Action movies have made stars out of actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise, and Keanu Reeves (John Wick: Chapter 4). The genre is thrilling and fast-paced, often with exciting stunts and incredible choreography. A good action film can get your pulse racing. But the best action movies have compelling storylines to go along with all the on-screen combat.
Amazon Prime Video has a great selection of action movies, and for this month, we have highlighted three in particular that are worth checking out. One dates back to the 1980s and features an actor who became one of the biggest action stars of that decade, and who remains in the public eye today.
If you love J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit book series as well as Peter Jackson’s Lord of The Rings movies, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is another iteration worth watching or rewatching. Directed by Jackson and partially written by Guillermo del Toro (and, of course, based on Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit), this movie is the first in the trilogy and a prequel of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Martin Freeman is Bilbo Baggins, who travels with 13 Dwarves to reclaim the Lonely Mountain on the advice of the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen). Set in Middle-earth like all the other films, this epic high fantasy adventure movie is filled with action, fabulous cinematography, and an incredible cast that also includes Cate Blanchett, Luke Evans, and Benedict Cumberbatch. It’s not the top-rated film in the franchise, but The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is crucial to understanding the context of the larger thematic elements.
Stream The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey on Prime Video.
The action in this movie features a lot of sword-wielding as the title character, a barbarian warrior played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, seeks vengeance for the death of his parents. Who is responsible? Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones), leader of a snake cult. The film was a commercial success, regardless of any criticisms of the film’s acting, screenwriting, and violence, and there’s no denying the action sequences in Conan the Barbarian are thoroughly entertaining. It’s typical of what you’d expect from an 1980s action movie.
It was Conan the Barbarian, in fact, that helped catapult Schwarzenegger to box office success. After this breakout role, he went on to star in blockbuster movies like The Terminator, Commando, The Running Man, Red Heat, and Total Recall, to name a few, as well as the sequel Conan the Destroyer.
Stream Conan the Barbarian on Prime Video.
Jim Caviezel is no stranger to playing former military or intelligence agents, having played a former CIA operative on the series Person of Interest. He returns to this type of character in Sound of Freedom as Tim Ballard, a former government agent who goes on a mission to rescue child victims of sex trafficking in Colombia. The character is based on the real man of the same name who founded Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.), an anti-trafficking nonprofit. Ballard, who had previously worked with the Department of Homeland Security, reportedly personally requested that Caviezel play him.
Dubbed a Christian thriller movie, Sound of Freedom has received criticism for having connections to the QAnon conspiracy theory and purportedly being sensationalized. For this reason, Sound of Freedom received a polarizing reception. But regardless of your personal or political beliefs, Sound of Freedom remains a movie with an important message: that of ending horrific crimes against children.
Stream Sound of Freedom on Prime Video.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?