Paramount Plus is one of the newer arrivals on the streaming scene, and while its roster is rolling out plenty of exciting streaming original and acquired shows, there are plenty of movies on Paramount Plus that are worth exploring. From the classic to the current and from the vintage to the very new, Paramount Plus offers an excellent movie lineup that rivals any other streaming service. To save you some time from surfing, The Manual has dug out a few of the very best Paramount Plus movies. Here’s what’s on Paramount Plus that you should watch this month.
Babylon (2022)
189m
Genre
Drama, Comedy
Stars
Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva
Directed by
Damien Chazelle
A fable set against the backdrop of 1920s Hollywood, Babylon is a movie about movies that is beautiful and rhapsodic in ways that few films even attempt to be. Running more than three hours, the movie follows three characters as they see their fortunes rise and fall against the backdrop of Hollywood’s transition to the sound era. One is an established Hollywood star (Brad Pitt), another an emerging ingenue who is too wild for her own good (Margot Robbie), and the third a behind-the-scenes striver who wants nothing more than to be close to the movie business (Diego Calva). The actual story of Babylon is rife with tragedy, and yet its baffling climax is a reminder that the movies live on when everything else is gone, and we can take some comfort in that at least.
Interstellar (2014)
169m
Genre
Adventure, Drama, Science Fiction
Stars
Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain
Directed by
Christopher Nolan
In a career filled with precise, slightly cold movies, Interstellar feels like something of an outlier for Christopher Nolan. The film, which follows a space mission designed to save Earth from extinction, is really about what it means to love another person, and what that love can and cannot do. On top of that; the movie also features some of the most stunning visuals of Nolan’s career, as well as a score from Hans Zimmer that has become a classic in the decade since the movie’s release. Not everything about Interstellar works, but it’s hard to imagine any other director taking a swing this big and pulling it off this well.
Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
131m
Genre
Action, Drama
Stars
Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly
Directed by
Joseph Kosinski
A sequel that no one needed and everyone was grateful for, Top Gun: Maverick improves on its predecessor by finding a more grounded emotional story to tell about its characters. The film follows Maverick, now a veteran pilot, as he returns to Top Gun to teach a class of young guns how to handle a deeply dangerous mission. Along the way, he falls in love, buries the hatchet with the son of his closest friend, and proves that Maverick is a legend that may never be equaled. If we failed to appreciate Tom Cruise before Maverick, this Top Gun sequel reminded moviegoing audiences everywhere why he’s still a major star.
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
180m
Genre
Crime, Drama, Comedy
Stars
Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie
Directed by
Martin Scorsese
An ode to greed and the misery it causes, The Wolf of Wall Street is a fabulous journey into forsaken levels of self-interest. Based on Jordan Belfort’s autobiography, The Wolf of Wall Street follows Belfort’s rise from stockbroker to penny stock hawker to a self-made millionaire who founds Stratton Oakmont at age 30. The over-the-counter brokerage house sells mounds of poor stock picks to uninformed investors, taking livelihoods along the way to making his brokers millionaires themselves. The party, the sex, the drugs, the whole house of cards, however, has to eventually fall. Filmmaker Martin Scorsese directs the on-screen story of the non-stop thrills at Stratton, where corruption ruled and more was never enough.
Ascension (2021)
97m
Genre
Documentary
Directed by
Jessica Kingdon
In Ascension, we get to see a modern economy’s growth from the ground up. The 2021 MTV documentary film follows the pursuit of the Chinese dream through a billion-member society that erupts in a riot of class stratification after permitting a regulated capitalism that prioritizes productivity and innovation over all else. This includes civil rights like freedom of speech, press, and more. Ascension premiered in June 2021 at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it won Best Documentary Feature. Director and producer Jessica Kingdon originally did not intend to focus solely on China. She described it as “an image-driven essay film composed of a series of vignettes, climbing up the rungs of China’s social ladder.” Like steps up society’s levels, Ascension is tiered into three stories, elevating up through classes — the proletariat, the aspirational middle, and a wanton elite — strict social tiers where the wealthiest are crystalized at the top.
South Park: Post COVID: The Return of COVID (2021)
62m
Genre
Animation, Comedy, TV Movie
Stars
Trey Parker, Matt Stone, April Stewart
Directed by
Trey Parker
After almost a quarter of a century on the air, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone finally revealed what would happen to Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny later on in life. Kind of. One of the highlights of the holiday season, South Park: Post COVID: The Return of COVID is another rampaging romp through hyperbolic American reality in a small Colorado mountain town. The plot follows the gang brought back together in 2020 as they try to prevent COVID’s appearance. In this strange place, Cartman is the second most successful of the boys, becoming an apparently devoted rabbi. Kenny, a mysterious billionaire, as a man, is still dead. Kyle has a life, but not much of one, and Stan’s has taken a terrible turn. Obstacles, of course, arise in traveling back to the past, including the appearance of a negative force in Victor Chaos. At times, crude, dark, hilarious, and ridiculous, and yet somehow coherent in spite of it all, the South Park formula works just as well in long form. You’ll have to stream it, however, to see how.
Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)
147m
Genre
Action, Adventure
Stars
Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames
Directed by
Christopher McQuarrie
The entire Mission: Impossible series is available on Paramount Plus, and anyone curious should probably start from the beginning. If you’re just looking for an all-time great action movie, then, Mission: Impossible Fallout is probably the place to start. The movie follows Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt as he’s tasked with reacquiring plutonium that he loses in the movie’s opening scene. Really, though, the thing that makes Fallout great is the way it seems to constantly ramp up the action. Every set piece here is a showstopper, and each action beat seems to just build on the last. The movie is operating at a dead sprint from its opening moments, and that’s what makes it great. Cruise is singularly committed to making these kinds of movies, but he’s also aided by an incredible supporting cast that includes Rebecca Ferguson, Henry Cavill, Simon Pegg, and Angela Bassett. Fallout is, quite simply, thrilling.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
134m
Genre
Adventure, Fantasy, Comedy
Stars
Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Justice Smith
Directed by
John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein
A movie about the roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons sounds truly terrible. Even if you’re a huge fan of playing the game, part of the enjoyment of it is the ability to craft your own adventure, so adapting it into a linear story would seem to make little sense. And yet, that’s exactly what they did with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and the results speak for themselves. This film follows a merry band of thieves as they attempt to rescue one man’s daughter from a wealthy con artist. The movie is a joy from the word go and it’s filled with great jokes and solid set pieces. Even better, Honor Among Thieves is exactly the right size and features a fully committed performance from Chris Pine. In a word, it’s everything you could want from a fantasy romp.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
146m
Genre
Drama, Science Fiction, Adventure
Stars
Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O'Connor
Directed by
Steven Spielberg
Over the course of his long career, Steven Spielberg has made a number of movies that could justifiably be called a masterpiece, but A.I. stands out as one of the very best. Spielberg took over the movie from Stanley Kubrick following that visionary’s death, which is part of what makes the movie feel so distinct. The movie, which tells the story of an AI boy who wants nothing more than the love of the mother who purchased him, is really a story about what it means to want love, and how distinctly human that feeling is. Over the course of a sprawling saga, A.I. feels at turns prescient and whimsical and feels like the perfect combination of Spielberg’s winsome, wholesome sensibilities and Kubrick’s much colder instincts.
There Will Be Blood (2007)
158m
Genre
Drama
Stars
Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Kevin J. O'Connor
Directed by
Paul Thomas Anderson
Paul Thomas Anderson has made a number of great movies over the course of his long career, but There Will Be Blood might be his best. Telling the story of a fictional oil baron as he accumulates wealth and isolates himself from everyone around him, There Will Be Blood is a story of greed and desire that hasn’t aged a day since it was first released. Featuring a towering central performance Daniel Day-Lewis, as well as some of the most stunning cinematography in the history of the medium, There Will Be Blood may not have won the Oscar for Best Picture, but it came closer than any other movie Anderson has made.
What’s new on Paramount Plus in December?
December 1
- 10 Cloverfield Lane
- 12 Dates of Christmas
- 40 Days and 40 Nights
- A Very English Christmas
- A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas
- A Vineyard Christmas
- A Walk on the Moon
- Adult World*
- Airplane II: The Sequel*
- Airplane!*
- American Hustle*
- Angel Heart
- Angela’s Ashes*
- Barbarella
- Bend It Like Beckham*
- Body Cam
- Braveheart
- Caddyshack
- Carriers
- Cheech & Chong’s Still Smokin’
- Christmas by Candlelight
- Christmas Casanova
- Christmas Cupid
- Christmas in Scotland
- Cloverfield
- Coupled Up for Christmas
- Crawl
- Critical Condition*
- Dead Presidents*
- Deck the Halls
- Dirty Dancing*
- Eat, Love, London
- Emma (1996)
- Ernest Saves Christmas
- Face/Off*
- Finding Vivian Maier*
- First Blood
- Florence Foster Jenkins*
- Grindhouse: Death Proof*
- Grindhouse: Planet Terror*
- Hondo
- How Stella Got Her Groove Back*
- I’ll Be Home for Christmas*
- Imagine That*
- Jack Reacher
- Jackass Number Two
- Jersey Girl
- John Grisham’s The Rainmaker
- Joyful Noise
- Judas and the Black Messiah
- Just Like a Christmas Movie
- Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
- Machine Gun Preacher*
- Madea’s Big Happy Family
- Megamind
- Milk Money*
- Mimic*
- Mimic 2*
- Mimic 3: Sentinel*
- Mother!
- Pretty Baby*
- Rambo III
- Rambo: First Blood Part II
- RED
- RED 2
- Regarding Henry
- Rise of the Guardians
- Rosemary’s Baby
- Rounders
- Scrapper*
- Set It Off*
- She’s All That
- Sirens
- Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins
- Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
- Tangerine*
- Teaching Mrs. Tingle
- That Thing You Do!*
- The Addams Family (1991)
- The Christmas Classic*
- The Dead Zone
- The Face of Love*
- The Fighting Temptations
- The Fugitive
- The Hours
- The Iron Giant
- The Ladies Man
- The Prophecy*
- The Prophecy 3: The Ascent*
- The Prophecy II*
- The Prophecy: Forsaken*
- The Prophecy: Uprising*
- The Shawshank Redemption
- The Shining
- The Thing*
- The To Do List
- The Virgin Suicides
- The Words
- Total Recall*
- Trainspotting
- Trapped in Paradise*
- Triple 9*
- Twisted
- Up in Smoke
- War of the Worlds
- What’s Eating Gilbert Grape
- Witness
- Wuthering Heights*
December 7
- Showing Up*
December 9
- Transformers: The Last Knight
December 11
- Jules*
December 20
- Golda*
December 21
- Beau Is Afraid*
December 26
- No Escape*
*Movies available on Paramount Plus with Showtime.
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