New Amazon Prime Movies In June: Classic 1970s Films Highlight New Streaming Selections

Amazon Prime Instant Video has released its June list of new movies available for streaming to customers who pay the $99 annual fee for the Prime service — which covers much more than just movies and TV shows — and the list should delight film buffs who can’t get enough of the era generally considered to represent American Hollywood moviemaking at its all-time creative peak.

We’re speaking, of course, about the 1970s.

Numerous books and even documentary films have explored the classic era when, for what seems now like a fleeting moment in cinema history, Hollywood handed over the reins to a generation of young, innovative directors such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and a kid named Steven Spielberg, to name just a few.

Many of the young directors came fresh out of film school with bright, radical ideas heavily influenced by French filmmakers such as Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, among other European so-called “art film” directors.

Coppola is represented on the June Amazon Prime list by not just one but two versions of his personal magnum opus, Apocalypse Now — a surrealist Vietnam War tale that has more in common with German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s 1972 classic Aguirre The Wrath Of God than with traditional war movies.

Stanley Kubrick created three of his best films in the 1970s, starting with the futuristic satire A Clockwork Orange in 1972, followed by the historical epic Barry Lyndon in 1975.

But it was his third 1970s film — actually released on May 23, 1980 — that still resonates best with audiences in the 2010s. That would be Kubrick’s Stephen King horror adaptation, The Shining, and that is the film that appears on Amazon Prime Instant Video in June.

Jack Nicholson gives perhaps his most manic performance in The Shining, as novelist Jack Torrance who undergoes a mental breakdown as he and his family spend the winter holed up in a creepy Colorado hotel.

Another 1970s classic also becomes available on Amazon Prime in June: The Paper Chase, director James Bridges’ bittersweet satire of American academia as seen through the eyes of a struggling law school student. Producer-turned-actor John Houseman won an Oscar for his iconic performance as the fearsome law professor, Charles Kingsfield.

For Netflix fans, the full list of new June releases on that streaming service can be found at this link, and picks of the best offerings in the upcoming month are at this link.

But here, below, is the full list of new Amazon Prime movies for June.

June 1

• The Shining
  
• Roman Holiday
  
• Apocalypse Now
  
• Apocalypse Now Redux
  
• Something Wild
  
• Sid & Nancy
  
• Sucker Punch
  
• Troll
  
• Troll 2
  
• Repo: The Genetic Opera
  
• The Island of Dr. Moreau
  
• Seven Psychopaths
  
• The Paper Chase
  
• People Will Talk
  
• Far From Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog
  
• Murder of a Cat
  
• Nine Months
  
• Word and Pictures

June 12

• Life of Crime

June 13

• Transformers: Age of Extinction

June 15

• Leprechaun: Origins

June 19

• A Most Wanted Man

June 24

• Covert Affairs – Season 5

June 26

• Katy Perry: The Prismatic World Tour

June 27

• The Mist

The Amazon Prime June highlights also include a couple of classic 1980s films, the punk rock biopic Sid and Nancy, and the black comedy-thriller Something Wild starring a pre-Goodfellas Ray Liotta.

[Image: Warner Bros. Publicity Still]