12 Best Movies Streaming On Amazon Prime Video, According To Rotten Tomatoes

If you're looking for a good movie to watch on Amazon Prime Video in the United States, and critical reception is a factor that plays a significant part in your decision-making, we've got you covered. From haunting documentaries to Old Hollywood classics to emotionally searing animated films, what follows is a list of the 12 movies on Prime Videos with the highest Rotten Tomatoes score.

It must be noted, of course, that there are hundreds of films with a perfect score of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, dozens of which are on Prime Video. Therefore, this list limits itself to films with over 20 reviews and uses, in this order, as its tie-breaking criteria : 1) The average critics' score, still accessible in the backend of the Rotten Tomatoes site, even after they pulled that metric from public view, and 2) The total number of reviews counted.

The 12th-most-acclaimed film available to Prime Video subscribers per Rotten Tomatoes ratings is a 1980 Australian classic. Directed by Bruce Beresford, "Breaker Morant" is set in 1902, at the end of the Second Boer War between the British Empire and the Boer republics in Southern Africa. The screenplay by Beresford, Jonathan Hardy and David Stevens adapts the eponymous 1978 play by Kenneth Ross (with additional material drawn from the 1973 novel "The Breaker" by Kit Denton), and follows the court martial of Australian lieutenants Harry "Breaker" Morant (Edward Woodward), Peter Handcock (Bryan Brown), and George Witton (Lewis Fitz-Gerald), who stand accused of murdering six Boer prisoners and a German missionary — a case that turns out to be more morally and legally complex than it would initially appear.

Recounting a legendary episode in Australian legal history, Beresford's film is among the most iconic screen depictions of the country's past, and arguably contributed to the consolidation of Australia's national iconography. 

While there are no top critics' reviews of "Breaker Morant" included on Rotten Tomatoes, the film still counts a total of 23 reviews, all of them positive, for a 100% Tomatometer with an average rating of 8.4. Reviewing the film for Punch magazine in October 1980, British critic Dilys Powell wrote, "The trial proceeds bleakly: an almost military directness, faces in severe close-up; nevertheless 'Breaker Morant' engages one's emotions more powerfully than many a film with closer attention to cinematic style."

Several of the most acclaimed films on Prime Video are documentaries, as is the case of "Roll Red Roll," a 2018 film by Nancy Schwartzman that boldly tackles the subject of rape culture through the lens of the 2012 Steubenville High School case. Through records of the police investigation, recreations of social media activity, and numerous interviews with the Steubenville populace, Schwartzman takes a long, searching look at the time a 16-year-old girl was raped by two high school football players, as well as the ripple effects that heinous act had on the town's community, large swaths of which jumped to relativization and victim-blaming. The film also closely follows Alexandria Goddard, the true crime blogger who helped bring public attention to the case, and her struggles with morality and the pursuit of truth.

With a 100% Tomatometer and an average score of 8.4 from 34 reviews, the film is the 11th-highest-rated one on Prime Video, and one of the best true crime documentaries ever made. Critics were largely impressed by Schwartzman's incisive, unsparing look at the various facets of the Steubenville case, and found "Roll Red Roll" to be a grueling but eye-opening watch. Slate's Lena Wilson called it "easily the most gut-wrenching crime story [I've] ever seen ... a testament to the dismaying reality of rape culture and to director Nancy Schwartzman's storytelling skills." The New York Times' Jeannette Catsoulis, meanwhile, deemed the film "a tough but essential watch."

Another renowned documentary about sexual violence on Prime Video is 2006's "Deliver Us from Evil," a notorious Amy Berg-directed portrait of Irish Catholic priest Oliver O'Grady, who admitted to molesting 25 children between the 1970s and 1990s at various parishes around Northern Califfornia. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature (which it lost to Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth"), the film sees Berg track down O'Grady to his then-current home in Ireland and conduct an interview in which he gives his own account of his crimes. In parallel, the film shows interviews with psychologists, activists, attorneys, and some of O'Grady's victims, along with footage of the depositions of O'Grady and other Los Angeles Archdiocese members.

"Deliver Us from Evil" has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and an 8.4 average score from 71 reviews, which makes it the 10th-most-acclaimed film on Prime Video. Critics commanded the film's ability to weave together a persuasive exposé of institutional complicity, with the Rotten Tomatoes consensus reading, "Deliver Us From Evil is a superb documentary and a searing look at an institution protecting its leaders at the expense of its followers. A profoundly disturbing chronicle of a wolf in sheep's clothing, the film builds a clear-eyed case against pedophile priest Oliver O'Grady, and the Catholic bureaucracy that protected him. The recollections of O'Grady's victims are nothing short of shocking and heartbreaking."

Notable as one of the 100%-rated films with the highest number of registered reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, 2008's "Man on Wire" was for some time the site's best-reviewed movie of all time by Tomatometer and number of ratings — but, going by average critic score, it sits at #9 on this ranking, with 8.4 from a whopping 158 reviews. Like the two previous entries on this list, it is a documentary, in which director James Marsh uses archival footage, pictures, interviews, and recreations to tell the story of the iconic stunt in which French high-wire artist Philippe Petit took a clandestine and safety-free walk between the World Trade Center Twin Towers in 1974.

Although the film centers on events that happened over 30 years before its making, it has the present-moment urgency of a heist flick, and critics were profoundly smitten with the way Marsh elicits tension and intrigue through documentary techniques. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus reads, "James Marsh's doc about artist Phililppe Petit's artful caper brings you every ounce of suspense that can be wrung from a man on a (suspended) wire." Indeed, the film's acclaim was massive enough to net it the Big Four critics' prizes (from the National Board of Review, National Society of Film Critics, and Los Angeles and New York critics' circles) and the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature — the only documentary ever to pull off that particular sweep.

The subject of exclusion and discrimination against women directors in the American film industry remains a crucial one among film buffs, and the 2018 Amy Adrion-directed documentary "Half the Picture" is a vital contemporary text for discussions of that topic.

Using the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's investigation into Hollywood hiring practices as a jumping-off point, the film is relatively simple and to-the-point in formal construction: Adrion largely structures her audiovisual essay through smartly-cut-together talking head interviews with a wide array of filmmakers. But, with a cast featuring the likes of "American Psycho" director Mary Harron, Martha Coolidge, Kasi Lemmons, "Destroyer" director Karyn Kusama, Ava DuVernay, "Wayne's World" director Penelope Spheeris, Jamie Babbit, the late, great Lynn Shelton, Brenda Chapman, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Miranda July, "Twilight" director Catherine Hardwicke, and Tina Mabry, those talking heads prove more than sufficient to make up a gripping 94 minutes.

Critics were impressed by "Half the Picture," which stands at 100% and an 8.5 average score from 21 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes — the 8th-highest-rated film on the Prime Video catalog. Los Angeles Times' Katie Walsh lauded Adrion's "careful craftsmanship" and deemed the film "an important piece of testimony," while The Verge's Tasha Robinson called it "a pocket education in great female filmmakers past and present, [which] lets so many of them address why they're interested in the field, what stories they managed to tell there, and how they overcame their obstacles."

A tense, claustrophobic, close-quarters affair, 2014's "Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem" is technically the third film in a trilogy about the miserable marriage of protagonist Viviane Amsalem (Ronit Elkabetz), following 2004's "To Take a Wife" and 2008's "Shiva." While it's enriched by the context supplied by its two predecessors, "Gett" can just as well be enjoyed (inappropriate as that word may be for it) on its own.

In the film, written and directed by Elkabetz herself alongside her brother Shlomi Elkabetz, Viviane has been married for over 20 years to the neglectful and quietly emotionally violent Elisha (Simon Abkarian); although they are living apart, he refuses to grant her a religious divorce or gett, which in Israeli law is a requirement for civil divorces between Jewish couples. Set entirely in a courthouse, the movie follows years of increasingly desperate pleas from Viviane before a court of rabbis as she struggles to break free from her husband, stumbling repeatedly onto his utter inflexibility.

With a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score and an average rating of 8.5 from 79 reviews, "Gett" is the 7th-most-acclaimed film on Prime Video. The Elkabetz siblings bowled critics over with their ability to turn an endless, frustrating courtroom battle into edge-of-your-seat cinema. As the Rotten Tomatoes consensus has it, "On paper, 'Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem' might seem less than thrilling, but on the screen, it delivers two hours of nonstop, tightly wound, brilliantly acted drama."

The 5th-most-acclaimed film on Prime Video according to Rotten Tomatoes is, much like entries 11 through 8 on this list, a documentary — but with a very particular formal and conceptual approach. Like "Roll Red Roll" and "Deliver Us from Evil," 2019's "Rewind" focuses on the topic of sexual abuse; the distinction, here, is that the victim himself is the director. Pulling together key moments from hours of his family's home video footage, filmmaker Sasha Neulinger presents the fraught story of his own childhood, and delves into the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of multiple family members, investigating the conditions that made the reiterated violence possible. He also analyzes, with clear-eyed precision, the ways in which abuse can, if left unaddressed, become a painful cycle that reverberates across generations of a family.

The film, released online in 2020 following a Tribeca bow in 2019, scored 100% with an 8.6 average from 44 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. It was applauded by critics not just as a piece of cinema but as a courageous act of personal reckoning that could make a positive impact on the lives of other victims, with the site consensus reading, "'Rewind' pulls at the roots of a family's horrific trauma with a deeply personal documentary that's hard to watch, but worth the effort."

Directed by Kiyotaka Oshiyama and based on a web manga by "Chainsaw Man" creator Tatsuki Fujimoto, 2024's "Look Back" is the highest-rated animated film on Prime Video, according to Rotten Tomatoes, as well as the highest-rated fiction film overall released after 1970. Those lofty titles don't quite account for what a simple, soul-stirring delight it is to watch "Look Back" in practice, though; it feels almost like a film too good and precious for Rotten Tomatoes rankings.

Even so, it scored 100% from 25 reviews, with an average rating of 8.7. In addition to gaining a massive fan following, "Look Back" wowed critics with its story of a years-long friendship. Early on, Ayumu Fujino (Yuumi Kawai) is a popular elementary school student who is lauded for her comic strips and drawings. One day, she's asked to spend time with Kyomoto (Mizuki Yoshida), an antisocial girl who also has a passion for drawing. The two girls form a complex and competitive yet strong bond, and then spend the whole journey to adulthood impacting each other's lives in profound ways.

Critical praise went to the film's celebration of the beauty of art and creation, to the visually breathtaking animation techniques used to bring that theme to fruition, and to the delicate yet gut-wrenching way the film handles the story of Fujino and Kyomoto's connection. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus states: "A moving tribute to all artists, 'Look Back' delivers a multi-sensorial experience that extends beyond its beautiful animation."

Save for the documentary sitting at #3, you will notice that all the movies on the list from this point on are consolidated classics of Golden Age Hollywood — beginning with "Witness for the Prosecution" in 4th place, with an 8.7 rating from 41 reviews. This 1957 Billy Wilder film is one of the most towering, influential courtroom dramas in history, as well as a rare instance of an Agatha Christie movie not primarily centered around detective work.

Set in London, England, and adapted from Christie's eponymous 1953 play, "Witness for the Prosecution" tells the treacherous, twist-filled tale of Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power), a seemingly charming and sympathetic man who is being tried for the murder of Emily French (Norma Varden) — a wealthy widow who bequeathed most of her estate to him. Leonard's case is taken on by Sir Wilfrid Robarts (Charles Laughton), a famous barrister on the brink of retirement. As Sir Wilfrid dives into the case, he discovers a wildcard in Leonard's wife Christine (Marlene Dietrich), whose unpredictable decisions threaten to unravel the defense's whole strategy.

During his legendary career, Billy Wilder directed and wrote a number of films that have nabbed 100% scores on Rotten Tomatoes, and, out of those, "Witness for the Prosecution" is arguably the most popular. As said in the site's consensus, "'Witness for the Prosecution' combines a fascinating character study with a brilliantly unpredictable plot to produce a practically flawless Agatha Christie adaptation."

For all the numerous acclaimed documentaries making up this list (as well as the list of 100%-rated films on Rotten Tomatoes more broadly), no documentary available on Prime Video has made a stronger RT showing than David France's "Welcome to Chechnya." A nail-biting, harrowing, and vital exposé of the persecution of gay men in the Russian republic of Chechnya, the 2020 film uses secretly-recorded footage and interviews with identity-concealing deepfake technology to alert the world to the anti-gay purges undertaken by Chechnyan authorities in the late 2010s. Several survivors of reported torture in detainment camps give their testimony on their experiences, and the activist network that allowed some Chechnyan men to flee abroad is also shown.

Released via HBO Films in the United States, "Welcome to Chechnya" left critics stunned, both for the brutality of the situation it depicts and for the sensitivity with which France commits to capturing the individuality and humanity of each of his traumatized subjects, all while urging viewers to take an urgent stand against the persecution of LGBTQ+ populations. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has 74 reviews, all positive, with an average rating of 8.7. The site's consensus sums up the film's reception like so: "An illuminating and urgent call to action, 'Welcome to Chechnya' portrays the horrors of the mass persecution of the LGBTQ+ community in the Chechen Republic with tenacity and tenderness."

The top two most acclaimed films on Prime Video according to Rotten Tomatoes are both black-and-white Westerns, and both could be considered orthodox, definitional examples of the genre during its Classic Hollywood apogee. Similarities don't stop there: Both are career highlights from titanic American filmmakers, and both star John Wayne.

Second place on the ranking goes to "Red River," a 1948 classic directed by Howard Hawks in maybe the most successful of his multiple career incursions into the genre. Scripted by Borden Chase and Charles Schnee, the film tells the fictionalized story of one of the real-life 19th-century cattle drives along the Chisholm Trail, centering on the embattled duo of successful Texas cattle rancher Thomas Dunson (John Wayne, whose casting saved Hawks from a behind-the-scenes crisis) and his orphaned protégé Matthew "Matt" Garth (Montgomery Clift). While attempting to complete a 10,000-head cattle drive to Missouri, the two men come into conflict over Dunson's tyrannical leadership style.

On Rotten Tomatoes, "Red River" has a 100% and an average score of 8.8 from 32 reviews. Critics both contemporaneous and modern are unanimous in praising the film's flawless construction, high-octane entertainment value, and surprising dramatic nuance and texture. As Time's James Agee wrote in 1948, "When a picture really interests [Hawks], he gives it enough character to blast you out of your seat. Red River, which Hawks produced and directed, clearly interested him a lot. It is a rattling good outdoor adventure movie."

Often deemed one of the best Western movies of all time, John Ford's "Stagecoach" set a new blueprint for popular cinema in 1939, and it has been endlessly imitated and referred to ever since, even inspiring "Citizen Kane." Working at the peak of his showman powers prior to his later, more meditative career phase, Ford combines the core tenets of efficient drama, comedy, romance, and adventure into a film packed to the rafters with straightforward entertainment value.

In "Stagecoach," a large group of characters have their stories told as they ride together on a stagecoach crossing from Arizona to New Mexico through Apache territory. Claire Trevor plays Dallas, a prostitute driven out of her hometown by moralists; Thomas Mitchell plays doctor Josiah Boone, who has a drinking problem; John Wayne, in one of his first breakthrough roles, plays revenge-minded prison breakout Henry the "Ringo Kid." Names like Andy Devine, Louise Platt, George Bancroft, and John Carradine round out the cast.

With a 100% score and a 9.3 average rating from 48 reviews, "Stagecoach" is far and away the highest-rated movie on Rotten Tomatoes that you can currently cue up on Prime Video. Contemporary assessments have often criticized the film's hostile depiction of Native Americans, but as Rotten Tomatoes reviews go, it largely remains a critical darling, with the site's consensus reading, "Typifying the best that the Western genre has to offer, 'Stagecoach' is a rip-roaring adventure given dramatic heft by John Ford's dynamic direction and John Wayne's mesmerizing star turn."