Are you in the mood for dinosaurs, star-crossed cannibal lovers and career-obsessed writers? Then you’re reading the right article.
Prime Video added a slew of new movies in July, and Watch With Us is here to suggest some of the best ones you should watch this weekend.
Dune: Part 3 is set to dominate the box office this holiday season, but lead star Timothée Chalamet was already wowing audiences four years ago in the odd love story, Bones and All.
Watch With Us are huge Adam Driver fans, and we especially enjoyed him in a rare sci-fi hero role in the prehistoric dinosaur flick, 65.
Last but not least, watch Philip Seymour Hoffman play the titular author in Capote, and you’ll realize why the actor is still fondly remembered and respected 12 years after he passed away.
‘Bones and All’ (2022)
Timothee Chalamet in Bones and All Yannis Drakoulidis /© MGM /Courtesy Everett Collection
Teenager Maren (Taylor Russell) is hungry to experience more than what her sheltered life has so far offered her. She’s also hungry for human flesh, which is probably why her father hid her away from society. Now that he’s dead, she’s free to roam the country and eventually meets people like her. While repelled by the older cannibal Sully (Mark Rylance), she’s drawn to Lee (Chalamet), a bleached-blond bad boy who accepts her for who she is – even if it involves killing and eating people.
Did I mention Bones and All is an oddly sweet love story? You wouldn’t know from the plot description, or in the scenes where Maren and Lee give in to their flesh-eating impulses. But what’s most surprising about the Luca Guadagnino (Challengers) film is how matter-of-fact it is. What could’ve been a horror film turns into a strange coming-of-age story about two loners who live on the margins of society. Chalamet is now a big box office star, but he shows the same magnetic talent and charisma that won over the millions of people who watched the more family-friendly Wonka.
Bones and All is streaming on Prime Video.
‘65’ (2023)
Adam Driver, Ariana Greenblatt in 65. Sony Pictures Entertainment / Courtesy Everett Collection
“65” stands for 65 million years ago, when a space pilot, Mills (Adam Driver), loses control of his ship and crashes on an alien planet that will eventually be named Earth. Mills isn’t alone, though – the only other survivor is a young girl, Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), who communicates in a strange language Mills doesn’t quite understand. But that’s a small problem compared to a bigger one they both face – they’re stuck on a foreign planet with almost no supplies and no clear way back home. Even worse, this planet has its own native species lurking about – dinosaurs!
65 is a strange cross between Alien and Jurassic Park, only with a lesser budget and a small cast. The result is a B-level movie that’s surprisingly effective. You really do feel like Mills is stuck in the prehistoric past, which is filled with danger pretty much anywhere he goes. As a proto-Joel from The Last of Us, Driver excels as a surrogate father to Greenblatt’s mostly silent Koa, who is more resourceful than she looks.
65 is streaming on Prime Video.
‘Capote’ (2005)
Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote. Sony Pictures Classics/courtesy Everett
In 1959, the Clutter family was brutally murdered by Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) and Dick Hickock (Mark Pellegrino). The case rocked the nation and, in particular, author Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman). In search of his next book, he decides to document the crime and upcoming trial in detail by traveling to Kansas himself. But as he grows closer to them, particularly Smith, he realizes he’s committed the ultimate sin of a journalist – he becomes too involved in the story he’s reporting on. As the trial drags on with no end in sight, can Capote find a way to finish his book without a concrete conclusion?
Capote is best remembered today as the film that won Hoffman his well-deserved Best Actor Oscar. But it’s more than an award-winning vehicle for an actor – it’s also an illuminating portrait of a writer paralyzed by his own empathy toward his subject and ambition for his career. He genuinely likes the killer he’s befriended, but he also needs him to die so he can have an ending for his book. And Capote knows that the book will cement his status as an American literary legend and the work he will be best remembered for. Hoffman is excellent, but Collins Jr., as a murderer who turns out to be less of a monster and something else altogether more complicated, is equally worthy of attention, both then and now.
