To mark Juneteenth, a holiday to celebrate the official end of slavery in the U.S., Apple has made its original Apple TV+ movie The Banker available to watch for free.
The movie, which is based on a true story, stars Anthony Mackie and Samuel L. Jackson as Bernard Garrett and Joe Morris, two of the first black bankers in the United States. At a time when discriminatory Jim Crow-era laws were in effect in the U.S., the pair hired a white man (played by Nicholas Hoult) to portray the face of their business, while the pair posed as a chauffeur and janitor.
The Banker available to watch for free
The Banker debuted on Apple TV+ on March 20 this year. (You can check out Cult of Mac‘s review here.) Reviews of the movie have been mixed-to-positive. On Rotten Tomatoes, it currently has a critic score of 77% from 69 critical reviews. However, it has an impressive 100% from 90 audience reviews. But this number falls on IMDB, which is made up entirely of audience reviews. There, The Banker currently has an average score of 7.2 out of 10 from 11,386 ratings.
To watch, The Banker, search for it on the Apple TV app on supported devices. While it might ask you to sign into Apple TV+, simply declining these requests (if you’re not a subscriber) will let you watch the movie for free. It will be available for free watching until the end of the month. After that, it will go back behind the $4.99 per month Apple TV+ paywall.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has frequently spoken out against racism in his role at Apple. Earlier this month, Cook published an open letter titled “Speaking up on racism.” It appeared on Apple’s homepage and came shortly after the killing of George Floyd kicked off a wave of anti-racism protests around the world. In the letter, Cook wrote that: “While our [anti-racist] laws have changed, the reality is that their protections are still not universally applied. We’ve seen progress since the America I grew up in, but it is similarly true that communities of color continue to endure discrimination and trauma.”
