Everyone needs a decent movie to watch, but who decides what’s good and what’s not?
The crew at Watch With Us does our best, but we’re only human. That’s why we sometimes rely on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer to guide us to what’s worth watching.
This May, Prime Video is streaming some great movies with around 90 percent Rotten Tomatoes scores. From the Oscar-winning One Battle After Another to a John Travolta ‘90s classic, you can’t go wrong with any of these films.
3. ‘Get Shorty’ (1995)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 89 percent
In the fall of 1995, no actor was hotter than John Travolta. The Saturday Night Fever actor had staged an improbable comeback with Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and he cemented his return to Hollywood royalty with Get Shorty, a black comedy about a mob hitman, Chili Palmer (Travolta), who dreams of making a movie.
He gets his chance when he has to collect a large gambling debt from Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman), a low-budget film director married to a B-movie screen siren, Karen Flores (Rene Russo). Chili makes a deal with Harry — he’ll help him get the money to pay off his debts, while Harry will help Chili get his film, Mr. Lovejoy, made. But Chili’s bosses aren’t as starstruck by Harry’s glamorous lifestyle, and they want their money yesterday.
With great supporting turns from Danny DeVito, James Gandolfini and Bette Midler and a sharp script from Out of Sight’s Scott Frank, Get Shorty is an amusing romp that plays best for fans of Goodfellas and The Player, two ‘90s classics this film aspires to be. It doesn’t quite reach those heights, but it possesses something just as valuable — John Travolta at the top of his game. An inferior sequel, Be Cool, was made a decade later, but it’s not required viewing.
2. ‘A Shot in the Dark’ (1964)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 94 percent
At a crowded country estate in France, a chauffeur is found murdered. Everyone suspects Maria (Elke Sommer), a housemaid who was found holding the gun that shot him. But is that cut and dried? That’s what Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers) wants to find out. He initially believes Maria is innocent, but as more members of the household croak, he begins to wonder if the beautiful maid really is a cold-blooded killer.
You shouldn’t take A Shot in the Dark’s mystery plot seriously — the film’s writer/director, Blake Edwards, sure doesn’t, and that’s on purpose. The plot is deliberately nonsensical, with a denouement that would’ve made Agatha Christie’s head spin. Instead, the movie is a showcase for Sellers’ still-brilliant physical comedy skills, which are on full display as he portrays the world-famous bumbling detective trying and failing to decipher the painfully obvious clues that are in front of him. Released in the same year as Dr. Strangelove, A Shot in the Dark spotlights one of the great actors of the 1960s, and that’s reason enough to watch it.
1. ‘One Battle After Another’ (2025)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 94 percent
Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a man in hiding — from the law, from his past and from himself. He’s a former revolutionary who has retreated into self-imposed exile filled with too much weed and not enough common sense. He’s a good dad to 16-year-old daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), though, and he wants her to have a better life than he has now. That wish is jeopardized with the re-emergence of an old enemy, Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who wants to kill Willa to prove himself worthy to a white supremacist organization. There ain’t no way Bob’s going to let that happen, even if he has to take the law into his own hands to protect the only person who cares about him.
Winner of six Oscars, including Best Picture, One Battle After Another is both an epic about America and an intimate story about a father and daughter. That it works as both is a credit to Paul Thomas Anderson’s enormous talent — he’s a writer-director who paints on a big canvas but doesn’t forget about the minor details that make his art pop with life, humor and emotion. Penn won an Oscar for his work as an ambitious villain, but DiCaprio is even better as an overprotective parent who clears away the fog of middle age just enough to remind himself what he’s fighting — and what he believes is right.
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