This weekend, Watch With Us is celebrating all sorts of interesting people: jewel thieves, social climbers and playboys with a knack for flying and crashing airplanes.
Prime Video just added three new movies featuring these fascinating protagonists, with Chris Hemsworth fronting the superb 2026 thriller Crime 101 as a burglar with a heart of gold.
Did someone say gold? That’s all that Reese Witherspoon’s Regency-era hustler Becky Sharp wants in the colorful costume picture Vanity Fair.
Last but not least, Leonardo DiCaprio steps into the shoes of Howard Hughes in The Aviator, a movie about how the dreams of a great man gradually turn into a living nightmare.
‘Crime 101’ (2026)
Sharon Combs (Halle Berry) has had it — officially. She’s an insurance agent who has put in the time and work, but when she’s again denied a promotion from her misogynistic bosses, she decides to accept Mike Davis’ (Chris Hemsworth) offer to help him out. Mike is no ordinary dude — he’s a jewel thief who needs her to provide intel on some diamonds owned by the rich Steve Monroe (Tate Donovan). Sharon isn’t a professional criminal, so when things go wrong, she finds herself in a world of danger that even Mike can’t save her from.
Adapted from Don Winslow’s novel of the same name, Crime 101 is a supremely entertaining thriller that does everything just about right. Hemsworth’s criminal hero is appropriately shady but kindhearted — he’s a good guy who doesn’t mind breaking a few laws now and again. Matching him is Berry as the fed-up Sharon, who is frustrated with a lifetime of doing the right thing leading to the wrong result. With Barry Keoghan as a psycho killer and Mark Ruffalo as a dedicated cop pursuing them all, Crime 101 is a worthy successor to classic Los Angeles noirs like To Live and Die in L.A. and Heat.
Crime 101 is streaming on Prime Video.
‘Vanity Fair’ (2004)
Becky Sharp (Witherspoon) is poor and almost has no connections, but that doesn’t matter — she’s sharp as a tack and knows how to charm men. Those skills are important in 19th-century England, when the classic system was at its most rigid and designed to keep people like Becky in the gutter. But when she meets the aristocratic Rawdon Crawley (James Purefoy), she thinks she’s hit the jackpot — literally and romantically. But will Rawdon’s snooty family accept Becky? And will a forthcoming war with Napoleon make Becky’s affairs of the heart seem trivial?
Adapted from the famous novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair has a lot of plot — the original book is over 600 pages long, after all. But the movie speeds through its many, many developments with a breathlessness that’s addictive — it’s classic English literature by way of Days of Our Lives. Witherspoon is too American and modern to be wholly believable as the British Becky, but she’s never less than mesmerizing as the world’s most likable social climber. She has wit and verse, and you wouldn’t mind if she stepped all over you to get ahead in life.
Vanity Fair is streaming on Prime Video.
‘The Aviator’ (2004)
Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) was one of the great men of the 20th century — famous, rich, innovative and just a little bit insane. He’s a fascinating person, which is why Martin Scorsese chose to make a movie about his life in the 1930s and 1940s. That’s when he was at his best, dating stars like Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale) and building airplanes that broke speed records and making movies that redefined what Hollywood could produce. But what would later undo him — the growing paranoia and fear of germs that would isolate him from the world — is already evident, and what makes The Aviator so fascinating is seeing Howard’s rise and fall occur at roughly the same time.
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In one of his great performances, DiCaprio makes his Howard irresistible and inevitable — he’s a modern man of invention, and he’s constantly searching for more lands and fields to conquer. The tragedy of Howard’s life, and what Scorsese emphasizes throughout the film, is that Howard’s ambition is only limited by his mind. The Aviator features some of the best filmmaking of the 21st century, with a spectacular plane crash sequence that needs to be watched again and again, but for all of its scope and ambition, it’s ultimately an intimate portrait of a man who could do almost anything except overcome his greatest fear.