What's New on Amazon Prime Video in July 2021

Summer 2021 is shaping up to be a lot better than summer 2020, vaccines be praised (yay science!), but you’ll be forgiven if you’re not ready to head back to theaters to catch a splashy summer blockbuster. Speaking of which, they’re in short supply anyway—outside of a few delayed tentpoles from last year (including Fast 9 and Black Widow), it’s hardly business as usual at multiplexes—but Amazon Prime Video is here to pick up the slack with a movie that seems perfect for those days it’s too hot to think.

The setup for The Tomorrow War (July 2) is perfect high-concept summer trash (though it was originally produced by Paramount Pictures for a late 2020 release): In the future, humanity is defending the Earth against alien invaders, and things are going badly. Luckily, time travel exists, and they decide to use it to go back in time and enlist a bunch of contemporary people to train to fight in the, well, you know the title. The

photogenic new recruits include the likes of Chris Pratt and Betty Gilpin, and if you’ve seen a movie before, you don’t need to watch the trailer to predict how this is going to go—though doing so will help you come up with additional ways the premise doesn’t make sense.

I kid, I kid. I’m sure it all works very well in context.

If your preferences for summer entertainment tilt more toward the soapy end of the spectrum, you can enjoy the stateside premiere of The Pursuit of Love (July 30), a BBC adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s Downton Abbey-ish 1945 society novel of the same name. Written and directed by actress-turned-screenwriter Emily Mortimer (Doll & Em), this mid-20th century look at life among the British upperclass stars Lily James and Andrew Scott.