Amazon Prime Video has an exciting line-up for you this month. Here's a list of what's new on the platform and some older hidden gems.
Academy Award-nominee Matthre Heineman paints an intimate portrait of international superstar J Balvin, in the week leading up to the most important concert of his career — a sold-out stadium show in his hometown of Medellín, Colombia. As the performance draws closer, the streets explode with growing political unrest, forcing the Latin Grammy-winning musician to wrestle with his responsibilities to his country and to his fans.
Academy Award-winning director Barry Jenkins adapts Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a Georgia plantation worker (Thuso Mbedu) who escapes and discovers that the Underground Railroad, a rumoured secret network of tracks and tunnels, actually exists. The 10-episode series also stars Chase W. Dillon, Joel Edgerton, Aaron Pierre, William Jackson Harper, Lily Rabe, and Will Poulter.
Created by David Weil and starring Academy Award-winning actors Morgan Freeman, Anne Hathaway and Helen Mirren, Emmy Award-winning actor Uzo Aduba, Nicole Beharie, Anthony Mackie, Dan Stevens, and Constance Wu, the seven-part anthology series explores the strange, beautiful, heartbreaking and hilarious truths of what it means to be human.
Director Michael Gracey follows singer P!NK behind the scenes of her 2019 Beautiful Trauma world tour, as she tries to balance being a performer with also being a mom, wife and boss.
Lauren Oliver adapts her own bestselling novel about an annual small-town Texas game in which senior graduates compete for a large sum of money and the chance to escape their circumstances. Across 10 episodes, the players will come face to face with their deepest, darkest fears and be forced to decide how much they are willing to risk in order to win.
Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) is an angel. Crowley (David Tennant) is a demon. They're unlikely partners on a high-stakes mission — preventing Armageddon. Adapted from Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchet's fantasy novel of the same name, the six-part series is immersive, moving and surprisingly feel-good, thriving on Sheen and Tennant's electric chemistry and impeccable comic timing.
Modern-day Sherlock Holmes adaptations are a dime a dozen, but few come close to the biting wit and snarky spirit of the eight-season House. Each episode follows a simple formula — a patient with outlandish symptoms is brought in and doctors struggle to determine the cause until the genius titular physician (an acerbic Hugh Laurie) steps in with an equally outlandish diagnosis (gold poisoning/brain measles/bubonic plague). He's always right.
As with his other films, director Rian Johnson takes a well-worn genre and gives it an ingenious spin in Looper. It follows Joe (Bruce Willis), a hitman sent back in time to be killed by his younger self (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). What follows when young Joe can't bring himself to pull the trigger forms the core of this smartly written film that isn't so much about how much time you have, but what you choose to do with it.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos transplants an ancient Greek myth into a chilling modern setting in this story of a surgeon (Colin Farrell) who saves lives until he is finally asked to take one. If he doesn't kill either his wife or one of their young children, all three will die. Who will he choose? It's an impossible situation designed to strike at the heart of your deepest fears.
A one-night stand turns into an endless nightmare when a woman's date refuses to let her leave his apartment. Director Cate Shortland effectively captures the terror and claustrophobia of what follows when an inviting home begins to feel like a prison, and a charming man turns a budding romance into a hostage thriller.
Loosely adapted from Haruki Murakami's Barn Burning, the South Korean entry for Best Foreign Language Film in 2019 is a heady mix of lust, obsessiveness and arson. It follows three characters whose lives intersect and become irrevocably intertwined when one of them goes missing. Burning is an enigma, raising more questions than it answers, and daring you to decode its layers long after it's ended.
Recommendations in collaboration with Amazon Prime Video