The Furious
Let's start with the scorecard, because it's the clearest thing about The Furious....
WOKE: 1.4
TRAD: 28.56
AUTH: 92%
Normal
Normal is exactly the kind of film its title ironically promises it is not: a small-town sheriff thriller that starts quiet and escalates into organized crime warfare, with Bob Odenkirk doing what he now does better than almost anyone in Hollywood....
WOKE: 7.98
TRAD: 22.26
AUTH: 72%
Cliffhanger
There is a version of Cliffhanger (2026) that nobody would want to see. It features a woman who is better than everyone around her because she is a woman, a villain who represents patriarchal power, and a father who needs to be rescued because compet…...
WOKE: 3.67
TRAD: 21.84
AUTH: 76%
The Boys - Season 4
The Boys is one of the most technically accomplished shows on streaming television. It is also one of the most nakedly ideological. Season 4 drops whatever pretense remained....
WOKE: 19.74
TRAD: 8.05
AUTH: 31%
Invincible - Season 3
Invincible remains the best superhero show currently in production. That verdict still holds in Season 3. It also holds a few progressive elements that cost it points on this scorecard. Both things are true, and they're both worth understanding....
WOKE: 7.2
TRAD: 18.34
AUTH: 72%
They Will Kill You
Zazie Beetz has spent years being the best thing in movies that did not deserve her. Deadpool 2. Joker. Bullet Train. She arrives, she crackles, she elevates every scene, then the camera cuts away and the film does something lesser with itself.…...
WOKE: 7.7
TRAD: 23.9
AUTH: 72%
Beast
Beast is the kind of film that used to be a Hollywood staple and is now almost extinct: a gritty, no-apologies MMA story about a man who gave up fighting to live a quiet life, only to be dragged back into the cage when the people he loves are threate…...
WOKE: 1.5
TRAD: 27
AUTH: 95%
Dhurandhar: The Revenge
Hollywood has been making apology films for a decade. Every American action movie now comes loaded with a second-act speech about institutional corruption, military-industrial complex guilt, or the hero's own problematic violence.…...
WOKE: 0
TRAD: 26.74
AUTH: 95%
They Will Kill You
They Will Kill You has exactly one thesis and it commits to it with admirable single-mindedness: put Zazie Beetz in a building full of immortal Satanists and watch what happens.…...
WOKE: 18.8
TRAD: 14.84
AUTH: 78%
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
PRE-RELEASE ANALYSIS: Spider-Man: Brand New Day releases July 31, 2026. This review is based on trailers, cast and crew confirmations, and the film's premise as described by Marvel and the production team....
WOKE: 6.3
TRAD: 13.09
AUTH: N/A
Masters of the Universe
PRE-RELEASE ANALYSIS: Masters of the Universe releases June 5, 2026. This review is based on trailers, production information, cast confirmations, and the franchise's established character values....
WOKE: 7.08
TRAD: 16.94
AUTH: N/A
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
There is a scene in The Final Reckoning where Ethan Hunt floats 400 feet underwater in a destroyed Russian submarine, completely alone, knowing that surfacing will take four minutes and every intelligence agency on the planet is hunting him.…...
WOKE: 3.15
TRAD: 21.2
AUTH: 78%
Deadpool
Deadpool is many things: Marvel's first successful R-rated superhero film, Ryan Reynolds's career resurrection, the movie that proved you didn't have to be family-friendly to print money at the box office ($780 million worldwide on an $58 million bud…...
WOKE: 7.84
TRAD: 9.8
AUTH: 80%
The Avengers
The Avengers arrived in 2012 as the culmination of a four-year Marvel experiment: could you build a cinematic universe, seed individual characters across separate films, and then bring them together for a shared story without everything collapsing? T…...
WOKE: 3.5
TRAD: 13.65
AUTH: 85%
Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc
Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc is one of the best anime films in years and also one of the most conservative-unfriendly Pixar-alternative entertainment options of 2025. That tension is the whole point....
WOKE: 13.1
TRAD: 11.76
AUTH: 48%
Red One
Critics destroyed this movie. 31% on Rotten Tomatoes. 'Dopey,' 'formulaic,' 'overstuffed.' The usual verdict when professional critics encounter a movie built entirely for an audience they don't belong to....
WOKE: 5.35
TRAD: 16.44
AUTH: 66%
Godzilla Minus One
Godzilla Minus One is the best Godzilla film made in decades, and also one of the most traditionally coded action films of recent memory. It's worth understanding why....
WOKE: 5.6
TRAD: 24.78
AUTH: 78%
Guy Ritchie's The Covenant
Guy Ritchie's The Covenant is one of the most traditionally coded war films of the 2020s, and it got criminally overlooked at the box office. That's worth talking about....
WOKE: 5.67
TRAD: 21.28
AUTH: 82%
The Creator
The Creator is a genuinely beautiful film with a genuinely bad politics problem....
WOKE: 35.88
TRAD: 4.9
AUTH: 12%
Sonic the Hedgehog 3
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is a film that understands what made the original games fun. It does not try to be more than it is. It is fast, funny, and focused on the core appeal of Sonic: speed, action, and friendship....
WOKE: 5.2
TRAD: 11.8
AUTH: 84%
Kill Bill: Volume 1
Kill Bill: Volume 1 is a film that defies easy ideological scoring, which is exactly the kind of challenge VirtueVigil exists to tackle.…...
WOKE: 13.38
TRAD: 18.5
AUTH: 60%
Django Unchained
Django Unchained is the most misread film in Quentin Tarantino's filmography. Critics on the left called it a radical racial fantasy. Critics on the right called it exploitation with a woke message. Spike Lee refused to watch it.…...
WOKE: 13.4
TRAD: 21.5
AUTH: 65%
John Wick
John Wick is the purest action film of the 21st century. Not because it is the most complex, or the most emotionally ambitious, but because it has total clarity of purpose and executes that purpose with absolute technical excellence.…...
WOKE: 0.7
TRAD: 14.65
AUTH: 95%
The Avengers
The Avengers (2012) is the film that proved superhero cinema could operate at genuine cultural scale. Six heroes with competing egos, ideologies, and power sets assemble to stop an alien invasion of New York. They fight each other first.…...
WOKE: 4.5
TRAD: 16.4
AUTH: 78%
Wonder Woman
There is a moment in Wonder Woman where Diana strides into No Man's Land, deflecting bullets with her bracers while Allied soldiers watch in disbelief, and charges toward the German lines alone.…...
WOKE: 5.15
TRAD: 13.3
AUTH: 78%
Rebel Ridge
The first thing you need to know about Rebel Ridge is that it is not about race. It's about property rights....
WOKE: 8.18
TRAD: 18.5
AUTH: 78%
No Time to Die
No Time to Die is a film at war with itself, and the miracle is that it almost wins....
WOKE: 11.98
TRAD: 12.25
AUTH: 82%
Blue Beetle
Blue Beetle is the most politically opinionated DC film since Zack Snyder left the franchise, and it is probably the most fun one since Shazam.…...
WOKE: 15.08
TRAD: 8.75
AUTH: 80%
Free Guy
Free Guy arrived in August 2021 during a summer of pandemic-delayed blockbusters, and it did something almost no one expected: it worked. Really worked.…...
WOKE: 4.4
TRAD: 12.39
AUTH: 82%
The Matrix Resurrections
The Matrix Resurrections is a fascinating failure. By which I mean: it fails as a blockbuster sequel, it fails as an action film, it partially fails as a story, and yet it succeeds as a piece of cinema that forces genuine engagement.…...
WOKE: 15.05
TRAD: 8.75
AUTH: 78%
Space Jam: A New Legacy
Space Jam: A New Legacy is a mess. A watchable, occasionally charming, utterly cynical mess. It is the clearest example of a studio film that exists to serve an IP portfolio rather than tell a story, and it did not even bother to hide that fact....
WOKE: 5.2
TRAD: 8.89
AUTH: 71%
Mortal Kombat
Mortal Kombat 2021 delivers exactly what the franchise's fanbase wanted and exactly what its critics expected: hyper-violent martial arts action, faithful adaptations of the game's iconic moves and fatalities, and a story shallow enough not to get in…...
WOKE: 4.6
TRAD: 8.19
AUTH: 74%
Wonder Woman 1984
Wonder Woman 1984 had the hardest job in superhero cinema: follow up one of the genre's most beloved entries while navigating a global pandemic release. It did not pull it off.…...
WOKE: 18.18
TRAD: 16.3
AUTH: 78%
Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
Birds of Prey is an interesting film to analyze from a conservative perspective because it makes no pretense of being anything other than what it is: a feminist action comedy designed to feel like a girls' night out at a punk rock concert.…...
WOKE: 23.34
TRAD: 5.05
AUTH: 82%
The Old Guard
The Old Guard surprised a lot of people when it became one of Netflix's biggest hits of 2020.…...
WOKE: 10.9
TRAD: 14.83
AUTH: 84%
Spider-Man: Far From Home
Spider-Man: Far From Home has one job. It has to be the first movie after Avengers: Endgame, and it has to make you feel okay about moving forward without Tony Stark. That's a brutal assignment. The film mostly pulls it off....
WOKE: 7.4
TRAD: 17.99
AUTH: 87%
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Wes Ball's reboot arrives many generations after Caesar's legacy, and it works hard to honor that lineage without being enslaved by it.…...
WOKE: 12.6
TRAD: 14.2
AUTH: 82%
Avatar: Fire and Ash
James Cameron has now made three Avatar films. Each one is technically extraordinary and ideologically predictable. Fire and Ash is both the best-looking film of 2025 and an almost proud repetition of every idea the franchise put on the table in 2009.…...
WOKE: 21.6
TRAD: 13.4
AUTH: 80%
The Terminal List
The Terminal List has a 40% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and a 94% audience score. That gap tells you everything you need to know about where the show sits culturally....
WOKE: 2.8
TRAD: 26.64
AUTH: 82%
Avengers: Doomsday
This is the review nobody else is writing yet. Avengers: Doomsday does not release until December 18, 2026. The trailers are out. The cast list is longer than a CVS receipt. Robert Downey Jr. is back, not as Tony Stark but as Doctor Doom.…...
WOKE: 4.6
TRAD: 18.4
AUTH: 82%
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping
Haymitch Abernathy has been one of cinema's great unexplained characters since Woody Harrelson stumbled through the original Hunger Games films as the perpetually drunk, permanently haunted mentor from District 12.…...
WOKE: 6.1
TRAD: 13.23
AUTH: 80%
The Matrix
The Matrix is the most politically contested movie in VirtueVigil history, not because it is propaganda but because everybody wants to own it....
WOKE: 6.83
TRAD: 14.28
AUTH: 91%
Gladiator
Maximus is a general. He commands the armies of Rome, wins battles for a dying emperor, and wants nothing more than to go home to his farm in Spain, to his wife, to his son, to the smell of wheat and horses in the morning.…...
WOKE: 1.7
TRAD: 32.2
AUTH: 94%
Braveheart
Thirty years on, Braveheart remains one of the most unapologetically traditional epics in the Hollywood canon. It is not a subtle film. It does not want to be.…...
WOKE: 3.5
TRAD: 19.74
AUTH: 92%
The Patriot
The Patriot is the kind of film Hollywood stopped making around the time it started worrying about how America looked to foreign markets. It is unabashedly pro-American, pro-family, and pro-violent-resistance-to-tyranny.…...
WOKE: 2.7
TRAD: 24.64
AUTH: 82%
Tombstone
Tombstone is one of the best Westerns ever made, and it is great for reasons that are entirely traditional. The friendship between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday is the most compelling male friendship in American film of the 1990s.…...
WOKE: 1.4
TRAD: 17.78
AUTH: 90%
Thunderbolts*
Thunderbolts* is the best Marvel film in several years, and the asterisk tells you something about what kind of film it wants to be. The studio insists the punctuation mark carries meaning. It does.…...
WOKE: 11.08
TRAD: 12.94
AUTH: 82%
Black Adam
Black Adam is a movie that has everything it needs to be a great comic book film and makes almost none of it work....
WOKE: 7.68
TRAD: 13.02
AUTH: 80%
Violent Night
The pitch is perfect and absurd: what if Santa Claus is actually an immortal Viking warrior named Nicomund the Red who became the familiar Christmas figure after centuries of gift-giving penance, and what if he is forced to fight his way through a ho…...
WOKE: 2.5
TRAD: 20.58
AUTH: 90%
Uncharted
Uncharted spent fourteen years in development hell for a reason. The Naughty Dog game series is critically beloved and commercially enormous specifically because it transcended the video-game-adaptation trap by borrowing from Indiana Jones and creati…...
WOKE: 5.4
TRAD: 15.96
AUTH: 74%
Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Movie: Infinity Castle
Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle is the most technically ambitious traditionally animated film since The Lion King, and it earns every frame of the $778.9 million it grossed worldwide....
WOKE: 4
TRAD: 23.1
AUTH: 85%
Tron: Ares
Tron: Ares cost Disney between $180 and $220 million to make and grossed $142 million worldwide. That is not a small disaster.…...
WOKE: 11
TRAD: 5.6
AUTH: 40%
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
In the year of Barbie and Oppenheimer, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was the best pure adventure film Hollywood released and the one most people forgot to include in that conversation....
WOKE: 3.7
TRAD: 12.92
AUTH: 78%
Argylle
Argylle wants to be the smartest spy film in the room. It ends up being the most exhausting....
WOKE: 11.2
TRAD: 13
AUTH: 62%
Atlas
Atlas is the kind of movie you watch on a Sunday afternoon with no expectations and find yourself mildly entertained.…...
WOKE: 12.2
TRAD: 10.82
AUTH: 58%
Gran Turismo
Gran Turismo is the kind of film Hollywood used to make with confidence: a true story about a young man who works harder than anyone else, earns the respect of skeptics, and achieves something that had never been done before. It is not complicated.…...
WOKE: 3.3
TRAD: 22.68
AUTH: 88%
American Sniper
Chris Kyle is from Texas. He grows up hunting with his father, absorbing lessons about wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs. His father teaches him that there are three kinds of people in this world, and that the Kyles are sheepdogs. This is not complicated.…...
WOKE: 2.45
TRAD: 36.6
AUTH: 92%
Road House
Everybody knew the Road House remake was going to either be a disaster or a surprise. What nobody expected was that it would land so firmly in entertaining, masculinity-affirming territory while generating almost zero ideological controversy.…...
WOKE: 4
TRAD: 18
AUTH: 79%
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
The thing you need to know going in: Axel F is nostalgia delivery mechanism first and movie second. It knows this. It's comfortable with this. Whether that's satisfying or frustrating depends entirely on what you're bringing to it....
WOKE: 4
TRAD: 15
AUTH: 76%
Avatar: The Way of Water
Let me say something that will surprise you: Avatar: The Way of Water is a more conservative film than its politics suggest....
WOKE: 14.54
TRAD: 17.14
AUTH: 72%
M3GAN 2.0
M3GAN 2.0 is a film at war with itself. The original M3GAN (2022) worked because Gerard Johnstone understood exactly what he was making: a Blumhouse horror-comedy about an AI doll whose protective programming lacked any ethical guardrails.…...
WOKE: 8.92
TRAD: 10.82
AUTH: 68%
The Dark Knight Rises
When Occupy Wall Street's David Graeber, one of the movement's most prominent intellectual voices, publicly called The Dark Knight Rises 'a piece of anti-Occupy propaganda,' he handed Nolan the most accurate review the film ever received.…...
WOKE: 4.2
TRAD: 24.78
AUTH: 88%
A Working Man
Jason Statham has spent 25 years building a brand around one specific promise: a good man, pushed too far, will do what needs to be done. A Working Man is the purest distillation of that promise he has ever put on screen.…...
WOKE: 1
TRAD: 17.36
AUTH: 88%
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Everything Everywhere All at Once won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actor and Actress. It earned $77 million on a $14.3 million budget. Critics called it a generational masterpiece.…...
WOKE: 15.34
TRAD: 16.32
AUTH: 88%
The Equalizer 3
The Equalizer 3 is the rare third entry in an action franchise that improves on what came before. It is also the cleanest, most traditionally grounded film in a franchise that has always skewed traditional.…...
WOKE: 3
TRAD: 20.88
AUTH: 88%
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the best animated TMNT film since the 2007 theatrical entry, and one of the most visually distinctive studio animated films in years.…...
WOKE: 4.97
TRAD: 8.64
AUTH: 64%
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
Seven films in, Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible franchise remains the gold standard for Hollywood action filmmaking. Dead Reckoning Part One is not just the best entry in the series; it is one of the best action films of the decade.…...
WOKE: 4.2
TRAD: 22.12
AUTH: 84%
Fast X
Fast X is exactly what the Fast and Furious franchise has always been: a maximalist action spectacle built around the unironic belief that family is the most powerful force in the universe.…...
WOKE: 6.1
TRAD: 26.46
AUTH: 78%
Kung Fu Panda 4
Kung Fu Panda 4 is the franchise equivalent of a talented athlete playing a slightly lesser sport: the fundamental skills are on display, the performance is creditable, but something of the original intensity has been traded for management comfort....
WOKE: 10
TRAD: 7
AUTH: 41%
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is the best argument against itself: a film that demonstrates exactly what franchise resurrection done right looks like, while also demonstrating the limits of what nostalgia can accomplish on its own....
WOKE: 6
TRAD: 10
AUTH: 62%
Thor: Ragnarok
Thor: Ragnarok is the MCU doing something it rarely does well: laughing at itself with genuine wit instead of nervous deflection.…...
WOKE: 11.9
TRAD: 18.76
AUTH: 88%
Captain America: Civil War
Captain America: Civil War is the MCU at the height of its powers, and it makes an argument that cuts against the progressive grain of the studio that produced it: sometimes the individual conscience is right and collective authority is wrong.…...
WOKE: 9.96
TRAD: 17.64
AUTH: 91%
Avengers: Infinity War
Avengers: Infinity War is the best argument that the Marvel Cinematic Universe ever made for its own existence. Ten years of narrative groundwork paid off in a film that is, almost in spite of itself, genuinely tragic. The heroes lose.…...
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 16.8
AUTH: N/A
Avatar
Avatar is the highest-grossing film in the history of cinema. It made $2.9 billion in its original 2009 release and over $2.3 billion more in its 2022 re-release. More human beings have paid to watch Avatar than any other movie ever made.…...
WOKE: 26.14
TRAD: 13.6
AUTH: N/A
The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games arrived in 2012 with a premise that seemed designed to alienate half its potential audience: a female protagonist, a dystopian critique of entertainment culture and government control, and a story where children kill each other as st…...
WOKE: 9.8
TRAD: 12.6
AUTH: N/A
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is a much better film than its critics want to admit, and a more thoughtful one than its marketing suggests. Director Steven Caple Jr.…...
WOKE: 8.6
TRAD: 17.01
AUTH: 82%
Shazam! Fury of the Gods
Shazam! Fury of the Gods is a film critics abandoned and audiences found charming. The 50% critic score tells you about industry politics and franchise fatigue.…...
WOKE: 5.9
TRAD: 17.5
AUTH: 80%
Iron Man
Iron Man is the movie that started it all. Not just the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though that is the historical fact. It started the era of the franchise superhero film as the dominant mode of big-budget Hollywood storytelling.…...
WOKE: 5
TRAD: 14.35
AUTH: N/A
Avengers: Endgame
Avengers: Endgame is the highest-grossing film of all time (adjusted for inflation).…...
WOKE: 10.54
TRAD: 13.65
AUTH: N/A
The Gorge
The Gorge is a high-concept premise executed with genuine craft. Two elite soldiers, one American and one Lithuanian, are posted to guard towers on opposite sides of a remote classified gorge for one year. No contact with each other.…...
WOKE: 4.2
TRAD: 12.25
AUTH: 72%
Flight Risk
Mel Gibson directs his first film in nearly a decade, and the result is exactly what you would expect from a director of his caliber working a contained genre script: competent, unpretentious, and functional....
WOKE: 2.1
TRAD: 10.99
AUTH: 55%
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Spider-Man: No Way Home is not just the best Spider-Man film ever made. It is one of the most emotionally devastating blockbusters of the decade, and it earned every tear....
WOKE: 3.5
TRAD: 22.05
AUTH: 50%
Nobody 2
Nobody 2 is exactly the film its trailer promises and nothing more: 89 minutes of Bob Odenkirk getting beaten up, beaten down, and beating back.…...
WOKE: 8.96
TRAD: 15.12
AUTH: 61%
War Machine
War Machine is a glorious throwback to the testosterone-fueled sci-fi action films of the 1980s and 1990s, and it does not apologize for it.…...
WOKE: 4
TRAD: 22
AUTH: 72%
The Electric State
The Electric State is a $320 million argument that money cannot buy a soul....
WOKE: 13.63
TRAD: 9.52
AUTH: 28%
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
The DCEU died the way it lived: drowning in its own ambition. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom was supposed to be a triumphant send-off for DC's most commercially successful franchise.…...
WOKE: 31.2
TRAD: 18.9
AUTH: 42%
Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver
Zack Snyder is the most misunderstood filmmaker in the culture war. His fans think he is their guy - the anti-Disney, anti-woke auteur who makes movies for men.…...
WOKE: 18
TRAD: 24
AUTH: 35%
Kraven the Hunter
Kraven the Hunter had a simple job: make a cool vigilante film about a man who uses superhuman hunting skills to kill criminals instead of animals. It mostly fails at this simple job.…...
WOKE: 5.4
TRAD: 11.2
AUTH: 54%
The Night Agent: Season 3
Not a woke trap. The Night Agent is one of Netflix's most reliable action properties precisely because it delivers exactly what it promises: a good-looking guy with a badge chasing bad guys through exotic locations.…...
WOKE: 22
TRAD: 38
AUTH: 68%
F1
Not a woke trap. Not even close. F1 is the purest strain of old-school Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking released in 2025. It's a comeback story about a broken man who finds redemption through grit, self-sacrifice, and the refusal to quit.…...
WOKE: 5.52
TRAD: 22.68
AUTH: 82%
Karate Kid: Legends
Not a woke trap. Not even close. Karate Kid: Legends is the most traditionally coded major studio release of 2025. It's a movie about older men teaching a young man to be brave, disciplined, and honorable. The trailer shows exactly what you get.…...
WOKE: 3.15
TRAD: 26.32
AUTH: 72%
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina
Not a woke trap. This is the most important thing conservative audiences need to hear: Ballerina is not a hostile takeover of the John Wick franchise. It's a spinoff built around a character who already existed in Chapter 3.…...
WOKE: 11.28
TRAD: 18.76
AUTH: 65%
Twisters
Twisters is that rare modern blockbuster that feels like it was made for the entire country, not just the coasts.…...
WOKE: 10.08
TRAD: 24.64
AUTH: 75%
Ne Zha 2
Ne Zha 2 is one of the most extraordinary animated films made anywhere in the world in the past decade. Full stop. The first film was a surprise phenomenon.…...
WOKE: 0
TRAD: 38.57
AUTH: 98%
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Let's address the elephant in the Wasteland right up front: Furiosa is not woke. It's not even close.…...
WOKE: 8
TRAD: 22
AUTH: 78%
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
Let's get this out of the way: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is not a film you watch for the story.…...
WOKE: 6
TRAD: 14
AUTH: 78%
Madame Web
Madame Web is one of the most comprehensively terrible superhero films ever produced by a major studio.…...
WOKE: 13.42
TRAD: 9.15
AUTH: 38%
The Beekeeper
The Beekeeper is the best Jason Statham movie in years, and it got there by doing something Hollywood has mostly forgotten how to do: make a straightforward action film for adults with a moral compass that actually points somewhere....
WOKE: 4.25
TRAD: 25.48
AUTH: 72%
Borderlands
Borderlands is what happens when a studio spends $115 million trying to turn a beloved M-rated video game into a PG-13 Guardians of the Galaxy knockoff.…...
WOKE: 17.5
TRAD: 8.26
AUTH: 55%
Captain America: Brave New World
Captain America: Brave New World is a deeply confused film that cannot decide whether it wants to be a political thriller, a superhero spectacle, or a meditation on race in America. It tries to be all three and succeeds fully at none of them.…...
WOKE: 14.58
TRAD: 10.08
AUTH: 68%
Mulan
Disney's 2020 Mulan is a visually gorgeous but narratively confused film that manages to simultaneously offend fans of the 1998 animated original, Chinese audiences, Western feminists, and human rights advocates.…...
WOKE: 20.78
TRAD: 17.64
AUTH: 58%
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the rarest thing in Phase Five of the MCU: a movie that earns its emotions without lecturing its audience.…...
WOKE: 5.18
TRAD: 14.36
AUTH: 73%
Thor: Love and Thunder
Thor: Love and Thunder is a film at war with itself. It contains the raw materials for a genuinely powerful story about grief, faith, and the failure of the gods, but it buries that story under a relentless avalanche of jokes, self-aware comedy, and …...
WOKE: 16.44
TRAD: 12.26
AUTH: 58%
John Wick: Chapter 4
John Wick: Chapter 4 is the rare action sequel that earns the word epic. Chad Stahelski's nearly three-hour opus scales everything that made the first film work to operatic proportions without losing the personal stakes at its core.…...
WOKE: 0.5
TRAD: 23.52
AUTH: 79%
Transformers One
Transformers One is the best Transformers film since the original 1986 animated movie. It does what no live-action entry ever managed: it makes you genuinely care about Optimus Prime and Megatron as characters before they become myths.…...
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 18.48
AUTH: 71%
The Amateur
The Amateur is a revenge thriller about a man who is not supposed to be in the revenge business. Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) is a CIA cryptographer, basement-dweller, a code-breaker who restores old Cessnas on weekends. He's not a killer.…...
WOKE: 4.9
TRAD: 14.62
AUTH: 62%
G20
G20 wants to be Air Force One for the streaming era. The setup is solid: terrorists seize a G20 summit in Cape Town, take world leaders hostage, and the U.S.…...
WOKE: 14.46
TRAD: 7.6
AUTH: 38%
Solo Leveling: ReAwakening
Solo Leveling: ReAwakening is two things stitched together: a rushed 80-minute recap of Season 1 and a spectacular 40-minute preview of Season 2. The first part is mediocre. The second part is genuinely thrilling.…...
WOKE: 1.26
TRAD: 28.35
AUTH: 62%
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is the MCU's most interesting mess. Sam Raimi brings genuine horror filmmaking to a franchise that desperately needed it, Elizabeth Olsen delivers a villain performance for the ages, and the multiverse conc…...
WOKE: 13.6
TRAD: 10.22
AUTH: 61%
Anaconda
Anaconda (2025) is a film that sounds better as an elevator pitch than it plays as a ninety-nine-minute movie.…...
WOKE: 4.4
TRAD: 12.18
AUTH: 62%
Top Gun: Maverick
Top Gun: Maverick is the best American action film in at least a decade. That is not hyperbole. It is a film that remembered something most of Hollywood has forgotten: audiences want to feel something, not be taught something....
WOKE: 1.05
TRAD: 21.28
AUTH: 91%
Lightyear
Lightyear is a mediocre Pixar film that became a cultural flashpoint for reasons that have almost nothing to do with its quality.…...
WOKE: 10.22
TRAD: 6.65
AUTH: 58%
Eternals
Eternals is the most ambitious and the most divisive film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.…...
WOKE: 19.74
TRAD: 5.95
AUTH: 55%
Black Panther
Black Panther is the most culturally significant MCU film ever made, and scoring it requires separating the cultural event from the actual film. The movie tells a surprisingly traditional story wrapped in progressive packaging....
WOKE: 18.82
TRAD: 20.03
AUTH: 68%
Black Widow
Black Widow arrives as Natasha Romanoff's belated solo film and the first entry in MCU Phase Four.…...
WOKE: 16.95
TRAD: 12.13
AUTH: 62%
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Shang-Chi is the most pleasant surprise in the MCU's representation era. Where many expected Marvel's first Asian-led film to be a diversity lecture, what we got is a deeply traditional family drama with spectacular fight choreography that draws from…...
WOKE: 5.46
TRAD: 14.19
AUTH: 74%
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a film at war with itself. At its best, it's a genuinely moving meditation on grief, loss, and the burden of legacy - anchored by Angela Bassett's towering performance as Queen Ramonda and boosted by Ludwig Goransson…...
WOKE: 18.42
TRAD: 12.67
AUTH: 64%
The Marvels
The Marvels is the film that broke the MCU's aura of commercial invincibility. With a worldwide gross of $206 million against a production budget of $374 million, it represents a loss of over $200 million for Disney and stands as the lowest-grossing …...
WOKE: 22.95
TRAD: 8.87
AUTH: 48%
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania had one job: introduce Kang the Conqueror as the next Thanos-level threat. It failed at everything except the Kang part, and then Jonathan Majors' conviction destroyed even that....
WOKE: 14.57
TRAD: 10.67
AUTH: 52%
Greenland 2: Migration
Greenland 2: Migration is a deeply traditional film wearing the clothes of a post-apocalyptic thriller.…...
WOKE: 5.05
TRAD: 18.62
AUTH: 70%
The Accountant 2
The Accountant 2 does something rare: it delivers a sequel that is as good as the original without flinching from what made the first film work....
WOKE: 4.2
TRAD: 26.46
AUTH: 76%
Back in Action
Back in Action is exactly what Netflix spent $200 million to make: a perfectly disposable action comedy that will perform huge numbers, entertain audiences for 114 minutes, and be forgotten inside a week....
WOKE: 12.6
TRAD: 10.92
AUTH: 55%
Havoc
Havoc is the closest thing to a Gareth Evans Raid film in English, and for a certain kind of audience, that is exactly enough....
WOKE: 8.4
TRAD: 17.22
AUTH: 67%
Silent Storm
Director Kathryn Bigelow returns with Silent Storm, a Cold War submarine thriller that represents American military cinema at its finest.…...
WOKE: 5.1
TRAD: 18.6
AUTH: 88%
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
Tom Cruise's final turn as Ethan Hunt is, by any reasonable measure, a triumph of old-school filmmaking values.…...
WOKE: 1.1
TRAD: 21.4
AUTH: 93%
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Marvel needed a win, and they mostly got one....
WOKE: 9.98
TRAD: 18.7
AUTH: 65%
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
Den of Thieves 2 does not break any new ground. It does not need to....
WOKE: 4.3
TRAD: 7
AUTH: 62%
Sonic the Hedgehog 3
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is the best film in this franchise and, honestly, one of the most enjoyable family action movies of 2024. It does something Hollywood rarely manages: it gets darker in its third installment without losing its soul....
WOKE: 4.2
TRAD: 18.34
AUTH: 72%
Venom: The Last Dance
This franchise was never supposed to work. A Venom movie without Spider-Man, built around Tom Hardy doing a two-man improv show with a CGI alien living in his chest. It worked twice already.…...
WOKE: 3.5
TRAD: 17.07
AUTH: 68%
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Harrison Ford is 80 years old. Indiana Jones is a few years younger on screen, but the arithmetic of time is the same.…...
WOKE: 15.4
TRAD: 22.7
AUTH: 50%
Jurassic World Rebirth
Jurassic World Rebirth is a $200 million movie that feels like it was written on a napkin during a studio lunch meeting.…...
WOKE: 14
TRAD: 10
AUTH: 42%
One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson makes movies for people who love movies. That has always been true. And One Battle After Another might be his most entertaining work, period.…...
WOKE: 10
TRAD: 6
AUTH: 55%
The Running Man
This review discusses the full plot including the ending....
WOKE: 5
TRAD: 5
AUTH: 51%
Warfare
Spoiler context: Warfare is a real-time depiction of real events. The real Elliott Miller, to whom the film is dedicated, lost his leg and his ability to speak as a result of the events depicted. This is not entertainment in the conventional sense.…...
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 9
AUTH: 84%
Novocaine
Spoiler warning: the twist at the end of the second act is worth preserving. If you plan to see Novocaine unspoiled, read only the first three paragraphs....
WOKE: 3
TRAD: 8
AUTH: 70%
Predator: Badlands
Dan Trachtenberg clearly loves the Predator franchise. That much is obvious from three films in three years.…...
WOKE: 9
TRAD: 5
AUTH: 35%
Gladiator II (2024)
Ridley Scott made Gladiator II because he wanted to make another Gladiator. That is essentially the whole story behind this sequel, and it explains both its strengths and its limits.…...
WOKE: 7
TRAD: 22.84
AUTH: 68%
The Penguin
The Penguin is the best argument that prestige superhero television doesn't have to be ideologically captured to be excellent.…...
WOKE: 9
TRAD: 14
AUTH: 70%
Deadpool & Wolverine
Deadpool & Wolverine is exactly what it advertises itself as: an audacious, frequently profane, nostalgically loaded buddy film that smashes two beloved superhero personas together and dares the audience not to have fun.…...
WOKE: 11
TRAD: 8
AUTH: 64%
The Fall Guy
The Fall Guy is one of the most genuinely enjoyable action movies in recent memory, and it achieves that by doing something remarkably simple: it actually likes its protagonist....
WOKE: 3
TRAD: 8
AUTH: 72%
Bad Boys: Ride or Die
Bad Boys: Ride or Die is a franchise that knows exactly what it is and has stopped pretending otherwise.…...
WOKE: 6
TRAD: 8
AUTH: 62%
Thelma
Thelma is based on something that actually happened to director Josh Margolin's grandmother. A scammer called her, pretending to be Josh, and told her he had been arrested. She sent $10,000 to an address he gave her. She was 93.…...
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 12
AUTH: 88%
Civil War
Alex Garland spent years watching political tribalism eat the American conversation, and his response was to make a movie that would give everyone something to hate and something to love.…...
WOKE: 22
TRAD: 18
AUTH: 60%
Monkey Man
Dev Patel spent seven years developing Monkey Man, got a broken nose, multiple injuries, and a Netflix deal that then collapsed. Then Jordan Peele watched the film and made sure it got into theaters.…...
WOKE: 28
TRAD: 14
AUTH: 65%
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Guy Ritchie has spent thirty years making films about men who are very good at dangerous things, and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is the logical culmination of that career.…...
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 11
AUTH: 85%
One Piece - Season 2
This preview is based on available trailers, creative team history, and pre-release information. Scores and verdict reflect our prediction only and will be updated upon release....
WOKE: 3
TRAD: 7
AUTH: 74%
The Night Agent - Season 3
Three seasons in, The Night Agent remains one of Netflix's most conservative-friendly prestige productions - and Season 3 makes no apologies for it.…...
WOKE: 7
TRAD: 25
AUTH: 72%
Shelter
There is a line of conservative cinema that barely announces itself: the masculine protector story, dressed in action-genre clothes, that has always been one of Hollywood's most durable formulas.…...
WOKE: 9
TRAD: 32
AUTH: 82%
Superman
James Gunn handed America's oldest superhero symbol a progressive megaphone and pointed it at every culture-war flashpoint of the moment - immigration, media distrust, foreign intervention - and then had the audacity to make a movie with genuine emot…...
WOKE: 19
TRAD: 21
AUTH: 53%
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
Hollywood doesn't often make movies that tell you to put down your phone - and mean it.…...
WOKE: 5
TRAD: 21
AUTH: 81%
Sound of Freedom
Here is what you need to know about Sound of Freedom before anything else: studios sat on this film for five years. Fox (which became Disney after the acquisition) shelved it. Not because it was bad - test screenings were strong.…...
WOKE: 4.2
TRAD: 30.8
AUTH: 88%
Captain America: Brave New World
Captain America: Brave New World is a Frankenstein's monster of a movie, stitched together from at least three different scripts, multiple rounds of reshoots, and the remnants of a 2008 plotline nobody was asking to resolve.…...
WOKE: 8
TRAD: 5
AUTH: 65%
Thunderbolts*
Thunderbolts asks you to care about six characters you either forgot existed or could not name at gunpoint. The question is whether it delivers a story worth telling. The answer, with significant reservations, is: sort of....
WOKE: 7
TRAD: 5
AUTH: 66%
Independence day
Independence Day is built on a traditional moral structure centered on individual courage, earned leadership, and collective survival through merit and sacrifice.…...
WOKE: 1
TRAD: 6
AUTH: 88%
Love Hurts
Love Hurts is kind of film dismissed by critics, enjoyed by audiences. Understands what it is: fun action-comedy about good man forced back into violence protecting loved ones. Does not pretend to be more. Does not attempt social commentary.…...
WOKE: 3.6
TRAD: 10.2
AUTH: N/A
C
Carry-On
Netflix does not often deliver a film that feels this old-fashioned in the best sense.…...
WOKE: 3
TRAD: 20.23
AUTH: N/A