10 Best Movies On Apple TV+ According To Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes becoming the ubiquitous barometer of popular and critical reception is perhaps the biggest double-edged sword of pop culture and movie fandom. It's great to have an easy, generalized reference point for how a film has been received, but it's all too easy for people to distill a film's entire sense of worth down to an aggregated percentage, which sometimes audiences don't even realize is just that: an averaged collection of reactions.

Even so, Rotten Tomatoes' influence on the cultural sphere of cinema has only become more robust as audiences have become even more trained to look for an easy one-size-fits-all reaction, and there are ways to carefully embrace conversations spurred on by a website that has become a popular top authority on criticism. And in an age of countless streamers — such as Apple TV+ — pumping out more and more movies destined to, or at risk of, collapsing under the incursion of new material dropping daily as their host services continue to lose a ridiculous amount of money in the process, it's an easy reference point to see the stuff that's actually getting people talking.

Here are the 10 best movies on Apple TV+, according to Rotten Tomatoes.

Sitting at a clean 100% Certified Fresh rating, "Deaf President Now!" is a documentary about the student protest of the same name, which occurred in March 1988 at Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C., after the Board of Trustees of the school opted to elect a hearing candidate to university president over the popular and qualified deaf candidates that were up for the position. It was an ambitious cry for fair representation of a marginalized community, and this Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim-directed doc exudes the intellect and compassion needed to relay the urgency of the events.

A lot of that comes through in the film's surprising and effective stylistic choices, often adopting the perspective of a deaf viewer by dropping out the audio in key moments, and using clever, shifting audio design and vocal manipulation to create a true shift in point of view. In making a documentary that's so visually astute and demanding, it creates an inherent attachment and empathy between the viewer and the raging passion of the subjects at hand. It would be no shock if it eventually found its way into our list of the 100 best documentaries ever.

Winner of Best Documentary Film from the National Board of Review, and with numerous nominations from other awards bodies such as the Emmys and the Critics' Choice Documentary Awards, Davis Guggenheim's film offers an inside look at actor Michael J. Fox's varied career and public battle with Parkinson's disease, which was always primed for the favorable reception of a true-blue crowd-pleaser. Sitting at 99% on Rotten Tomatoes, it's clearly hard to find anyone who hasn't been moved by the life story of an actor whose struggles have been exceedingly public for some time.

But even then, it's refreshing how resolutely "Still" refuses to resign itself to treacly sentimentality, offering up a sobering portrait of a man whose personal struggles have come to define his image inexorably, and how one overcomes such a struggle. "Still" affords the star an opportunity to elucidate his life on his terms, and in the process, Fox gets an uplifting, entertaining, and truly cinematic documentary.

In a list that encompasses a lot of documentaries featured on Apple TV+, here's an animation breakout from the streamer with enough goodwill to give Apple a movie with its own cult classic status. Sitting a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes, "Wolfwalkers," directed by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart, is the third film in Moore's "Irish Folklore Trilogy," which would go on to receive Best Animated Feature Film nominations at the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes, and the BAFTAs.

In addition to being a critical darling, it's a refreshing type of animated movie to serve audiences, utilizing a savvy blend of 2D animation and 3D modeling techniques to deliver a coming-of-age supernatural and folkloric fantasy with gorgeous panache. When so many studio animated pictures find themselves stuck in a rut of generalized motifs and void of a distinct identity, "Wolfwalkers" provides a dazzling display of the best that animation can achieve.

In the wake of Broadway's closure during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, plans for a full-fledged film adaptation of Irene Sankoff and David Hein's stage musical "Come From Away" were scrapped. Instead, they would produce a filmed version of the live play to be released on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, attended by an audience of frontline and emergency workers, as well as 9/11 survivors.

If you don't know the relevance of that, then you don't know the story of "Come From Away," which follows the true plight of a group of nearly 7,000 airline passengers and crew members who found themselves stuck in the tiny town of Gander, Newfoundland, when all domestic airspace was closed following the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Accommodating an amount of people that equated to about half of the town's population, the citizens of Gander instilled a reassuring sense of welcoming and hope in the wake of an extremely uncertain day, and with a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, "Come From Away" forges a community from the chaos, capturing a comforting sense of cooperative unity.

Following the pair's 2016 volcano documentary "Into the Inferno," legendary director/documentarian/film fandom's resident crazy grandpa, Werner Herzog, once again teams up with Cambridge University volcanologist and scientist Clive Oppenheimer to study fiery blazes that are coming from above rather than already here on Earth: meteorites. In this globetrotting expedition, they speak to people in a slew of vocations — who would handle meteorites in a professional capacity or simply as a passionate hobby or source of inspiration — to consider the existential weight of what it means for these balls of fire to crash land on our own soil.

"Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds" is charmingly haphazard in that offhand Herzog-type of way, not content to settle into the predictable rhythms or learnings of your traditional documentary. But that's what makes "Fireball" so enjoyably uncommon, and Herzog and Oppenheimer meld science and existentialism in a way that genuinely makes you consider the (in)significance of our place in the universe.

A loving paean to one of the forefathers of jazz music, as well as one of the greatest all-time American musicians, "Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues" crafts an affectionate portrait of a true titan and cultural renegade. Director Sacha Jenkins doesn't stray far from your traditional documentary structure, but the true value of his film is the abundance of archival footage featuring Armstrong himself that makes up the runtime, offering new, up-close insights into someone so influential that they've reached the apotheosis of mythic American celebrity.

Between the new footage, unearthed recordings, intimate diary entries from Armstrong himself, insightful and passionate talking head interviews, and a regular focus on Armstrong's devotion to humanitarianism and civil rights, Jenkins arranges what is sure to be the most comprehensive portrait of the man seen thus far, and it transcends Armstrong himself to become an all-encompassing tribute to the turbulent paths of artistry on the public stage.

There's probably no one more suited to make a documentary about the groundbreaking experimental underground new-wave punk band The Velvet Underground than filmmaking iconoclast Todd Haynes, what with his intrinsic resistance to the sanitized machinery of Hollywood filmmaking. Indeed, "The Velvet Underground" heartily earns its 98% Rotten Tomatoes score by delivering an appropriately nonconformist look at a maverick group of musicians.

Hayne's takes an immersive approach to his film, engrossing the viewer in an encompassing visual and aural surge of cinematic tricks as opposed to settling for conventional formatting. "The Velvet Underground" is more reflective of avant-garde styles of filmmaking, with its split-screens, sound distortion, strobe effects, and general enveloping quality that seeks to imbue within the viewer an understanding of a time and place as opposed to a simple historical narrative. For a band like The Velvet Underground, it's a perfect type of radical cinematic depiction.

Continuing the trend of Apple, quite fittingly, being a streamer that releases well-received music documentaries, here we have a more contemporary subject than previous entries in subversive pop star Billie Eilish. Director R.J. Cutler's "Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry" tracks the meteoric rise to fame seen by the now-23-year-old singer-songwriter, whose mainstream career success feels like an outlier within the sphere of corporatized radio pop.

But "The World's a Little Blurry" is a doc made for the fans more than anything else, which is perhaps self-evident by its extensive 140-minute runtime, stretching the mythos of Eilish's career out as in-depth a manner as possible to create the de facto portrait of a young woman who's had to learn to command the system of the contemporary music industry. It asks a lot of the non-converted, but Cutler does his best to make this a more all-encompassing story of the realities of stardom and fandom, which makes "Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry" a profound portrait of pop stardom.

Between "Fancy Dance" and "Killers of the Flower Moon," Apply TV+ is clearly all-in on critically acclaimed movies starring Lily Gladstone. Toplining this drama about the tribulations and generational struggles of Indigenous populations, she stars alongside Isabel Droy-Olson and Shea Whigham in an impressive mix of genres and tones, toggling between coming-of-age road movie, a social drama, and a revenge thriller, all in service of a loving tribute to the struggles of Native women.

It's also a wonderful showcase for its stars, who propel the post-colonial tale of community, love, and perseverance that make up "Fancy Dance" to greater heights. Gladstone doubles down on proving her movie-star credibility, and the supporting cast all help to contribute additional emotional layers to a varied yet tightly stitched tapestry. As the directorial debut from Erica Tremblay, it's a strong calling card that promises fruitful prospects in the realm of detailed, stirring character dramas.

Responsible for celebrated documentaries such as "The Thin Blue Line," "Gates of Heaven," and "The Fog of War," director Errol Morris turned his sights to David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré, for "The Pigeon Tunnel." Carré was an MI6 intelligence officer who applied his knowledge of the inner workings of government spycraft and espionage to a successful shift from government employee to renowned novelist.

Largely told straight from le Carré himself, in what would be his final interview before his death in 2020, "The Pigeon Tunnel" is simultaneously candid and cagey, with Morris and the audience at the behest of how much le Carré will allow himself to reveal. Following the same measured pace and slow allotment of information as you would find in a le Carré novel, this may be best suited for longtime fans of the author but, in that same sense, Morris offers le Carré the perfect departure after a storied career of intelligence work and critically acclaimed novels.