordingly. See how they all break down on the lists below:

October Arrivals: Still Going Strong

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

There's no shortage of new titles on Prime this month, with yet another boatload of old, obscure, and public domain flicks (Nabonga, anyone?) arriving to complement a number of genuine classics, some Halloween horror, and a smattering of new releases and returns. Oh, and if you've been yearning to watch (or rewatch) the Back to the Future trilogy, all three are streaming now till the end of the month, to celebrate the first film's (gulp) 30th anniversary.

Making more than welcome appearances in October are Roman Polanski's darkly funny Bitter Moon (1994), Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978), Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman's brilliant Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Stanley Tucci's old-school farce The Impostors (1998), Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam (1972), and Otto Preminger's classic noir, Laura (1944).

Also worth a look is the first season of the Amazon original series Red Oaks, a 1980s-set coming-of-age comedy whose pilot last year showed a lot of promise. And then there's season 1 of Schitt's Creek, a new Canadian comedy I haven't seen but which stars SCTV greats Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara and is co-created by Levy—which alone should put it on any comedy fan's radar.

All notable titles listed below. Once again there were too many for me to link them all, so I've given preference to those I thought especially worth a look.

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.

July Departures: Catch 'Em While You Can

For some of you this may be short notice, but if you've been checking the Expiring Soon page for the last few weeks, you know there are only a couple of days left—through July 30, in fact—to catch most of the below titles before they leave Prime Instant Video. If you haven't been checking regularly, then, well, you've got some streaming to do!

Matthew Modine and Elizabeth Berkley in The Real Blonde

Not sure what to watch in the next 48 hours? A fair number of these movies tend to appear and reappear on a regular basis (on both Prime and Netflix), and many are big-name titles you likely already know or have seen. So if you need a place to start, consider some of the following:

CLASSICS
Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) - an early film of the French New Wave that retains its fascinating fly-on-the-wall quality, delivering an unvarnished look at the sometimes dangerous business of attraction, directed by the great Claude Chabrol (expires 7/31) PRIME ONLY
Harold and Maude (1971) - a classic cult film of the 1970s, reviewed here
Love Story (1970) - one of the great tearjerkers of all time, and a major phenomenon in its day
Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) - considered by many to be the worst movie ever made. How can you resist? (expires 7/31) PRIME ONLY

HBO, Comedy, and...Troma Time!

If you like really bad movies with lots of trashy titles (or is that lots of trashy movies with really bad titles?), then this new batch of Amazon Prime arrivals is for you. I can't claim to be a big follower of Le Cinema du Lloyd Kaufman (a.k.a. Troma Entertainment), but I'll always appreciate his influential role in the vanishing art of low-budget exploitation cinema. How much less rich would the world be without movies like Demented Death Farm Massacre, Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy, Blood Sisters of Lesbian Sin, and Croaked: Frog Monster from Hell?

Each of us must make peace with this question for ourselves, but if you're looking for a little something to cleanse the palate between big-budget summer gloss, then you won't do worse (or is that better?) than settling into the La-Z-Boy with a brewskie and/or barf bag and queuing up one or more of the below titles. Given the number of imported titles, along with the lack of such (cough) classics (cough) as Tromeo & Juliet, Class of Nuke 'em High, and Toxic Avenger, my guess is that many, if not all, of these were distributed by Troma as opposed to actually being produced by them. Which means they could be much better—or far, far worse—than even the usual Kaufman fare.

May's Noteworthy Arrivals

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary

Some interesting PRIME ONLY entries this month, especially for fans of cult and art films. If you like things weird, wacky, and highly original, it's tough to go wrong with anything by director Guy Maddin. He's the guy who directed 2004's hoot, The Saddest Music in the World (probably his best-known film), as well as Careful (1992) and the highly regarded ballet adaptation, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (2003), both of which are now streaming.

Also falling into the weird category are a handful of cult horror flicks released under the Mutant Sorority Pictures label (which for some of you should be recommendation enough):

Death Laid an Egg (1968)
Demon Seed, a.k.a, Satan's Mistress, Dark Eyes, Demon Rage (1982) - not to be confused with Donald Cammel's far superior 1977 film starring Julie Christie
Jail Bait Babysitter (1977)
Satan's School for Girls (1973)