The 10 best movies on Prime Video in December 2021

Movie titles are inherently designed as come-ons, but some function more as warning signs. The title of Little Miss Sunshine, like that of 1998's Happiness, serves as a giant flashing sign reading “Danger: Leaden Irony Ahead.” The film’s premise similarly primes audiences for a shrill, misanthropic parade of All-American grotesques. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ Sundance sensation stars Greg Kinnear as a deluded third-rate motivational speaker; Alan Arkin as a heroin-sniffing, porn-obsessed, endlessly profane grandpa; Paul Dano as a Nietzsche-fixated teenager pursuing muteness as an eccentric lifestyle choice; and Steve Carell as a suicidal gay academic. Yet the film accomplishes a remarkable feat of creative alchemy by breathing life and depth into characters that, in lesser hands, could easily have come across as grating caricatures. It helps to have a cast stocked with ringers with the chops to play comedy as drama and drama as comedy. [Nathan Rabin]

Greta Gerwig’s glorious new adaptation both is and isn’t your grandmother’s . In many ways it’s an even more faithful take on Louisa May Alcott’s original novel than the beloved 1994 , which downplayed the other March sisters to focus first and foremost on Winona Ryder’s Jo. [Caroline Seide]

Whether it’s laying out its ambush-and-heist schemes or racing through French city streets at breakneck speeds, Ronin expects viewers to keep up. John Frankenheimer’s film makes the groan-worthy mistake of explaining the significance of its title twice—first in a textual introduction, and later via an expository conversation between two characters. Yet in all other respects, the movie is a work of no-nonsense proficiency, moving at a fleet pace that allows the audience to revel in the sights and sounds of freelance ex-military professionals and criminals adeptly concocting and executing elaborate smash-and-grab plans. [Nick Schager]

Audiences unfamiliar with Louis Wain could be forgiven for assuming that a biopic about his “electrical life,” unfolding in the late 19th and early 20th century, might look something like , especially since both films star Benedict Cumberbatch. Although Wain did have some scientific interests, and even briefly fancied himself an amateur inventor, he’s remembered mainly for his many whimsical paintings and drawings of cats, which grew increasingly ornate (sometimes verging on psychedelic) over the years. He was also a notable eccentric who may or may not have had schizophrenia (people still argue over ostensible evidence in his work, à la Van Gogh) and Electrical Life, for a while, seems admirably determined to focus on peculiarities rather than serve up the usual Wiki-style checklist. [Mike D’Angelo]

It’s easy, almost inevitable, to see the brutality of war as proof of the absence of God. It takes a peculiar, and peculiarly strong, sort of faith to see things the opposite way. “This great evil, where does it come from? How did it steal into the world?” one character wonders in Terrence Malick’s 1998 film The Thin Red Line, to the accompaniment of some brutal imagery. He may not be thinking big enough. Malick mixes the grim war story of James Jones’ experienced-based World War II novel about the invasion of Guadalcanal with the voiceovers and nature images that have become his directorial signature. As the film progresses, his characters’ thoughts draw toward the conclusion that all living things participate in a cosmic consciousness defined by struggle. It’s a radical, pantheistic vision of the world that might seem pretentious and New Age-y, but the story around it makes the observations seem hard-won, and the sweep and beauty of the film makes them ring true. [Keith Phipps]