2021’s Best Movie is Now Streaming on Prime Video

As with any month new content continues to pop up on the various streaming services almost every day and Amazon Prime Video has managed to snag one of the best films if last year, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza. It’s not a major surprise that Prime Video would be streaming on the service since it was produced by Prime’s recent acquisition MGM, but that the film can now be accessed online so easily is worth celebrating. Starring Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman (son of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman), the film centers on Alana Kane and Gary Valentine growing up, running around and falling in love in the San Fernando Valley, 1973.

Though without any wins at The Oscars, Licorice Pizza was nominated for three Academy Awards including Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture (marking Anderson’s 9th, 10th, and 11th total nominations). The American Film Institute named it one of the 10 best movies of the year (joining the likes of Dune, West Side Story, and Best Picture winner CODA), and it also nabbed four nominations at the Golden Globes (including Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy). Licorice Pizza also landed on countless critical top 10 lists and Best Film honors including with the Atlanta Film Critics Circle, Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association, New York Film Critics Online, and others.

“In some ways, it was the same, in some ways, they were completely different,” Haim previously shared with ComicBook.com in performing music as compared to acting. “Being on a set and seeing lights and cameras, it’s very much ‘lights, camera, action,’ the quotes are true, guys. It’s very much ‘lights, camera, action.’ It’s daunting. Of course, you feel like a little kid and all these people that know what they’re doing and then it’s up to you to be like, no, it’s on you, it’s just on you. And I didn’t have my siblings with me to blame them for things, I had to know what I was doing constantly on set. And I was with a lot of people who were in my family half the time. It was very terrifying, at first.”   

 Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography is largely split across the internet, 1996’s Hard Eight (aka Sydney) can be found on Showtime along with The Master, Boogie Nights is streaming on Netflix in addition to Phantom Thread, both Magnolia and Inherent Vice are only available on Kanopy, with Punch Drunk Love on HBO Max, and finally There Will Be Blood on Paramount+.