Got yourself an Apple TV+ subscription and don’t know what to watch on it? Let us guide you with our top ten TV shows and films on the popular streaming service, which has everything from innovative sci-fi to wartime adventure, as well as epics from two legendary directors.
Severance
The cleverest drama on TV? Set in and around a mysterious company that wipes its employees’ memories of the outside world when they arrive for work - and does the reverse at home time - Severance is a super-smart satire on the way we give up our true selves for the sake of a wage. But with its fabulous visual imagination and drily witty script, it’s much more.
Blitz
Less challenging than some films by director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) but no less engaging, this film turns on a sensational debut by Elliott Heffernan as George, a ten-year-old who is evacuated from London during the Second World War. George returns in search of his mother (Saoirse Ronan), embarking on an adventure that shows the harsh reality of a city under fire.
Silo
Life after the apocalypse is tough for the characters in this high-concept sci-fi epic: they’re stuck underground, in a deep vertical bunker, and are told tales of the instant death that awaits them if they walk into the toxic wasteland outside. But is that true? A sophisticated political allegory develops as the citizens of the silo wonder if the people in charge are who they say they are.
Fly Me to the Moon
Fans of old-school screwball comedies should give this historical rom-com a whirl, especially if you love tall tales set in the 1960s. Scarlett Johansson stars as a marketing whiz hired by the Richard Nixon government to make a fake moon landing, in case the real one goes wrong. Channing Tatum’s serious Nasa guy is horrified, but eventually the pair see eye to eye.
Prime Target
Think The Da Vinci Code, mixed with a bit of The Bourne Identity, but where the mystery the hero and the baddies are chasing is a maths problem, and you have the unlikely formula for this thriller. Luke Woodall (The White Lotus) is the genius-level geek whose work with prime numbers takes him from Cambridge University to the back streets of Baghdad.
Killers of the Flower Moon
A Martin Scorsese masterpiece that looks like a Western but turns the genre on its head. In the 1920s, the Osage Nation in Oklahoma strikes oil and is then hit by a series of murders - Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro play the men whose greed drives them to commit heinous acts, with Lily Gladstone as the indigenous woman caught in a slowly unfolding tragedy.
Slow Horses
Why are there so many spy dramas on streaming right now? Mainly it’s because everyone’s trying to make something as cool as Slow Horses, a mix of deadpan British comedy and old-school espionage thrills. Gary Oldman is disgustingly good as Jackson Lamb, the boss of a gang of MI5 rejects who find themselves wrapped up in awfully high-stakes missions.
Wolfs
Clooney! Pitt! The old Ocean’s Eleven muckers are reunited for a drama about “fixers”, the men you call when you need help but can’t ask the police. George and Brad play two fixers who prefer to work alone but are called to the same job - a body in a hotel room - and must then become a team. The star power of the two leads is irresistible.
Shrinking
Harrison Ford’s comic timing has never been in question, but his ability to make us laugh is given full rein here as Paul, mentor of Jason Segel’s widowed therapist character, Jimmy. As Jimmy’s loved ones help him through his loss, a fantastically funny ensemble piece develops about pals looking out for each other and telling each other some hard home truths.
Napoleon
Director Ridley Scott in historical epic mode, teamed with Joaquin Phoenix as lead actor? That combination tells you Napoleon will be an intense ride, and it delivers, charting the French general’s rise to power and his relationship with his wife Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby). It’s spectacular but, in its portrayal of the military man’s eccentricities, naughtily entertaining too.
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