In addition to shipping your packages, Amazon Prime is also the home to many genuinely great movies and TV shows. And, as the summer season reaches its peak, streaming something good can often take your mind off of the sweltering temperatures outside.
Comedies are often the perfect go-to genre for distraction, in part because they can bring genuine laughs, especially if they’re great. These are the best comedies you should watch on Prime Video to relieve your summer blues.
The Apartment (1960)
One of the greatest comedies ever made, The Apartment tells the story of a lowly insurance company employee who allows the higher-ups at his firm to use his apartment for their trysts. In addition to being one of the greatest love stories ever told, The Apartment also has the kind of wit and visual panache that is much harder to find in more recent comedies.
Although the movie certainly has some dark moments, the central performances from Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon are more than enough to leave you with a warm feeling in your gut.
The Big Sick (2017)
Based on the true story of Kumail Nanjiani’s relationship with his actual wife, Emily V. Gordon, The Big Sick follows Kumail playing a version of himself as he meets and then begins to date a girl named Emily. When Emily falls into a sudden and unexplained coma shortly after the couple has broken up, Kumail finds himself in an awkward relationship with Emily’s parents.
It’s a pretty unusual structure for a rom-com, but it works in large part because of Holly Hunter and Ray Romano’s outstanding performances as Emily’s parents, and because the writing is genuinely sharp from beginning to end.
Hot Fuzz (2007)
The second in Edgar Wright’s Cornetto trilogy, Hot Fuzz stars Simon Pegg (from the Mission: Impossible movies) as a strait-laced police officer who is assigned to a small town in the west country of the U.K. Once there, though, he begins to investigate a series of surprisingly grisly murders that seem to implicate some of the most powerful people in town.
While this movie has all the makings of a serious drama, Hot Fuzz is basically all jokes from the second it starts. Director Edgar Wright knows how to integrate comedy into the visuals of his films in addition to the script, which, when combined, make Hot Fuzz one of the best movies of the decade, comedy or not.
The Lost City (2022)
Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum are two of our great movie stars, and The Lost City unites them in spectacular fashion. When a writer of adventure romance novels finds herself in the middle of an actual quest to recover a lost artifact, she and the cover model for her books are forced to trust one another in order to survive.
Featuring a few truly delightful cameos, as well as some genuine action and an excellent villain performance from Harry Potter himself Daniel Radcliffe, The Lost City is the kind of action comedy we should get more of.
Licorice Pizza (2021)
Licorice Pizza may seem like one of the more serious movies on this list, but the movie’s great joy is how lightly it tells its story. Set in the San Fernando Valley in the early 1970s, the movie tracks a relationship between a teenage boy and a 20-something woman as they both come of age.
Featuring wonderful, winning performances from Alanna Haim and Cooper Hoffman, Licorice Pizza is a movie told in vignettes as the lives of its two central characters intersect. What makes the movie work, though, is how vibrant, funny, and alive each one of those sections of the film feels.
