Top TV Series and Films on Apple TV Plus. With a focus on quality over quantity, Apple TV Plus has grown significantly since its inception over five years ago, showcasing some of the greatest movies, TV shows, and documentaries that streaming has to offer. Their collection is chock-full of expensive productions, auteur directors, moreish weekly-drop series, and motion pictures starring some of the biggest names in the world. Because of this, the home that Tim Cook constructed has turned into a discriminating viewer’s preferred streaming destination for many, even in the face of the massive heritage catalogs of Netflix, Disney+, and Prime Video.
(The weaponized flatulence of Gary Oldman in Slow Horses alone makes the membership price worthwhile!) Now that the platform is growing and assembling an impressive array of talent both in front of and behind the cameras, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have some kind of clever, manually selected guide to the top content that streamers have to offer?
Whatevs, whatcha know? We at Empire have made the decision to provide you with just that—an all-inclusive list of the top movies and TV series available on Apple TV at the moment.
You’ve come to the perfect spot whether you’re looking for elegantly produced period pieces, gripping criminal dramas, devious thrillers, daring documentaries, indie darlings, or some crazy metamusical mayhem. By the way, there’s no set order for this list—Silo would have been first, naturally.
While you’re here, be sure to check out our lists of the top Netflix UK TV series and movies, as well as what to watch on Disney+, if you’re looking for further suggestions to help you get the most out of your streaming membership.
Constellation
Writer-creator Peter Harness’ Constellation is a noodle-twisting sci-fi thriller that may require patience from its viewers, but only because it merits it. It is profoundly odd, narratively convoluted, and very purposefully timed. The show centers on Noomi Rapace’s astronaut Jo Ericsson, who experiences both minor and major life upheavals upon returning to Earth following an accident on the International Space Station.
Rapace steadies the temporally disorienting first episodes, with Jo’s increasing anxiety and bewilderment reflecting our own as story lines emerge and go in a mist of seemingly hallucinatory actions and wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey antics. Harness employs a daring and often exasperating storytelling technique, which is mitigated by a captivating group of people. The mother-daughter relationship between Davina and Rosie Coleman, who play Jo’s daughter Alice, is particularly noteworthy and serves as the emotional center of the program. And when Harness does, at some point, explain exactly what’s happening, we still can’t bring our jaws off the ground.
Read the Empire review here.
Masters Of The Air
From the creators of Band Of Brothers and The Pacific, comes this alternatively tense, exhilarating, tearjerking, and jaw-dropping new WWII series, inspired by the hair-raising exploits of the USAAF’s 100th Bomb Group, dubbed the “Bloody Hundredth” for good cause. Austin Butler and Callum Turner, as Majors Gale “Buck” Cleven and John “Bucky” Egan, lead a formidable group (Ncuti Gatwa, Barry Keoghan, and Nate Mann all co-star, and shine — here). Their flawless chemistry keeps the show grounded even as we soar through the skies with the Bloody Hundredth in a series of breathtaking raids and mêlées.
Masters of the Air is a heartfelt film directed by master craftsmen like Cary Joji Fukunaga and Band of Brothers veteran Tim Van Patten. It is a modern reminder of the bravery and human cost of the bloodiest conflict in history, as well as a nod to classic American war epics.
Read the Empire review here.
Killers Of The Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese’s most recent film explores the horrific actual story of the Osage killings in Oklahoma in the 1920s during “The Reign of Terror,” and shows the American filmmaker battling both his own cinematic heritage and his country’s violent past. The movie centers on Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Ernest Burkhart, an ethically dubious war soldier who marries Mollie Gladstone, an Osage woman, and unintentionally uses both of them as players in his uncle William “King” Hale’s (Robert De Niro) plot to kill and pillage the Osage people. Scorsese approaches this horrifying period of American history with genuine attention and a strong feeling of duty.
Silence breaks up periods of intense violence; Osage customs and culture are depicted in great detail; and Marty uses a clinical precision to highlight the banality of evil while showing increasing acts of inhumanity. Even though it lasts more than three hours, Scorsese makes every minute matter.
Read the Empire review here.
Slow Horses
Although this program, which is based on the novel series by Mick Herron, is occasionally compared to Le Carré, it is actually more of a natural descendent, fusing spycraft with a dark, very British humor. And so, Le Carré-on. A group of MI5 types who have all screwed up in their careers are banished to “Slough House,” a dingy satellite office that sits far from the agency’s top stars in their shiny Regent’s Park base. Slow Horses is anchored by Gary Oldman, who plays every burping, farting note of chief agent Jackson Lamb. Nevertheless, this group succeeds in resolving a complex kidnapping case.
The clever texts are matched with performances by a stellar ensemble that includes Jack Lowden, Saskia Reeves, Olivia Cooke, Kristin Scott Thomas, and many others. We’re not shocked that a fourth and fifth season with Lamb and company has already been greenlit after an incredible Season 2 and, to be honest, an even more amazing Season 3. Is it not the most delightful scent to wake up to in musty storage rooms?
Read the Empire review here.
Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, a TV adaptation of the motion picture MonsterVerse, blends blockbuster scale (and money) with longform storytelling, decentring its kaiju star attractions to go a little deeper into the history of the cryptozoological cabal that investigates them. Starring Kurt and Wyatt Russell as the younger and older incarnations of Monarch man Lieutenant Lee Shaw, the show tells an ambitious, character-driven story that gradually reveals Monarch’s many secrets while exploring the human cost of citywide beastie brawls. The story is set in the aftermath of 2014’s Godzilla.
Additionally, it just so happens to be an opulent, globally traversing series with a timeline that spans Japan, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Alaska, Utah, and San Francisco, with stunning location work. The human element gives the scaly MonsterVerse tapestry an intriguing new twist, and the large bois, when they do show up, are not to be missed. GOJIRAAAAAA!
Read the Empire review here.
Lessons In Chemistry
Lessons in Chemistry pits Brie Larson against her worst enemy to date: the patriarchy! She has defeated Thanos in Avengers: Endgame and joined the family to battle Jason Momoa’s Dante in Fast X! The show, which is based on Bonnie Garmus’ best-selling book of the same name, revolves around Elizabeth Zott (Larson), a gifted chef and clever chemist who lives in the world of 1950s America, which is ruled by men.
After being forced to leave her PhD program and working as a lab technician in a field full of average guys, Elizabeth finds herself in the spotlight as the host of a TV cookery show, where she teaches viewers about much more than just the exquisite art of julienning carrots. This is pure televisual comfort food, buoyed by a masterful, winning lead performance from Larson and its jaw-droppingly exquisite historical details, not to mention the serotonin-calling kitchen sequences.
Read the Empire review here.
Flora And Son
John Carney (of Once, Sing Street, and Begin Again) is the master of musical films. His realistic and musically infused films celebrate the power of song to communicate our deepest feelings and establish connections with one another that are beyond the reach of spoken language. In his most recent film, Flora and Son, Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the fretful American Jeff, who teaches fretting Irish mother Flora (Eve Hewson) the guitar in an attempt to either annoy or connect with her wayward teenage son Orén Kinlan, who also wants to be a musician.
Flora and Son shines in the balancing of its love story, while being textbook Carney in terms of form and emotion (hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!). Unquestionably, when Hewson and Gordon-Levitt are on screen together, sparks fly, but what really moves us is Carney’s delicate examination of a mother and son’s unbreakable love.
Read the Empire review here.
The Pigeon Tunnel
In Errol Morris’s documentary The Pigeon Tunnel, real-life former MI5 (and 6!) spy David Corrnwell—better known to the world as the legendary espionage fiction author John Le Carré—makes for an engaging interview subject. With dramatic, evocative camerawork and cleverly placed close-ups, the film is shot like its own espionage epic. Morris and Cornwell play a game of cat and mouse as the two notoriously cowardly masters of their respective fields get frank.
Le Carré’s final interview is every bit as compelling and mysterious as any of the author’s writings, investigating the boundaries between art and artist as much as being a detailed biography of the man behind Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Whether you’re a die-hard fan of Carré or believe Smiley to be one of Snow White’s seven dwarfs, this film is a true must-see.
Read the Empire review here.
