Summer is finally here, but Watch With Us has already been celebrating all month long by checking out all the great new movies on streaming.
Amazon Prime Video has a lot of films for you to check out, from recent hits like The Accountant 2 with Ben Affleck to original movies like Deep Cover with Orlando Bloom.
The streamer also has plenty of underrated movies that are worth watching over the weekend. We’ve selected three of the best for you to stream so you can get your summer season started with some drama, thrills and deep-sea chills.
‘Leviathan’ (1989)
The success of 1979’s Alien with Sigourney Weaver spawned a slew of imitators — and most of them were pretty bad. Leviathan, however, is one of the better options, even if it lacks the polish and poetry of the movie it shamelessly rips off. When a deep-sea mining crew discovers an abandoned Russian submarine, all they find is the captain’s log detailing his crew’s deaths and a flask of vodka. After one of them dies after consuming the vodka, the survivors soon realize that something sinister — and maybe alien — was aboard that ship, and it’s mutating into a creature that could consume them all.
Sounds familiar, right? Yet Leviathan changes just enough of Alien’s formula to be interesting. The cast is full of character actors you’ve probably never heard of, but they’re led by Peter Weller, who is best known as the original RoboCop. He’s good here as the leader of a rapidly diminishing crew who must figure out a way off their sea station without being eaten by the creature or crushed to death by the pressure of the ocean around them. And you thought you had work problems!
Leviathan is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
‘Indian Summer’ (1993)
If you’re a fan of 1983’s The Big Chill or Netflix’s recent hit comedy The Four Seasons, you’ll enjoy Indian Summer. When Lou Adler (Alan Arkin) decides he’s returning from running Camp Tamakwa, he invites some of his former child campers back for a reunion. The now-adult campers include Matt (Vincent Spano) and his wife Kelly (Julie Warner); Matt’s ex Jennifer (Elizabeth Perkins); widow Beth (Diane Lane); and perennial bachelor Jamie (Matt Craven). Their reunion will awaken old feelings, rivalries and resentments, but it will also make them remember the youth they’ve forgotten and realize that their future isn’t so set in stone as they think.
Indian Summer is one of those movies that came and went in theaters, but played forever on cable in the mid-’90s. Seen today, it’s a surprisingly resonant drama about the pleasures and pitfalls of reliving one’s youth. The cast is uniformly excellent, with Lane moving as a camper who’s seen the most tragedy of them all and Arkin as the owner who knows when it’s time to say goodbye.
Indian Summer is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
‘Red Corner’ (1997)
Jack Moore (Richard Gere) is a wealthy businessman in China preparing to finalize a telecommunications deal with the Chinese government. Before the deal goes through, though, a major problem arises — the daughter of a powerful Chinese general is murdered and Jack is the prime suspect. Despite his pleas of innocence, Jack is arrested and thrown in jail. Thousands of miles away from anyone who knows him, Jack will have to rely on his skeptical lawyer, Shen Yeulin (Bai Ling), to defend him in court and expose the people who set him up..
Red Corner is a thriller that seems a little outdated, but its primary theme is still resonant. Jack is an innocent caught in a corrupt system that values profit over human life, and the fact that he’s a foreigner makes Jack all the more vulnerable. Gere is dependably solid and heroic here, and Ling is terrific as a counselor who realizes she can’t ignore the injustices that her peers turn a blind eye to.
Red Corner is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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