The best fantasy movies on Amazon Prime Video

When Reign of Fire hit theaters in 2002, the year 2020 was 18 years away. For us, it’s the recent past. But the world of the movie diverges from our own when dragons awaken from hibernation at the end of the 20th century and they quickly become the dominant life form on Earth. In 2020, Quinn Abercromby (Christian Bale) leads a small band of survivors as humanity faces extinction. But hope comes in the form of Denton Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey) and his militia. Denton and his crew are on a mission to kill dragons, and with Quinn’s help, they might have a chance to save the world from this reign of fire.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the entire Lord of the Rings cinematic trilogy is on Amazon Prime Video just in time for the premiere of The Rings of Power. But enjoy it while it lasts because there aren’t many fantasy flicks better than this one. The Fellowship of the Ring kicked off the trilogy with style, as director Peter Jackson brought J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels to life with vivid details and beautifully shot scenes. Elijah Wood stars as Frodo Baggins, a simple Hobbit who just happens to have the One Ring of Sauron, the Dark Lord and the enemy of everything good in Middle-earth. To save the world, the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), a Ranger named Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), Frodo’s best friend, Samwise Gamgee (Sean Astin), and five others form a Fellowship to accompany Frodo on his quest to destroy the ring. But not all of them will survive the journey.

There are a lot of familiar faces from genre TV in Knights of Badassdom, including True Blood’s Ryan Kwanten, Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage, Westworld’s Jimmi Simpson, Community’s Danny Pudi, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles’ Summer Glau. That actually makes the movie even more enjoyable. Within the film, Joe Revitt (Kwanten) has just been dumped by his girlfriend, Beth (Margarita Levieva). To cheer Joe up, his friends, Hung (Dinklage) and Eric (Steve Zahn), take him to a live-action roleplaying game, where he meets Gwen (Glau). However, the assembled players unintentionally awaken a deadly succubus, who assumes Beth’s likeness before using her dark magic to prey on everyone in her path.

Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) and Gemma (Imogen Poots) are in search of real estate. When they visit a development of identical suburban homes called Yonder, the couple is seemingly abandoned by their realtor. They decide to pack it in and head home, but it turns out that Yonder keeps the twenty-somethings in some kind of time loop where no matter how far they drive, they always return to house #9 — the domicile their agent showed them. Tom and Gemma decide to stay at the house for the night, but when a newborn baby arrives with instructions stating, “Raise the child and be released,” Tom and Gemma become the unwilling victims of unseen, otherworldly forces. Vivarium combines fantasy, horror, and sci-fi elements in a rather remarkable way. Whenever the story seems to slip, Eisenberg and Poots wrangle it right back in.