The 10 best free Amazon Prime movies you can stream right now, ranked

The best free Amazon Prime movies that subscribers in the US can stream in 2023, from some of the best horror movies to the most heartbreaking romances.

The best free Amazon Prime movies: Suspiria, Air, and One Night in Miami

What are the best free Amazon Prime movies? Amazon Prime is fantastic for a number of reasons: next-day delivery, early access to great deals, and an enormous library of movies and TV shows to binge, but wait!

Even with an Amazon Prime membership, there are a large number of new movies that you still have to purchase at an additional cost. This is due to the fact the company has its own VOD platform, which puts content in the same user interface as its Amazon Prime Video streaming service offerings.

That’s why we’ve made this list of the best movies that come packaged with your subscription. These are the best free Amazon Prime movies, the ones you don’t have to worry about paying extra for or disappearing from the library. If you need a free trial to keep up with what’s on one of the best streaming services, click here.

What are the best free Amazon Prime movies?

  1. Air
  2. Suspiria
  3. One Child Nation
  4. Brittany Runs A Marathon
  5. The Neon Demon
  6. I Am Not Your Negro
  7. Paterson
  8. One Night in Miami
  9. The Northman
  10. The Handmaiden

Ben Affleck in Air

10. Air (2023)

Air is one of the more recent best Amazon Prime movies, releasing in 2023. Following the conception of the most famous shoe ever made, the Air Jordan, Ben Affleck directs best friend Matt Damon in this sports biopic.

You can get the full rundown of slam dunks and fumbles in our Air review, but the jist of it is that Affleck appears to be back on form after his superhero stint, energized behind the camera and working with a quality ensemble cast. Air might not reinvent the wheel, but it doesn’t need to, instead nailing down the cornerstones of the best sports movies‘ formulas.

Dakota Johnson in Suspiria
9. Suspiria (2018)

A remake only as a technicality, Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is its own thing. Sure, the building blocks from the 1977 masterpiece are there, but both in spirit and visually, clearly, the goal was to create something new.

Telling the tale of a young woman who finds herself at an odd dance school where dark rumors swirl, Suspiria tests the audience’s limits with teasing threads, gut-churning body horror, and abstract storytelling. It might not quite stand up to the original’s vibrant simplicity, but it doesn’t try to — this is an earthier and cynical repurposing of the original’s bony frame. If strange, echoing horror is your thing, look no further.

One Child Nation poster
8. One Child Nation (2019)

Amazon Prime Video has a strong library of documentaries, including Nanfu Wang’s One Child Nation. Back in 2019, this film was making its way around the film festival circuit, helped along by positive word of mouth and admiration of its gutsy tacking of seriously difficult subject matter.

After becoming a mother, Wang uncovers the hushed history of China’s one-child policy and the generations of parents and children forever scarred by the social experiment. Nominated by the Producers Guild of America Award for Best Documentary Motion Picture, Amazon soon snapped it up for distribution. If you’re someone who enjoys festival fare and humble documentary filmmaking, One Child Nation has a lot to offer.

Jillian Bell in Brittany Runs a Marathon
7. Brittany Runs A Marathon (2019)

Time for a less intense, breather of a movie! Brittany Runs A Marathon is quite easily one of those films you can scroll past without a second thought, as it looks quite generic on the surface. Trust us, though, it’s a hidden gem.

One of the streamer’s best movies based on a true story, it stars Jillian Bell as a woman struggling with her self-confidence and health. Desperate to get herself out of a rut, she takes up running. We follow her starting from scratch, struggling, winning, starting all over again… it’s realistic in a way a lot of similar motivational stories aren’t. With a refreshing lack of toxic positivity and more of a focus on achieving overall health than a body transformation, it’s a delightful pick-me-up.

Elle Fanning in The Neon Demon

6. The Neon Demon (2016)

Like Suspiria, this is not everyone’s cup of tea, and not for the faint of heart. Nicholas Winding Refn swaps out the summery hues and stoic aesthetic of Drive for kaleidoscopic madness in The Neon Demon, which is an interrogation of our consumption of beauty. With as much tact as a bull in a china shop and prompting lots of discussion around what some felt was faux-feminism messaging, it’s an exhausting and steely thriller as grotesque as it is beautiful.

Starring Elle Fanning as an ephemeral young model entering a snake pit of seedy photographers, jealous contemporaries (portrayed by models-turned-actors such as Abbey Lee), and LA’s model-making machine, it gets more hair-raising by the minute. If the pulsing score and vibrant cinematography don’t put you on the floor, its sickening twists and turns will.

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5. I Am Not Your Negro (2016)

This 2016 documentary on activist and writer James Baldwin is as smart, multifaceted, and exemplary as the man himself was.

In 1979, James Baldwin described his next project to his literary agent. The book was to be a revolutionary and unique account of the lives and deaths of three of his friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time of his death just under a decade later, he had only 30 completed pages. Documentary filmmaker Raoul Peck contemplates the unfinished book in this sprawling, Oscar-nominated film.

Adam Driver in Paterson

4. Paterson (2016)

2016 was a great year for Amazon Studios if this list is anything to go by. Paterson is one of its quieter works, a subtle character drama led by Adam Driver about fulfillment, ‘the struggling artist’, and the daily ups and downs of the average life.

The Jim Jarmusch screenplay latches onto bus driver Paterson, who scribbles poems into his notebook in between the gaps of his highly regimented days in New Jersey. One to watch if you’re keen on the themes of purpose and the identity crisis of not achieving greatness.

Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X, Leslie Odom Jr. as Sam Cooke, and Aldis Hodge Jim Brown, Eli Goree as Cassius Clay in One Night in Miami

3. One Night in Miami (2020)

On the evening of February 25, 1964, in Miami, Cassius Clay joins Jim Brown, Sam Cooke, and Malcolm X as the men consult about the weight of being successful Black men amidst the civil rights movement.

Regina King’s directorial debut (queen shit) is a hauntingly effective reexamination of larger-than-life people. Kingsley Ben-Adir, Aldis Hodge, Leslie Odom Jr., Eli Goree, and Lance Reddick are the top names in this stellar ensemble cast, breathing life into hugely important historical figures beyond what’s written in books.

The best Prime Video movies you can stream right now: The Northman

2. The Northman (2022)

Robert Eggers, the director of some of the best A24 movies, like The Witch and The Lighthouse, took things to a far grander scale with his epic Norse tale, The Northman.

Starring Alexander Skarsgård, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Ethan Hawke, this bloody and brutal tale of Viking warfare is stunning to look at, contains some incredible fight choreography, and offers plenty of Norse mythology if that’s your cup of tea. Read our The Northman review for more, but this sprawling tale continued Eggers’ heady and visceral streak.

The best Prime Video movies you can stream right now: The Handmaiden

1. The Handmaiden (2016)

One of the best Korean movies we’ve ever seen, The Handmaiden combines thrilling plot twists with titillating romance to leave you on the edge of your seat. Director Park Chan-wook never misses!

The Handmaiden is a sprawling tale of deception, crime, repressed feelings, and sexual desire, all wrapped up in an aesthetically pleasing, enthralling story.

For more lists like this for different services, we’ve also got the best Netflix movies, and best Disney Plus movies, as well as genre lists such as the best horror movies, best romance movies, and best drama movies of all time. Finally, there’s a handy guide to everything new on Amazon Prime Video.