The 20 Best Amazon Original Films, Ranked

by Taylor Freitas, for Metacritic – July 19, 2022

In 2015, Amazon Studios—the film and TV production company owned by Amazon—co-produced its first movie: the Spike Lee musical dramedy Chi-Raq. Since then, the e-commerce giant has poured billions of dollars into its original content, including feature-length films, TV programs, documentaries, and more. In fact, last year alone, Amazon invested $13 billion into its video and music content offerings, up from $11 billion in the previous year.

As it stands today, Amazon has produced more than 100 original films, ranging from horror movies to comedies to biographies and beyond. The company also has several more movies slated for release this summer, including Anything’s Possible and Samaritan. Its movies have won Academy Awards, BAFTA Awards, Critics’ Choice Awards, Golden Globes, and more, with Amazon being the first streaming service to produce a Best Picture nominee at the Oscars.

If you’re thinking about diving into Amazon’s deep catalog of original films, you’ve come to the right place. Below, Metacritic has created a list of the company’s top movies, which includes both Amazon Studios-distributed theatrical releases as well as Prime Video exclusives.

On the list, you’ll find everything from family dramas to historical pieces to plays. You’ll also notice several appearances from acclaimed filmmaker Steve McQueen, whose Small Axe anthology takes up four slots on the list. We've chosen to include them here because critics evaluated the individual installments as their own films (even though Small Axe competed in the limited series category at the Emmys).

Here, Metacritic lists the 20 best-reviewed Amazon original films, ranked by Metascore. Documentaries and films with fewer than 7 reviews from professional critics are excluded.

All photos courtesy Amazon Studios

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87 #6 (tie): Small Axe: Education

Education is the fifth and final film in Steve McQueen’s 2020 Small Axe series. It revolves around Kingsley Smith (Kenyah Sandy), a 12-year-old boy who’s pulled out of class for being “disruptive” and relocated to a school for children with special needs—all of which turns out to be a thinly-veiled excuse by the school administrators to segregate him because to his race. Although the characters are fictional, Education is based on real-life policies from 1970s Britain, where Black children were taken out of mainstream classrooms and placed into schools for the “educationally subnormal.”

“This is heavy material, to be sure, but it’s not without dark humor.” —Odie Henderson, RogerEbert.com

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