4 timely Paramount+ movies to watch this week (July 27-August 2)
The good news is, Paramount+ has a loaded August on the way. The wrench in the works, however, is the fact that the calendar still says July, and you’ve got a week’s worth of potential movie nights to get through.
Fortunately, the streamer has no shortage of great, culturally relevant movies to tap into. Streaming between July 27 and August 2, you’ll find one of Christopher Nolan’s most mind-bending trips through space and time (while you wait for tickets to The Odyssey), a dazzling Denis Villeneuve future noir that you’ll have to wait till Saturday for, a Boston drama led by Hollywood’s man of the hour, and my top pick, an animated hit everyone’s already streaming.
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Interstellar
Christopher Nolan’s wormhole conundrum still slaps
The Odyssey has got the name Christopher Nolan on everyone’s lips at the moment, but you don’t need an excuse to go back and check out his extraordinary back catalog of movies. If I were you, though, I’d make haste and strap in for his 2014 masterpiece, Interstellar, this week while it’s still on Paramount+.
Quiz
Name that Christopher Nolan movie
Trivia challenge
From Gotham to the stars — can you match these iconic scenes, characters,
and quotes to the right Nolan film?
CharactersPlotQuotesDirectorsSci-Fi
Which Christopher Nolan film follows a man with short-term memory loss who uses
Polaroid photos and tattoos to hunt for his wife’s killer?
Correct! Memento (2000) tells the story of Leonard Shelby, played by Guy
Pearce, who suffers from anterograde amnesia. The film is famously told in reverse chronological order,
mirroring Leonard’s fragmented perception of reality.
Not quite — the answer is Memento. Released in 2000, it stars Guy Pearce
as Leonard Shelby, a man who cannot form new memories. Nolan’s bold choice to tell the story in reverse
made it one of the most distinctive thrillers of its era.
In Batman Begins, which villain uses a fear-inducing toxin and wears a burlap mask
throughout the film?
Correct! Dr. Jonathan Crane, aka the Scarecrow, is played by Cillian
Murphy in Batman Begins. His fear toxin, derived from a rare blue flower, is central to the League of
Shadows’ plot to destroy Gotham City.
Not quite — the answer is Scarecrow. Cillian Murphy plays Dr. Jonathan
Crane, a psychiatrist who weaponizes fear itself. While Ra’s al Ghul is the film’s true mastermind, the
Scarecrow is the more visible mask-wearing villain on the streets of Gotham.
In The Dark Knight, the Joker says ‘Why so serious?’ — but which actor’s portrayal
of the Joker earned a posthumous Academy Award?
Correct! Heath Ledger won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor
for his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008), tragically awarded posthumously after his death in
January 2008. His performance is widely considered one of the greatest villain portrayals in cinema
history.
Not quite — the answer is Heath Ledger. He delivered a haunting,
transformative performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight and was awarded the Oscar for Best Supporting
Actor posthumously. Joaquin Phoenix later won for a different Joker film in 2019, but Ledger’s remains
iconic.
In Inception, what is the name of the spinning top that Dom Cobb uses as his ‘totem’
to tell if he is in a dream?
Correct! Cobb’s totem is a spinning top — in reality it falls over, but
in a dream it spins indefinitely. The film’s famously ambiguous final shot of the wobbling top has been
debated by fans for years, leaving Cobb’s true reality an open question.
Not quite — Cobb’s totem is simply called the top, or spinning top. Each
character in the film has a unique totem to detect whether they’re dreaming. The final shot of the film
deliberately cuts before the top falls or keeps spinning, leaving audiences in beautiful uncertainty.
In Interstellar, which planet do the crew visit first, where one hour on its surface
equals seven years on Earth due to time dilation?
Correct! Miller’s planet orbits so close to the black hole Gargantua
that extreme gravitational time dilation makes one hour there equal seven years back on Earth. The crew
pays a devastating price for the brief time they spend on its wave-battered surface.
Not quite — the answer is Miller’s planet. Its proximity to the
supermassive black hole Gargantua causes extreme time dilation. By the time Cooper and the crew return
to the Endurance after just a few hours, decades have passed for those waiting aboard the ship.
Dunkirk depicts the real World War II evacuation of Allied soldiers in 1940.
Approximately how many soldiers were rescued during the actual Operation Dynamo?
Correct! Operation Dynamo, carried out between May 26 and June 4, 1940,
successfully evacuated approximately 338,000 Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk. Nolan’s film
portrays the chaos and heroism of the rescue using a non-linear three-timeline structure.
Not quite — around 338,000 soldiers were evacuated during Operation
Dynamo. What made it remarkable was the involvement of hundreds of civilian ‘little ships’ that crossed
the English Channel to help. Nolan’s film captures that desperate, fragmented experience across land,
sea, and air timelines.
In Tenet, the protagonist learns to manipulate objects moving backward in time
through a process called what?
Correct! In Tenet, ‘inversion’ is the process by which objects — and
people — have their entropy reversed, causing them to move backward through time relative to everyone
else. The concept underpins the entire plot and leads to some of the film’s most mind-bending action
sequences.
Not quite — the process is called inversion. In Tenet, inverted objects
and people experience time in reverse relative to the world around them. Nolan drew on real physics
concepts like entropy and the second law of thermodynamics to craft the film’s complex, looping
narrative.
In Oppenheimer, which actor plays J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist
who led the Manhattan Project?
Correct! Cillian Murphy plays J. Robert Oppenheimer in the 2023
biographical epic. His performance earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor, and the film itself won
Best Picture. Murphy had previously appeared in smaller roles in several earlier Nolan films.
Not quite — Cillian Murphy plays Oppenheimer. It was a career-defining
role for Murphy, earning him the Oscar for Best Actor at the 2024 Academy Awards. Matt Damon also
appears in the film as General Leslie Groves, the military leader who oversaw the Manhattan Project.
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Hot off his Best Actor Oscar win for Dallas Buyers Club, Matthew McConaughey stars as Cooper, a former NASA pilot reluctantly turned farmer, living in a not-too-distant future where a great blight is slowly choking the Earth to death. But when a secret government program discovers a wormhole near Saturn that leads to three potentially habitable planets, Cooper and scientist Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) head a mission across space and brutal time dilation—where they lose decades of their Earth time in mere hours—to investigate. Like many Nolan films, it’s a trip of mind-bending proportions that will have you drawing diagrams to figure out … in a good way.
3
Blade Runner 2049
Denis Villeneuve’s gorgeous sci-fi sequel is worth the Saturday wait
Masterful French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve has been the purveyor of so many excellent films and franchises (Incendies, Sicario, Arrival, Dune) that it’s easy to see how he pulled off the impossible with this 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049. Honoring Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult Harrison Ford classic, Villeneuve carved out its own identity—and won Oscars for cinematography and visual effects in the process.
Set 30 years after the original, while still playing in the world of Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, it follows K (Ryan Gosling), a replicant blade runner for the LAPD who hunts old, problematic replicants. When evidence surfaces that a replicant once gave birth to a child, K’s investigation threatens to unravel society and leads him to a long-missing Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). It’s a gorgeous, sepia-toned film that also stars Robin Wright and Ana de Armas. There’s a catch, though: it doesn’t hit Paramount+ until Saturday, August 1. Additionally, the timing is also perfect, with Prime Video’s Blade Runner 2099 series looming this November.
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Good Will Hunting
Ease your Odyssey wait with the one that launched Matt Damon
Can’t get enough Matt Damon after seeing The Odyssey? Before he was Jason Bourne or Odysseus, the Boston actor was a 27-year-old who co-wrote his own breakout—Good Will Hunting—and won a screenwriting Oscar with pal Ben Affleck for it.
This 1997 Gus Van Sant-helmed drama stars Damon as Will Hunting, a troubled South Boston orphan who also happens to be a genius quietly mopping floors at MIT. When he solves a graduate-level math problem left on a hallway chalkboard, everything changes. Facing jail after a stupid street fight, Will agrees to a deal: weekly therapy sessions with Sean Maguire (Robin Williams, in an Oscar-winning performance) and mentorship from arrogant professor Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård). It’s a beautiful drama that’s less about equations than about a young man learning to trust, love, and choose his own future. How ‘bout them apples?
1
Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender
Aang’s all grown up, and leads Team Avatar’s long-awaited return
My top pick this week is also the one everyone’s already watching—it’s parked at number one on the Paramount+ Top 10. The first feature film from Avatar Studios, it doesn’t get more epic than Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, a stunning sequel to the original animated series, which debuted to strong reviews and a 90% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Set years after the Hundred-Year War—and chronologically between Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra (both on Paramount+, too—it finds a grown-up Aang (voiced by Eric Nam) discovering a surviving airbender named Tagah (Guardians of the Galaxy’s Dave Bautista) and learning of an ancient power that could rescue the Air Nomads from extinction. With Katara (Jessica Matten), Sokka (Román Zaragoza), and the Avatar gang, Aang races to claim it before a shadowy group called the Denied does. What can I say, it’s beautifully animated, packed with fast, elemental fight sequences, and some real drama. It’s made for longtime fans, but is a satisfying 99 minutes for anyone.
A few suggestions while August rolls in
Sometimes the best night out is a night in, and if you’ve had your eye on what’s happening in the theaters with Damon and Nolan and Prime’s Blade Runner announcement, then several of these should pique your interest. For your next great find, however, How-To Geek’s streaming coverage has plenty more.
- Subscription with ads
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Yes, $8/month
- Simultaneous streams
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- Live TV
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Select live sports (NFL on CBS & UEFA Champions League)
- Price
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Starting at $8/month or $60/year
