2 weeks Ago By Brian Tallerico
This post will be updated frequently as movies enter and leave the service. *New titles are indicated with an asterisk. In 2021, CBS All Access rebranded with the name Paramount+ , reflecting the history of the legendary film and TV company with that nifty little mathematical sign that all the streaming companies seem to love these days.
The name Paramount brings a deep catalogue of feature films, and the streaming service also includes titles from the Miramax and MGM libraries. They have also added a more robust original selection than at launch to complement the service’s classics like Gladiator , the Mission: Impossible series and Grease . For now, Paramount+ can’t compare to the depth of a catalogue like Max ’s or the award-winning original works at other streamers, but it has a solid library with at least 30 films you should see.
Year: 2000 Runtime: 2h 34m Director: Ridley Scott One of the most popular films of its era, this action epic stars Russell Crowe as the legendary Maximus, a warrior whose family is murdered by the vicious Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). Forced into slavery, Maximus has to rise the gladiator arenas to get his vengeance. The film made a fortune on its way to winning the Oscar for Best Picture.
Year: 1984 Runtime: 1h 45m Director: Martin Brest It’s hard to explain to people too young to experience it how big a star Eddie Murphy was in 1984 when his Axel Foley ruled the world. Murphy’s wit and charm were put to perfect use in Beverly Hills Cop that produced two inferior sequels, and both happen to also be on Paramount Plus. Year: 1974 Runtime: 2h 10m Director: Roman Polanski Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.
One of the best movies of the ‘70s, this Best Picture nominee (and Best Screenplay winner) tells the story of Jake Gittes, played unforgettably by Jack Nicholson, as he investigates an adulterer and finds something much more insidious under the surface of Los Angeles. It’s a must-see, as important as almost any film from its era. Year: 1995 Runtime: 1h 37m Director: Amy Heckerling You can keep all those stuffy Jane Austen adaptations—one of the best remains Amy Heckerling’s updating of the 1815 classic Emma to mid-‘90s L.
A. Is this the most ‘90s movie ever? From its fashion to its references to its beloved characters, Clueless is certainly one of the most iconic, a movie that made a small impact when it was released but feels like it grows even more popular with each generation that discovers it. Year: 2004 Runtime: 1h 59m Director: Michael Mann Tom Cruise gives one of his most fascinating performances as Vincent, the passenger to Jamie Foxx’s L.
A. cab driver on a very fateful night. It turns out that Vincent is hitman and he needs Foxx’s character to drive him on a killing spree in this tense, gorgeously-shot thriller from the masterful craftsman Michael Mann.
Year: 2007 Runtime: 1h 40m Director: David Cronenberg David Cronenberg directed this fantastic gangster flick that’s become iconic for a naked fight scene, but the movie around that is pretty great too. Naomi Watts stars as a midwife who uncovers a Russian prostitution ring that draws in the son of the godfather played by Vincent Cassel and an enforcer, played by Viggo Mortensen, in one of his best screen performances. Year: 1997 Runtime: 2h 18m Director: John Woo There are rumors that a remake of this John Woo classic is on the horizon, so you owe it to yourself to go back and see the very high standard that project will have to meet.
Face/Off is one of the best action movies of the ‘90s, a wonderfully staged blockbuster by one of the genre’s best filmmakers. And John Travolta and Nicolas Cage were near the peaks of their screen charismas as an FBI agent and terrorist who end up, well, switching faces. It’s a blast.
Year: 2020 Runtime: 1h 38m Director: Jiayan “Jenny” Shi Jiayan Shi directed and produced this heartbreaking documentary about the disappearance and death of Yingying Zhang in 2017. Shi has unique access to the story in that she knew Yingying, and so her film has an incredible you-are-there quality as Shi captures the investigation and grief that would emerge from this horrific crime. Paramount+ deserves credit for bringing smaller projects like this to their subscribers, ones that other major streamers might ignore.
Year: 1990 Runtime: 2h 25m Director: Martin Scorsese One of the best films of the 1990s, Martin Scorsese’s telling of the story of Henry Hill changed the language of how we tell stories about mobsters, and it’s a work that only feels more like a classic with each passing year. GoodFellas has held up perfectly over the last three decades partially because of how much that followed tried to hollowly repeat it, but it’s also still just a wildly entertaining piece of work, a movie with more life in any five-minute stretch than most films have in their entire runtime. Year: 1972 Runtime: 2h 55m Director: Francis Ford Coppola Maybe you’ve heard of it? In all seriousness, there’s a very cool opportunity right now to watch the entire Godfather trilogy on Paramount+, including the superior recent cut of the third film.
You could then slide from some of the best filmmaking of all time into the streaming service’s original series The Offer , about the making of Coppola’s masterpiece. Year: 1995 Runtime: 2h 50m Director: Michael Mann Robert De Niro and Al Pacino star in one of the best movies of the ‘90s, a stunning cat-and-mouse game between a career criminal and a workaholic cop. The book release of Heat 2 in 2022 brought a lot of people back to this movie, one that has held up remarkably well over the nearly three decades since it was released.
It’s a masterpiece. Year: 1981 Runtime: 1h 55m Director: Steven Spielberg The first four films in the franchise featuring one of the world’s most famous action heroes is finally back on Prime Video (jump over to Disney for the fifth if you must). Of course, the first film, Raiders of the Lost Ark , remains the best of the bunch but there’s some value and fun in Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade too (and even parts of Crystal Skull .
Yeah, we said it.) Year: 2009 Runtime: 2h 33m Director: Quentin Tarantino One of the most famous filmmakers of all time is reportedly prepping his last film . Before then, why not catch up with one of his best in this Oscar-winning revision of history? For his last few films, QT has been blending actual history with his love of cinema to create a hybrid that only he could make.
And Christoph Waltz’s Oscar-winning performance here might be the best in any Tarantino movie. Year: 2014 Runtime: 2h 49m Director: Christopher Nolan No one else makes movies like Christopher Nolan, a man who took his superhero success and used it to get gigantic budgets to bring his wildest dreams to the big screen. Who else could make this sprawling, emotional, complicated film about an astronaut (Matthew McConaughey) searching for a new home for humanity? It’s divisive among some Nolan fans for its deep emotions, but those who love it really love it.
Year: 2002 Runtime: 1h 25m Director: Jeff Tremaine Jackass Forever helped 2022 start with a bang. Now you can go back and watch the whole series exclusively on Paramount+ right now! (Even the “alternate” ones like Jackass 3.5 ).
Go back to the heyday of Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, and the rest of the dangerous idiots. These movies are often derided as being dumb but they’re a glorious, infectious kind of dumb that wants nothing more than to make you laugh. Year: 1996 Runtime: 2h 18m Director: Cameron Crowe One of Cameron Crowe’s best films became something of a punchline with its heavily quoted lines (“Show me the money,” “You had me at hello,” everything that cute kid says) but it’s actually a character-driven romantic comedy that has held up incredibly well in the quarter-century since its release.
Tom Cruise plays the title character, a sports agent who is pushed into starting his own agency while he falls in love with a single mother, played by Renee Zellweger. It’s sweet, smart, and funny. Year: 2022 Runtime: 1h 52m Director: Aaron Nee, Adam Nee With echoes of beloved rom-coms like African Queen and Romancing the Stone , this film truly felt like an anomaly in 2022, and yet it turned into a pretty big hit at the theater.
It’s already on streaming services, and it’s a great choice if you’re looking for some escapism tonight. Travel to the middle of nowhere with a romance novel writer (Sandra Bullock) and the cover model (Channing Tatum) who tries to save the day. Year: 1999 Runtime: 3h 8m Director: Paul Thomas Anderson Paul Thomas Anderson’s character study is one of the beloved auteur’s best works, a study of the interconnectivity of modern life and the fallibility of human relationships.
Coming not long after Boogie Nights , Magnolia is the film that really affirmed PTA’s status as one of America’s best filmmakers and contains some of the career-best work of Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, Jason Robards, Julianne Moore, Philip Baker Hall, and more. Year: 2007 Runtime: 1h 59m Director: Tony Gilroy George Clooney does phenomenal work as the title character in Tony Gilroy’s feature debut.
He’s a lawyer who has spent his career defending big business, but he finds himself in a moral quandary over a toxic cover-up. Nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture, it won Best Supporting Actress for the legendary Tilda Swinton. (Note: This one is especially poignant with the recent loss of Tom Wilkinson .
) Year: 2002 Runtime: 2h 25m Director: Steven Spielberg One of Steven Spielberg’s best modern movies is this adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story about a future in which crime can be predicted before it happens. Tom Cruise stars as a man who is convicted of a crime he has no intent of committing in a fantastic vision of a future in which the systems designed to stop crime have been corrupted.
It’s timely and probably always will be. Year: 1996-present Runtime: Varies Director: Various The whole series is finally here! For some reason, parts 1 to 3 and parts 4 to 6 have alternated residence on a lot of streaming services, but Paramount+ currently hosts the entire thing from De Palma’s first movie to Fallout . While we wait for Mission: Impossible 7 , revisit the whole arc of the saga of Ethan Hunt to date.
Year: 2023 Runtime: 1h 45m Director: Celine Song A current Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay nominee, this phenomenal film isn’t on any of the other streamers. It stars the excellent Greta Lee and Teo Yoo as a couple who were close as children but reunite years later after she immigrated to the United States. It’s as much a story of what people leave behind when they change their entire lives as it is a traditional story of unrequited love.
It’s beautiful and unforgettable. Year: 2008 Runtime: 1h 52m Director: David Gordon Green Seth Rogen gives one of his best performances as Dale Denton, an average guy who just wants to get high. He visits his dealer (played perfectly by James Franco) on the wrong night as the pair cross paths with hitmen and a police officer on the wrong side of the law.
This is an incredibly funny movie, and you don’t need to be high to love it. Year: 2018 Runtime: 1h 30m Director: John Krasinski Who could have possibly guessed that Jim from The Office would be behind one of the most successful horror films of the ‘10s? You’ve probably already seen this story of a world in which silence is the only way to survive, but it’s worth another look to marvel at its tight, taut filmmaking and a stellar performance from Emily Blunt. Plus, Paramount+ recently added the sequel , so: double feature time! Year: 2019 Runtime: 1h 24m Director: Rose Glass Rose Glass’s terrifying horror film is one of the best movies of 2021 and it’s already on Paramount+.
Reminiscent of psychological nightmares of the ‘70s like Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby , this is the tale of a hospice nurse named Maud (a fearless performance from Morfydd Clark) who becomes obsessed with saving the soul of one of her patients (Jennifer Ehle). It’s unforgettable. Year: 1996 Runtime: 1h 51m Director: Wes Craven The Ghostface killer came back in January 2022 with the release of Scream , the fifth film in this franchise and the first since the death of Wes Craven, and the fun continued with another sequel in 2023 (although the troubles around the production of the seventh film have been, well, notable ).
Paramount+ is the best place for a marathon with the original trilogy and the fifth and sixth films (but, bizarrely, not Scream 4 .) The first movie is still a flat-out genre masterpiece. Year: 2010 Runtime: 2h Director: David Fincher One of the best movies of the 2010s has returned to Paramount after a brief hiatus to remind people how wildly far ahead of its time this movie was when it was released.
With a razor-sharp screenplay by Aaron Sorkin and some of the best direction of David Fincher’s career, this is a flawless movie, one that resonates even more now in the era of constant internet than it did thirteen years ago. Year: 1986 Runtime: 1h 53m Director: Jonathan Demme Jonathan Demme was a master of tonal balancing, finding a way to perfectly blend the comedy and the dread in this story of an average man caught up in a criminal’s web. Charlie (Jeff Daniels) is a milquetoast banker who goes on a wild ride with a girl named Lulu (Melanie Griffith), but everything changes when Lulu’s ex (an unforgettable Ray Liotta) enters the picture.
Year: 1976 Runtime: 1h 53m Director: Martin Scorsese One of Martin Scorsese’s early masterpieces, Taxi Driver is the wildly influential story of a man pushed off the edge of sanity, featuring a fearless performance from a young Robert De Niro. Few movies from this era are cited more than this one, and it’s not just because it touches on themes that remain timeless but that it does so in such a riveting, harrowing way. It’s unforgettable and the rare perfect film that holds up every single time you watch it.
Year: 2007 Runtime: 2h 38m Director: Paul Thomas Anderson One of the best films of the ‘00s, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s Oil! won Daniel Day-Lewis his second Oscar as the unforgettable Daniel Plainview. As detailed and epic as great fiction, Anderson’s movie is one of the most acclaimed of its era, a film in which it’s hard to find a single flaw. Even if you think you’ve seen it enough, watch it again.
You’ll find a new reason to admire it. Year: 1997 Runtime: 3h 14m Director: James Cameron More than just a blockbuster, this Best Picture winner was a legitimate cultural phenomenon, staying at the top of the box office charts for months. There was a point when it felt like not only had everyone seen the story of Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet), but most people had seen it twice.
History has kind of reduced this epic to its quotable scenes and earworm theme song, but it’s a better movie than you remember, a great example of James Cameron’s truly robust filmmaking style. Year: 2022 Runtime: 2h 10m Director: Joseph Kosinski It’s the movie that saved movies last year! The truth is that Paramount wanted to drop this long-awaited sequel on a streamer during the pandemic, but Tom Cruise knew it was the kind of thing that should be appreciated in a theater. He bet on himself and the result is arguably the biggest hit of his career, a movie that made a fortune and seems primed to win Oscars in a couple months.
Year: 1992 Runtime: 2h 10m Director: Clint Eastwood Clint Eastwood’s Western completely deconstructed a genre that the director/star helped define and earned the filmmaker Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture. It’s a straight-up masterpiece, the story of an aging outlaw dragged back into one more job that will remind him of his own history of violence and that of this country. In Eastwood’s notable career as a filmmaker, it’s arguably still his best work.
Year: 2000 Runtime: 1h 36m Director: Sofia Coppola Sofia Coppola made her directorial debut with this adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s beloved novel about a group of sisters who captivated the entire neighborhood in which they lived. Kirsten Dunst anchors a dreamy, captivating movie about the myth of perfection that exists in the world of picket fences in middle America. It’s got a great Air soundtrack too.
Year: 2013 Runtime: 3h Director: Martin Scorsese Leonardo DiCaprio should have won the Oscar for his amazing performance as Jordan Belfort, the financial criminal that rocked Wall Street and shocked audiences in one of Scorsese’s best late films. Arguments over whether or not this film glorifies a “bad guy” have become prominent—and could only really be made by people who haven’t actually watched it. Most of all, it’s a shockingly robust film, filmed with more energy in a few minutes than most flicks have in their entire runtime.
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