One of Stephen King’s Best Movies Is a Must-Watch on Prime Video This Weekend
This weekend at the box office features little in the way of new arrivals. The biggest debutante is Meredith Alloway’s feature directorial debut, Forbidden Fruits, which stars the likes of Lili Reinhart, Victoria Pedretti, Alexandra Shipp, and Lola Tung in a horror comedy blending witchcraft and Mean Girls. Instead of new arrivals, it is the Ryan Gosling-led sci-fi flick Project Hail Mary that will prove most popular for the second week running, following an opening weekend that broke a box office record for Amazon MGM. If you’ve already seen Gosling’s latest space effort and are looking to be entertained, your best shot might be from the comfort of your own home. With that in mind, here’s a look at three Prime Video movies you should watch this weekend.
For more recommendations, check out our list of the best shows and movies on Prime Video.
1
‘Carrie’ (1976)
Rotten Tomatoes: 94% | IMDb: 7.4/10
Sometimes, you can’t beat a horror classic on the weekend. Ahead of the October release of Mike Flanagan‘s interpretation, check out the beloved 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie. Directed by Brian De Palma, Carrie follows the titular shy teenage girl, who, after relentless humiliation from her classmates, unleashes her telekinetic powers.
The story of Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is the stuff of horror legend. Tapping into the anxieties of everyone in the audience and adding a perfect slice of sci-fi horror, this beloved adaptation thrives as both a terrifying chiller and a twisted coming-of-age story. From its perfect, lightbulb-shattering opening scene to that iconic prom bloodbath, don’t miss out on Carrie this weekend.
2
‘Super 8’ (2011)
Rotten Tomatoes: 81% | IMDb: 7.0/10
From a King adaptation to a film some wrongly associate with the legendary writer, your weekend will be all the better for a viewing of Super 8. The J.J. Abrams-directed, Steven Spielberg-produced flick follows the story of a group of young kids in 1979, who witness a train crash and quickly become embroiled in strange, otherworldly happenings in their quiet town.
The movie that launched Elle Fanning into the public eye, 15 years before she would be Oscar-nominated for her supporting role in Sentimental Value, Super 8 features plenty of signature Abrams lens flare on its way to delivering a pulse-racing, nostalgia-fueled sci-fi experience. Often described as “Stranger Thingsbefore Stranger Things,” this is a great way to fill the Upside Down-sized hole in your viewing.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
3
‘Late Night’ (2019)
Rotten Tomatoes: 80% | IMDb: 6.5/10
For better or for worse, Late Night shows have been dominating headlines for the past year. Back in 2019, Oscar-winner Emma Thompson led an eye-catching cast in Late Night, a film satirizing the television staple and its male-dominated writers’ rooms. When a female writer is brought on board to help deal with diversity concerns, Late Night host Katherine’s (Thompson) professional and personal lives change forever.
Also starring Mindy Kaling in one of her more underrated roles, Late Night is a hidden comedic gem in the vast Prime Video catalog. Scoring big with critics upon release, the film felt timely in 2019 with its detailed satirization of late-night talk shows. However, seven years later, it is perhaps even more relevant, making it a perfect watch this weekend.
