5 best Amazon Prime Video movies of 2023, ranked

American wrestling fans may not have heard of Cassandro, but he was one of the few openly gay wrestlers in Mexico’s lucha libre scene to become a true star. The Cassandro biopic features Gael García Bernal as Saúl Armendáriz, the man behind the character. Armendáriz is Mexican-American who crosses the border from Texas to Mexico to seek his dream of becoming a masked luchador in lucha libre.

However, Armendári doesn’t find success until he drops the mask and portrays a flamboyant wrestler in drag (the Mexican wrestling term for this is “exótico”). Armendári finally finds his true self by embracing his Cassandro persona in and out of the ring. There have been plenty of sports underdog stories before, but never quite admire this one.

Prime Video really loves its biopics and true stories, and it’s no coincidence that four of our picks fall under those categories. Of those four, A Million Miles Away is perhaps the most inspiring because it tells the story of José M. Hernández (Michael Peña), a Mexican-American and the son of a migrant worker who dreamed of becoming a NASA astronaut.

With the preserve of his wife, Adela (Rosa Salazar), and his instructor, Frederick W. Sturckow (Garret Dillahunt), Hernández reaches for the stars and finds it within himself to overcome the odds and become one of the handful of people who have have spent an extended time in space.

Tommy Lee Jones and Jamie Foxx furnish the star power in The Burial, a dramatization about a case that shed some unflattering light on the funeral home business. Jeremiah O’Keefe (Jones) had an oral agreement with Raymond Loewen (Bill Camp) that could have saved his family business, if Loewen had actually kept his word.

Fearing that his contract lawyer, Mike Allred (Alan Ruck), wouldn’t be able to win his case, O’Keefe turns to Willie E. Gary (Foxx), a personal injury lawyer from Florida. Although O’Keefe and Gary have the same goal, they also have conflicting personalities that threaten to overwhelm their case and keep them from getting what O’Keefe is owed.

Director Ben Affleck reteams with his old pal, Matt Damon, in Air, the best original movie on Prime Video in 2023. This is the origin story of Nike’s Air Jordan shoes and a dramatization of what it took to land an endorsement deal with Michael Jordan just as he was getting into the NBA. Damon plays Sonny Vaccaro, a talent scout who stakes his career on landing Jordan as a client while attempting to convince Nike founder Phil Knight (Affleck) to accept the deal.

The movie goes out of its way to keep Jordan himself largely off-screen, but it does feature Viola Davis as Jordan’s mother, Deloris Jordan. And Deloris proves to be a very shrewd negotiator when the financial future of her son is at stake.