You might love pro wrestling and find documentary films tiresome — or vice versa. Either way, the new trailer for the upcoming Monster Factory documentary series on Apple TV+ may be for you. It tells the stories of those yearning to get into the ring.
Just the fact that a school trains aspiring pro wrestlers on every aspect of getting into the business is interesting. And so are some of the contenders trying to change their lives.
Apple TV+ kicked off an upcoming documentary series — Real Madrid: Until the End — with a trailer Wednesday. In it, soccer icon David Beckham raves about the famous Spanish soccer club’s remarkable 2021-2022 season. It was loaded with drama and plenty of come-from-behind victories on the way to the club taking the Champions League title.
The three-part documentary series premieres on Apple TV+ on Friday, March 10.
★★☆☆☆
Make or Break, Apple TV+’s surfing competition series, returns for its second season this week, throwing us right back into the personal lives and challenges facing the greatest wave riders in the world as they prepare for a world championship.
Who will be crowned the best? If that question excites you, you’ll have a fine time with this by-the-numbers surfing docuseries.
Apple TV+ brought back surfing competition documentary Make or Break for a second season that starts February 17. The trailer pumps up the surfers’ desperation to win the coveted World Surf League Championship title.
“Season 2 … I guess we weren’t that bad,” one surfer chuckled. Sure, the show is back, but in the trailer it looks like some of the surfers could be done for good if they don’t do better.
★★☆☆☆
New Apple TV+ documentary series Super League: The War for Football examines a dark and very recent chapter in the beloved sport’s history when the bubble threatened to burst.
Capitalism’s slowly tightening stranglehold over the sport meant that some owners saw the potential for growth that meant cutting off not just more than half of the European teams, but the thousands of fans of those teams. This is the story of the people who saved football … for now.
★★★☆☆
In new Apple TV+ documentary Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me, we take a trip into the center of the pop star’s world to discover her journey has been nothing but hardship surrounded by impossible highs, which makes coping with her fame something like a near-impossibility.
Narrated by Gomez herself and directed by Alek Keshishian (Madonna: Truth or Dare), this revealing, well-intentioned and often quite beautiful documentary gets us inside of her turmoil and the whirlwind of both her fame and her illness. It’s important for people to know that being America’s sweetheart is no picnic, and that the machinery of fame is parasitic and unyielding. Hopefully, someone, somewhere will pull the brakes on throwing kids into the show business maelstrom.
★★★★☆
New Apple TV+ documentary Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues takes a lively and appropriately soulful look at the man who invented popular music in America as we know it today.
The film, which premieres today on Apple’s streaming service, brims with expert testimony from witnesses, fans, friends, and family of the incredibly influential jazz musician. It’s bolstered by a cornucopia of rare archival footage and photographs that root Armstrong firmly in history.
Louis Armstrong is too big a subject to think you could ever fully capture him, so director Sacha Jenkins treats this project as just one man’s look at another man. It’s remarkably successful.
At first glance, Selena Gomez is a fabulously successful actress and singer. But she has had her share of troubles, including medical and mental health problems.
Upcoming Apple TV+ documentary Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me looks at her struggles to overcome these challenges. And the first trailer, released Monday by Apple, gives us a sense of what to expect.
“Korea’s mermaids,” also affectionally known as “rowdy grandmas,” are elderly free divers who for generations have caught seafood off South Korea’s Jeju Island to feed their community.
They’re known in Korean as the haenyeo. Apple TV+ said Tuesday an upcoming documentary film will tell their story, including how younger generations are filling their ranks to keep the time-honored — and environmentally sustainable — tradition from dying out.
★★★★☆
New Apple TV+ documentary Sidney tells the story of the great actor and activist Sidney Poitier. Filmed just before his death in January 2022, the film delivers a gripping, first-person chronicle of a man discovering himself, finding his talent, and divining the character of the country he called home.
Irreplaceable guests like Greg Tate, Spike Lee and Harry Belafonte join Poitier to recount his life and times in the excellent Sidney, from director Reginald Hudlin and producer Oprah Winfrey.
In the first trailer for upcoming docuseries Gutsy, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton take part in animated discussions with strong and accomplished women who inspire them.
The list of participants in the series, which premieres September 9 on Apple TV+, is truly varied. It includes famous names from different walks of life, including Kim Kardashian, Gloria Steinem and Jane Goodall.
Sidney Poitier was the first Black man to win an Oscar for Best Actor. His willingness to stand up to racism made him both loved and hated in 1960s America. An Apple TV+ documentary honoring his life and legacy premieres September 23.
A trailer for the film, called simply Sidney, debuted Tuesday.
In new Apple TV+ documentary series Gutsy, Hillary Rodham Clinton and her daughter Chelsea Clinton will interview women the pair find inspirational.
The eight-part docuseries, based on the Clintons’ bestseller The Book of Gutsy Women, will premiere September 9, Apple said Thursday in a press release.
This post contains affiliate links. Cult of Mac may earn a commission when you use our links to buy items.
From Irish folklore to ’60s New York, from culture clashes to meteors, here is a list of the very best films on Apple TV+ so far.
You can divine the company’s best impulses by seeing the best films it acquired, from arcane, auteurist curiosities and thoughtful genre pieces to documentaries that attempt to break free from the usual niches.
★★☆☆☆
Apple TV+ documentary series Home returns Friday for a second season of wonky architecture and human interest stories. The streamer is banking on the beauty of accessibility as spectacle and drama to bring audiences back for more feel-good TV.
The houses the series showcases look glorious, to be sure. But the stories are meant to be as much of a hook as the sight of impossible angles and cozy nooks nestled in wondrous corners of the earth.
Apple’s five-episode dinosaur documentary Prehistoric Planet pulled in plenty of viewers. Amazing archosaurs recreated with cutting-edge CGI effects helped the series hit number five on a list of most-watched TV shows on all the streaming services in the United States.
And Severance continues to draw a big audience almost two months after the season finale on Apple TV+.
It’s dinosaur week on Apple TV+. There’s a new episode of Prehistoric Planet on every night, and critics are heaping praise on the docuseries.
It has a 100% positive score on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.
★★★★☆
Apple TV+’s newest docuseries is Prehistoric Planet, which delves into the lives and habits of a host of dinosaurs. Arriving next week — just in time to get kids of all ages excited about Jurassic World Dominion — the five-part series offers all the usual pleasures of presenter David Attenborough’s nature documentaries.
Viewers can learn — and be awed by the state-of-the-art CGI creature design and gorgeous location photography — all at once.
A couple of enormous sauropods go head to head. A herd of ceratopsia takes on a predator in a driving snowstorm. A pair of tyrannosaurs share a tender moment. All of these are highlights of the second trailer for Prehistoric Planet, coming soon to Apple TV+.
This five-night docuseries will explore the age of the dinosaurs from the Arctic to the oceans.
☆☆☆☆☆
Apple TV+’s most shameless cash grab is back for a truly unearned victory lap. Gotham Chopra and Co. have crafted the thoroughly un-asked-for second season of Greatness Code, the only show on TV about how great and talented athletes are.
Oh, what’s that? There are 10 million other shows about the same thing, and they’re all more involved than 10-minute interviews with competently animated interstitials and some vague notion of what makes an athlete “great”?
Well shut my mouth. Guess there’s no reason to watch this one, is there?
Apple TV+’s latest documentary series The Big Conn is a too-earnest, too-cute look at the biggest scandal to ever hit the Social Security Administration.
The story is fascinating and filled with interesting people. But the approach taken represents the very worst tendencies of modern nonfiction. That includes its four-episode run time, which could easily have been tightened to a single movie.
Ultimately, there’s something a little crass about making a documentary about fraud that jukes every scene until it’s two minutes too long, just to make sure it meets a series order.
Ever wonder how champion pro athletes overcome all odds to win? Apple TV+ unveiled its trailer Tuesday for the second season of Emmy Award-winning sports documentary series Greatness Code.
It gives you a glimpse at what drives top athletes to succeed in impossibly competitive scenarios.
The series premieres May 13 on Apple TV+.
Apple TV+’s new surfing docuseries Make or Break charts the fortunes of nearly 50 competitors as they vie for the title at the World Championship of Surfing.
You get to know the underdogs and the favorites alike in this no-holds-barred look at the dangers and excitement of a sport that doesn’t always receive the prestige treatment. This snappily edited, seven-episode docuseries will show you the ins and outs of pro surfing as the competitors hunger for the title.
It’s hardly must-see TV, but it’s diverting enough.
Apple TV+ won its very first BAFTA TV Awards Sunday for two documentaries, 9/11: Inside the President’s War Room and 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything.
Each year the BAFTAs honor the best British programs and productions in addition to honoring films, such as CODA on Apple TV+, with separate awards.
Apple TV+’s latest documentary series is They Call Me Magic, a look at the life and legacy of one of the greatest and most flashy basketball players the game ever saw.
Director Rick Famuyiwa gives us a guided tour of Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr.’s game, the illness that took him out of professional sports, and the family members — both professional and blood — who made his life hard but worth living. The documentary’s form is digestible and the story is a necessary window into living memory, to see at once how far we’ve come and how little we’ve changed.
