Apple TV+ is one of the strangest streamers out there, with almost no licensed TV or film content and a small number of originals. That makes the best movies on Apple TV+ easy to find. There simply aren’t that many! Apple is clearly taking a “quality over quantity” approach, with its money spread across genres and targeted at making its subscribers (many roped in with a deal that came with one of the company’s tech products) treat it like a real contender. It also helps that it’s only $4.99 a month, or free for a year if you’ve just purchased a new (and eligible) device.
With films from up-and-comers like Minhal Baig, arthouse favorites like Sofia Coppola and Werner Herzog, some A-list music docs, one of the best animated movies of the 2020s and Martin Scorsese’s latest, Apple TV+ is actually making the case that it belongs in the conversation alongside the more established services. As long as it keeps adding good movies to its roster, that is. It recently snagged a few critical darlings like Killers of the Flower Moon and Wolfwalkers.
Here’re our ranked picks for the 10 best movies on Apple TV+ right now:
10. The Pigeon Tunnel
Year: 2023
Director: Errol Morris
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Documentary
For a documentary about one of the most celebrated writers of spy fiction, The Pigeon Tunnel can seem—at first glance—deceptively placid. Clocking in at just over 90 minutes, the film features an extended conversation between David Cornwell, AKA John le Carre, and Oscar-winning docmaker Errol Morris. It’s just that. Two people talking, with Morris off-screen, their parrying question-and-answers broken up with archival images and re-enactments of Cornwell’s past, as well as snippets from the classic movies or TV adaptations based on his spy universe: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and A Perfect Spy. However, it’s a fascinating conversation that keeps its hold on the viewer for its duration. The Pigeon Tunnel begins with Cornwell wondering what kind of an interlocutor Morris might make. After all, an interview is a type of interrogation, he muses. Cornwell makes the comparison lightly, a bemused smile playing on his face, his polished diction never slipping. At once, you know he’s in control of this interview, and by extension this representation of himself—a famous author who borrowed from his own troubled past when writing fiction. For fans of le Carre, who may have read his 2016 memoir The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life, there isn’t much new information in the documentary. What’s engaging is Cornwell’s erudition as he outlines his life and the circumstances that led to his career as spy. Cornwell rarely gave interviews. His conversation with Morris would turn out to be one of the last he gave before his death in 2020. Throughout the process, Cornwell is perfectly at ease, dancing around Morris’ sometimes-speechifying questions with practiced polish. He speaks in perfect paragraphs, never searching or pausing for words. There are no grand revelations. Morris doesn’t push Cornwell far on his own betrayals—to his friends or in his love life. We don’t get a sense of what it was like for Cornwell to live in murky worlds of his own making as an adult, and whether he felt guilt—beyond a general attitude of shrugging away life’s messiness. It’s clear that Cornwell had determined in advance that there would be some questions that he would never answer, that he’s not an open book to be read through and through. There are some secrets he keeps. The Pigeon Tunnel, then, is a chance to see an expert raconteur, who seems to know every trick of the trade—answering a master documentarian’s questions when he wants, and deflecting with panache when he doesn’t, regaling you with such wonder that you can’t help but be enthralled.—Aparita Bhandari
9. Hala
Year: 2019
Director: Minhal Baig
Stars: Geraldine Viswanathan, Jack Kilmer, Gabriel Luna, Anna Chlumsky
Genre: Drama
Writer/director Minhal Baig’s Hala is an intimate coming-of-age drama held up by its personal writerly touches and a star-making turn from Geraldine Viswanathan as the title character. Hala’s struggling with the same kinds of things we normally see high school characters struggle with: What to do after graduation, how to manage a relationship with her parents that’s not quite adult and not quite childish, and (of course) boys. Viswanathan’s understated quiet and the warmth in which the situations are shot (almost always centered on her face)—be they at a family dinner or a walk in a Chicago park or a reading of a high school English assignment—make the dramatic ricochet of Hala’s minor rebellion rattle us all the harder. Her relationship with a poetry-loving floppy-haired boy, her parents’ imperfections and a boatload of baggage brought from Pakistan (including the threat of arranged marriage) create a compelling portrait of a family that overcomes Baig’s sometimes sleepy direction. While there’s a lot, probably too much, going on around Hala—to the point that the movie threatens to shake apart—and the film tends to raise issues it’d rather not see through to any sort of conclusion, some striking shots, realistic dialogue (even in that heightened “everything’s the end of the world” way that teens can have) and Viswanathan’s ability to sell it all make the film a worthy and unique entry into the coming-of-age canon.—Jacob Oller
8. Boys State
Year: 2020
Director: Jesse Moss, Amanda McBaine
Genre: Documentary
The tendency to read too much into Boys State as a representative of American politics—contemporary, functional, broken and otherwise—doesn’t quite line up with the event itself, in which every year the American Legion sponsors a sort of mock government sleepaway camp in Texas for high school boys (girls get a similar program of their own), where attendees join parties, run for office, craft platforms, run campaigns, hold debates, then ultimately exercise their right to vote. As one candidate for fake boy office explains, “My stance on abortion would not line up with most guys’ out there. So I changed my stance. That’s politics…I think. You can’t win on what you believe in your heart.” Money has no place in their policies, nor do women, immigration, or anything that isn’t gun control or abortion. They aren’t much interested in exploring U.S. governmental systems and lawmaking as they are in reinforcing an ideal of obsolescing democratic rule. There is no representation here, there are only screaming masses of peachfuzz and popularity contests. Instead of taking a divided nation’s temperature through its puberty-ridden youth, Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s documentary becomes a dramatic account of modern American masculinity in the making, blisteringly hormonal and desperate to be taken seriously. —Dom Sinacola
7. On the Rocks
Year: 2020
Director: Sofia Coppola
Stars: Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, Marlon Wayans
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Sofia Coppola’s new movie On the Rocks starts out as a story of possessive fatherhood, with Felix (Bill Murray) narrating to his teenage daughter, Laura: “And remember, don’t give your heart to any boys. You are mine until you get married. Then you’re still mine.” The girl laughs off the declaration as a jape, which turns out to be a catastrophic tactical mistake. In her womanhood, Laura (Rashida Jones), does indeed get married to a man, Dean (Marlon Wayans), and they have two beautiful daughters of their own, eldest Maya (Liyanna Muscat) and youngest Theo (Alexandra Mary Reimer). Dean is spearheading his own startup, a company that provides vaguely sketched-out services but which keeps him not only busy but in constant motion. Laura stays at home with the girls and, when she’s afforded rare moments of peaceful alone time, attempts to write a book the way Sisyphus attempts to push a boulder up a hill. She’s in a rut. Dean’s on the rise. He’s so often cross-country that the yawning gap between them is visible from the stratosphere, and then along comes Felix to sweep Laura up and indulge her fear that Dean in fact might be plowing his assistant, Fiona (Jessica Henwick), a knockout at least 10 years her junior. So begins a caper as Felix, protective by way of outmoded patriarchal charm, endeavors to prove Dean’s infidelity to prop Laura back up using all of his cunning and a not insignificant chunk of his wealth and social capital. On the Rocks suggests that men grown old are really just babies with an insatiable need for the world to love them, their kids—their daughters—in particular. Their childishness is revealed by the volume of their charisma: the taller the tales, the costlier the tab, the more blatant the flirt, the more extravagant the lifestyle, the more a man’s insecurity is revealed. Laura is at once drawn to and repelled by Felix. In light of Felix’s screed to young Laura, this is the inevitable crest of their bond, but Coppola’s gentle, yearning filmmaking generates sympathy for the father and empathy for the daughter. —Andy Crump
6. Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You
Year: 2020
Director: Thom Zimny
Genre: Musical, Documentary
The black-and-white behind-the-scenes documentary accompaniment to Bruce Springsteen’s album of the same name, Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You is a beautiful and companionable tour through the music and its making from an American master. Director Thom Zimny buys into the album’s concept, which focuses on just how long Springsteen’s been at this thing. Poignant juxtaposition with archival footage and pictures emphasizes just how long the E Streeters have been at this—and reminds us of who and what was lost along the way. It’s unabashedly emotional throughout and illuminating on occasion, but it’s mostly dedicated to giving Springsteen fans more of the album’s experience: Letter to You’s development is of minor importance in the film, but its performance is exceptional. In between tracks, Springsteen’s intense voiceover hovers over all the right imagery, with funerals, trains, snowy forests and lots of other muscular American iconography flitting by before another song starts up. The design of the documentary may be a bit repetitive, but the musicality is masterful and there’s nothing like letting The Boss extend a hand, inviting us to join in the campfire kind of collaboration with which this album was constructed and the lovely melancholy with which it appreciates the passing of time.—Jacob Oller
5. Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
Year: 2020
Director: Werner Herzog
Genre: Documentary
Werner Herzog will show you multiple clips from Mimi Leader’s Deep Impact for no other reason than because he likes them, he finds them well-done and evocative—he says as much in that even-keeled, oddly accented voice over—then soon after chastise “film school doctrine” when complimenting a field video shot by a South Korean meteor specialist in Antarctica. Like Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, his documentary from earlier in the year, Fireball (co-directed with Clive Oppenheimer, with whom he made 2016’s Into the Inferno) is less about what it’s about (meteorites, shooting stars, cosmic debris—and the people who love them) than it is about Werner Herzog’s life, which is his filmography, which is a heavily manipulated search for ultimate truth. This is all he makes movies about anymore: himself, navigating falsehood until he can master it, which is basically what he sees as moviemaking anyway. Unlike Nomad, Fireball is partly shot by Herzog’s trusted cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, which rewards majestic drone shots—now Herzog’s old man bread and butter—with casual sublimity as often as despairing humor. Together they follow tangents all over the world, ridiculing the depressing Mexican town where a meteorite destroyed the dinosaurs and today stray dogs’ dreams rot from their heads, or collecting microscopic space rocks from the roof of an Oslo sports arena. All is at the mercy of Herzog’s curiosity, ravenous and insatiable. —Dom Sinacola
4. CODA
Year: 2021
Director: Sian Heder
Stars: Emilia Jones, Eugenio Derbez, Troy Kotsur, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Daniel Durant, Marlee Matlin
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Sometimes a movie so successfully plunges you into its world that it completely engulfs you in a lived-in experience. From the gorgeous, scenic opening moments of CODA, you can almost smell the Atlantic salt air and pungent scent of the daily catch. The movie transports you to Gloucester, Massachusetts and lovingly drops you into the life of one family. Seventeen-year-old Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) is what the title of the movie refers to—a child of deaf adults. She is the only hearing member of her immediate family. A senior in high school, Ruby lives with mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin), father Frank (Troy Kotsur) and older brother Leo (Daniel Durant). Every morning before school even begins, Ruby works with her brother and father on their fishing boat off the coast. As the family’s sole interpreter, they have come to rely on her, and she feels the weight of familial responsibility more than most high schoolers. When Ruby joins the school choir, her teacher Bernardo Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez) notices that Ruby has a unique vocal talent. “There are plenty of pretty voices with nothing to say. Do you have something to say?” he asks. He works with her and encourages her to apply to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, a move that would take her away from the family that not only loves but desperately needs her. On the surface, this coming-of-age story is that simple and straightforward. But writer/director Sian Heder weaves a beautiful, nuanced and complex tale buoyed by delicate and deft performances. Although specifically about a Deaf family, the story of a child wanting to form her own identity outside of her parents is universally relatable. It’s no surprise that Matlin is terrific. The Oscar-winner has been knocking it out of the park in both television and movies since she won for Children of a Lesser God when she was just 21. Durant is equally fantastic as a guy eager to prove he can do much more than what society and his parents think he’s capable of. Derbez hits just the right note as the supportive yet demanding teacher who won’t let Ruby use her family as an excuse. As a man who has had people misjudge him his whole life, Kotsur will break your heart. But CODA truly rests on Jones’ very capable shoulders. She’s such a compelling screen presence: Ruby’s inner turmoil is palpable. By the time the movie reaches its poignant, beautiful conclusion, I defy anyone to have a dry eye. CODA is about letting go and letting your loved ones soar.—Amy Amatangelo
3. A Charlie Brown Christmas
Year: 1965
Director: Bill Melendez
Stars: Peter Robbins, Christopher Shea, Kathy Steinberg, Tracy Stratford, Bill Melendez
Genre: Animation, Comedy
We could get into plenty of arguments over which Charlie Brown animated special is best, but A Charlie Brown Christmas is my favorite pull of the bunch. Charlie Brown’s confrontation with the Christmas season’s commercialism (back in 1965 no less) and a sad little fir tree make this a cartoon classic, as the ultimate funny-pages shlimazel suffers endless social indignities (no Christmas cards) and the holiday blues. The film remains a touching, funny 25 minutes that connects to kids both young and grown—capturing the spirit of Charles Schulz’s amusingly downer strip—ornamented with slapstick gags and the delightful jazzy Christmas score from the Vince Guaraldi Trio that’s become synonymous with the Peanuts crew. The animation might be a little jagged and repetitive—the child voice acting hit and miss—but the ragtag production helps make it extra endearing, as if the precocious children at the core of the holiday film had a real hand in putting it together. You’re not going to knock this film for those kids doing their weird dances on a loop and neither am I. It just wouldn’t be Christmassy of me.—Jacob Oller
2. Wolfwalkers
Year: 2020
Director: Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart
Stars: Honor Kneafsey, Eva Whittaker, Sean Bean, Simon McBurney, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Tommy Tiernan, Jon Kenny, John Morton
Genre: Animation, Fantasy
Wolfwalkers is filmmaker and animator Tomm Moore’s latest project out of Cartoon Saloon, the animation studio he co-founded in 1999 with Paul Young, and the capper to his loosely bound Irish folklore trilogy (begun with 2009’s The Secret of Kells and continued with 2014’s Song of the Sea). At first blush, the film appears burdened with too much in mind—chiefly thoughts on everything from English colonialism to earnest portraiture of Irish myths, the keystones of Moore’s storytelling for the last decade. Linking these poles are a story of friendship across borders and social boundaries, a dirge for a world pressed beneath the heels of men, a family drama between a willful girl and her loving but overprotective father, and a promise of what life could be if strangers reached across those borders and boundaries to find, if not love, then at least common ground. How Moore and his collaborators Ross Stewart and Will Collins created such a robust screenwriting economy that each of these threads not only fit into Wolfwalkers’ 103 minutes, but feel entirely essential to its vibrance, is likely a whole narrative unto itself. Their collective achievement speaks for itself, of course: Wolfwalkers is a stunning effort, the best of Moore’s career and the best Cartoon Saloon has produced to date. Every detail here, every flourish, has a purpose, whether splashes of red on flower petals, soft edges around dusk-lit trees, or three-panel split screen sequences that read like the pages of illuminated manuscripts brought to life. The effect is magic, and that magic is profound and breathtaking. —Andy Crump
1. Killers of the Flower Moon
Release Date: October 20, 2023
Director: Martin Scorsese
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser, John Lithgow
Rating: R
Genre: Drama
Martin Scorsese has made a career telling stories that tackle issues of justice, retribution and betrayal. From his overt and poetic crime films, through to his dark comedies, religious parables and character pieces, he has long been drawn to stories where the ambiguities of life collide with the complexities of survival, and where day-to-day choices result in consequences sometimes obvious, and sometimes far more subtle and insidious. With Killers of the Flower Moon, he crafts an ambitious historical drama that’s tragedies echo to this day, an observation of a criminal case that transformed the U.S. justice system and, perhaps too subtly, an allusion to the ongoing epidemic of murders targeting Indigenous women—acts of unsolved violence that are left to languish, continuing to afflict both my country of Canada and Scorsese’s native land. The displaced Nation of the Osage—kicked from their lands back East and forced to travel West, their population decimated—found themselves at the heart of a financial miracle. By coincidence or providence, the land that they called their own in Oklahoma proved to be a rich oil deposit, and the boon resulted in what was then extraordinary wealth for the Native population—but also enormous opportunities for exploitation and violence from those set to extract the oil. The Osage were granted certain economic benefits, but the very withdrawal of their funds was tightly monitored, a paternalistic system that did little to protect from those nefarious in their intentions. One way the system could be subverted was through marriage, and it’s here that the film takes its central story, landing somewhere between love and larceny. Lily Gladstone plays Mollie Burkhart, a beautiful young woman who is helping care for her elderly mother (legendary Cree/Métis actress Tantoo Cardinal). At the behest of his powerful cattle rancher uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro), returning soldier Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) is encouraged to flame the sparks of affection with Mollie both for personal benefit and to potentially secure a line into this lucre. Scorsese elicits terrific performances and provides a canvas for a remarkable story. The way he illustrates the ease in which lies are told and promises betrayed is deeply affecting, as is the way in which individual characters are given space to be complex, with flaws and contradictory feelings intact.–Jason Gorber