The most-watched movie on Paramount+ right now is the new Scary Movie, which critics have taken a baseball bat to. It may have a 24% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but folks keep pressing play on the Scream spoof, and honestly, I’m here for it because movie lovers can’t go by critics alone.
Every Paramount+ movie below arrived on the service for U.S. customers in early September. We’ve got everything from trailer park comedy and wars spanning history to a mind-bending supernatural flick, and my top pick, the best Star Trek send-up ever. While the Tomato meter scores swing wildly from one to the next, one person’s stinker is another person’s all-time favorite. You decide.
5
Joe Dirt
A critical punching bag that cable turned into a cult hit
David Spade’s 2001 comedy Joe Dirt was dead on arrival when it hit theaters, but two decades of basic cable reruns dropped it into viewers’ laps and gave it renewed life. Spade stars as Dirt (pronounced “Deer-tay”), the unfailingly optimistic, mullet-wig-sporting janitor at an L.A. radio station who gets dragged into the studio of shock jock Zander Kelly (Dennis Miller), who starts out wanting to tear Joe’s dignity to shreds.
But as Joe starts telling the tragic and hilarious story of how his parents abandoned him at the Grand Canyon as a kid, and how he’s spent his whole life looking for them—including a romance with the gorgeous Brandy (Brittany Daniel), and a feud with a bully named Robby (Kid Rock) along the way—Joe’s story on air has the whole city rooting for him.
Joe Dirt
Release Date
April 10, 2001
Runtime
91 Minutes
Director
Dennie Gordon
4
300
This. Is. Sparta!
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Once you get past 300-star Gerard Butler’s thick Scottish accent (a dialect not native to ancient Greece, I’m pretty sure), Zack Snyder’s scorching box-office war epic is a thrilling watch. More than just that one memeable scene—you know, the one with the big kick and Butler’s defiant line that started a war, “This is Sparta!”—300 is the story of the mighty Spartan King Leonidas (Butler), who leads his army of 300 loyal Spartan warriors against the enormous Persian army of the god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro).
Meanwhile, at home, Leonidas’s wife, Queen Gorgo (a pre-Game of Thrones Lena Headey), fends off political scheming from Theron (The Wire‘s Dominic West). The battle scenes are the stuff of cinematic legend, and full of beautiful slow-motion sequences and a gritty, contrast-heavy aesthetic that add depth and intensity to the film.
300
Release Date
March 7, 2007
Runtime
117 minutes
Director
Zack Synder
3
Dunkirk
Another Nolan cinematic war masterpiece is pure dread
Swinging the critical reception pendulum to the top end of the spectrum now, Dunkirk is a three-time Oscar-winning, 92%-rated gut-punch of a war movie by Christopher Nolan (yeah, the The Odyssey guy), who landed his first Best Director nomination for the film. Dunkirk brilliantly recreates the atmosphere and intensity of 1940 World War II, when 400,000 Allied troops were trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk, France, as the Germans pummeled them backwards towards the English Channel.
Nolan focuses on three different stories—young Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), a British soldier on the beach; Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance), a civilian sailor who, along with countless other brave civilians, volunteered his boat to help rescue stranded soldiers on the beach; and Farrier (Tom Hardy), a Spitfire pilot who risks his life to deliver air support. The three stories converge in a nail-biting saga that Nolan is known for.
Dunkirk
Release Date
July 21, 2017
Runtime
106 minutes
Director
Christopher Nolan
2
The Dead Zone
King, Cronenberg, and Walken make a chilling trio
In the “bizarre and creepy supernatural thriller” category, it’s hard to think of a better trio of geniuses you could bake together than Stephen King, David Cronenberg, and Christopher Walken. I wrote about this iconic 1983 gem in my roundup of Paramount+ thrillers last weekend, but it’s so good that it warranted another inclusion.
The Dead Zone—adapted from King’s 1979 novel and directed by Cronenberg, hot off of Videodrome—is peak Walken, who stars as Johnny Smith, a man who awakens from a five-year coma to discover that he’s developed strange psychic powers that show him a person’s past, present, and potential future just by touching them. It’s a blessing and a curse, as Smith starts helping the local police and citizens, but also finds that he’s the only one who can stop a potentially deadly future at the hands of a rising politician (Martin Sheen). Also worth checking out is the 2002 series The Dead Zone, starring Anthony Michael Hall, which is streaming on Prime Video.
The Dead Zone
Release Date
October 21, 1983
Runtime
103 minutes
Director
David Cronenberg
1
Galaxy Quest
A satirical loveletter to Trek that’s a great anytime watch
All the Star Trek you’ll ever need is on Paramount+ (they own the lot, after all), but one of the best Trek-adjacent films ever made is now on the service, so you should take advantage and watch Galaxy Quest before it fires up its Quantum Flux Drive and takes off. One of my favorite movies of all time, the 1999 Trek satire is beloved by Trekkies across the board.
It follows the washed-up, convention-circuit cast of the ’80s sci-fi show Galaxy Quest—including Shatner-esque actor Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen), fed-up Gwen DeMarco (Sigourney Weaver), and a proper British thespian typecast by his latex-masked character, Alexander Dane (Alan Rickman)—who are literally beamed from Hollywood to space to play their characters in real life to help an alien race called the Thermians take on an evil warlord. The Thermians, who mistook the show for real “historical documents,” soon learn the truth about the actors, but they luckily get another chance to play their characters to perfection.
Galaxy Quest is full of excellent Trek jabs, like Nesmith’s shirtless captain, transporter mishaps, and perhaps best of all, the plight of Crewman #6, Guy (the amazing Sam Rockwell), a “Redshirt” who’s convinced that he’s going to be the first to die. “By Grabthar’s hammer, by the suns of Warvan, you shall be avenged!!”
Galaxy Quest
Release Date
December 25, 1999
Runtime
102 minutes
Director
Dean Parisot
A never-ending selection of movies
If you’re a movie lover like me, you know that pretty much everything you want or need is streaming. If you like thrillers, there’s plenty. If documentaries are more your thing, there are tons to choose from, too. And if you just want to know what’s new in movies, check back weekly.
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