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Paramount+ subscribers in the U.S. can look forward to boldly going where no one has gone before, with Captain Pike and the crew of the Starship Enterprise in the fourth season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds this Thursday. But before then, if you're hunting for a flick or two for movie night this week, I've got some primo selections below.
My recommendations for the week come from a handful of new additions to P+ for July, and include my top pick—one of the creepiest J-horror remakes I've ever seen that I go back to over and over again when I can. Additionally, there's a classic gangster hunt, a cult-hit burger joint, and a globe-trotting race against the undead.
The Untouchables
Eliot Ness and his crew take on Capone's Chicago
Real-life mobster and bootlegger Al Capone has been the subject of many iconic Hollywood movies and TV series spanning back as far as the 1950s—two different Capone movies (1975 and 2020) and HBO's Boardwalk Empire (2010) among them. But by far the most recognizable is 1987's The Untouchables, Brian De Palma's epic that won Sean Connery his only Oscar.
Based on Bureau of Prohibition Special Agent Eliot Ness's own 1957 memoir, The Untouchables follows Ness (Kevin Costner) and his team—including beat cop Jimmy Malone (Connery), sharpshooter George Stone (Andy Garcia), and accountant Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith)—who descend on 1930s Chicago to take down Capone (Robert De Niro). It's a defining gangster movie of the '80s that still holds up today with an 83% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Good Burger
Kenan and Kel serve up '90s fast-food chaos
"Welcome to Good Burger, home of the Good Burger. Can I take your order?" Way before Kenan Thompson became Saturday Night Live's longest-serving player, he and fellow All That castmember Kel Mitchell took one of the show's funniest and most popular sketches about a clueless fast-food employee and turned it into a big-screen cult hit.
In Good Burger, the movie, Mitchell's blissfully positive and naive Ed translates well to the big screen, joined by Thompson's Dexter Reed, a teenager who gets a job at the titular burger joint to pay for repairs to his teacher's (Sinbad) car after crashing into it. The whole movie is ridiculously fun hijinks and banter, as the two partners band together to stop mega burger chain Mondo Burger from stealing Ed's delicious secret sauce recipe and putting them out of business. Good Burger and its 2023 sequel, Good Burger 2, are both available on Paramount+.
World War Z
Brad Pitt in a very fast zombie apocalypse
Most traditional "zombie" movies or TV shows feature lumbering, brain-hungry, easy-to-kill minions that are more like your sleepwalking grandmother than they are a real threat. In 2013's mindboggling World War Z (the highest-grossing zombie movie of all time, don't you know), however, a couple of key things break the mold, giving it a more terrifying spin.
First, forget the drooling leg-draggers and prepare for spastic, fast-moving hordes of infected that will do anything—including piling on top of one another to make human, wall-scaling chains—to get to their victims. Next, this outbreak isn't confined to one city or small town; it's global, involving geopolitics, and all the military might of the planet banding together to prevent the end of the world as we know it. But what it does have is a hero and an emotional core. Brad Pitt stars as Gerry Lane, a retired UN investigator who, with the personal goal of making it back to his lovely wife (The Killing's excellent Mireille Enos) and kids, might also be the only guy who can stop it.
The Ring
Watch the tape, then you have seven days to die
Gore Verbinski's remake of Hideo Nakata's 1998 Japanese hit Ringu sparked a J-horror trend that resulted in a surge of remakes, such as The Grudge, Dark Water, and Pulse. 2002's The Ring, however, is my favorite. Naomi Watts stars as Seattle journalist Rachel Keller, who, after the mysterious death of her niece, finds herself investigating an urban legend about a supposedly possessed VHS tape that, when watched, leads to the death of the viewer in seven days.
Being the good investigative journalist she is, Rachel finds the tape and watches it herself. Immediately after, the phone rings, and the creepy voice on the other end says her countdown has begun. With the help of her ex, Noah (Virgin River's Martin Henderson), Rachel races against the clock to uncover the disturbing history of the curse and also save her son, who's also watched the tape. Two sequels followed—2005's The Ring Two (also on Paramount+) and 2017's Rings.
Summer decisions
Give Paramount+'s suggestion algorithm the night off and pick whichever of these human-vetted movies grabs you first. Then, when you're done, let How-To Geek's streaming guides handle the rest of your summer queue.
