98 reviews in this category.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the best film in the franchise because it understands something the others only gestured at: the real treasure was never gold or glory. It was a father and son finding each other....
The second chapter of a trilogy is the hardest to get right. It must deepen the stakes, expand the world, and darken the tone without resolution. It must make the audience feel the weight of the journey.…...
Sam Raimi's Spider-Man hit theaters on May 3, 2002, cleared $114 million in its opening weekend, which was a box office record at the time, and grossed $821 million worldwide against a $139 million budget.…...
Kenneth Branagh's Thor (2011) is the MCU film that established Marvel could do mythology at scale and not embarrass itself.…...
The Wizard of Oz is the most beloved film in American history, and it earns that status on every rewatch. Under VVWS methodology, it scores STRONGLY TRADITIONAL by a wide margin, and that scoring is not close.…...
Ride or Die is Amazon Prime Video's glossy new action-comedy series that pairs Octavia Spencer and Hannah Waddingham as best friends on the run through Europe after one of them is revealed to be an elite international assassin.…...
The Return of the King is not merely the greatest fantasy film ever made. It is arguably the most traditionally-themed blockbuster in Hollywood history. Adapted from J.R.R.…...
A road-trip comedy that runs its horny premise into the ground, David Wain's latest delivers consistent laughs at the cost of any moral coherence whatsoever.…...
Pixar's first feature is not just a landmark of computer animation. It is a deeply traditional story about the things that matter most: loyalty, sacrifice, and earning your place in the world....
Moana (2026) arrives in theaters with a question hanging over it that no amount of Dwayne Johnson charisma can fully answer: why does this exist? The 2016 animated film earned two Oscar nominations, grossed nearly $700 million worldwide, and remains …...
The Mandalorian and Grogu is the first Star Wars theatrical film to come from the television wing of the franchise, and the result is a modest, heartfelt adventure that knows exactly what it is: a story about a father and his son.…...
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is one of the most traditionally moral films ever made.…...
Enola Holmes 3 continues the franchise's pivot from charming Victorian detective romp into something heavier and more politically pointed. The film opens in Malta, where Enola and Tewkesbury have arrived for their wedding.…...
The second Harry Potter film is darker, longer, and more confident than the first, and it holds up remarkably well....
Peter Parker has been in every version of Spider-Man's origin story. Uncle Ben dies, Peter learns the lesson, Peter becomes the hero. Spider-Man: Homecoming skips that story entirely. You have already seen it twice.…...
Star Wars didn't arrive quietly. On May 25, 1977, George Lucas released a film that redefined what movies could be, and nearly fifty years on, it still holds up as one of the most purely traditional pieces of popular entertainment ever made....
The Empire Strikes Back is the rare sequel that improves on everything the original established. It does this not by escalating spectacle but by deepening everything else: character, theme, moral complexity, and emotional cost....
Rogue One is the best Disney-era Star Wars film. It's also the most honest one. It ends with every hero dead, and it earns that ending completely....
Twenty-five years later, this film still works....
The opening four minutes of Up contain more emotional truth than most films achieve in their entire runtime. You know the sequence. Carl meets Ellie. They share a dream. They build a life together. They plan to go to Paradise Falls. They don't.…...
Finding Nemo is twenty-three years old. It still works....
WALL-E is one of the most technically and emotionally ambitious animated films ever made. It is also one of the most ideologically complicated films Pixar has produced.…...
The Princess Bride is thirty-nine years old and people still quote it at weddings....
Here's what's remarkable about Captain America: The First Avenger. It came out in 2011, before the MCU became a machine, and it is still the most traditionally American film the franchise has ever produced.…...
Nobody expected Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl to be good. It was a theme park ride. An amusement park attraction turned into a two-and-a-half-hour blockbuster. The genre had produced very few memorable films.…...
The Revenant is one of the most physically demanding cinematic experiences ever put in front of an audience.…...
Twenty-two years after the original Jurassic Park opened in theaters, Universal and Spielberg managed something genuinely difficult: they made a sequel to an iconic film that understood why the original worked and built on it rather than dismantling …...
Twenty-five years after Shrek changed what an animated film could be, the 25th anniversary theatrical re-release gives audiences a chance to measure the original against its cultural legacy.…...
Ready Player One is a Spielberg film pretending to be a nostalgia delivery mechanism. The pop-culture references, the Iron Giant, the DeLorean, Chucky, Buckaroo Banzai, the Shining, are the surface.…...
There is a moment in Man of Steel where Clark Kent, maybe 12 years old, is overwhelmed in school by his newly awakening X-ray vision and super-hearing. The walls dissolve.…...
Batman v Superman begins with the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne, as every Batman story must. But it does not begin at Crime Alley.…...
Four hours. That is what Zack Snyder needed to tell this story properly, and for once in the history of the superhero blockbuster, a studio let a director find out if he was right....
The opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark lasts about six minutes and contains no dialogue worth remembering.…...
Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the most beloved animated series ever made. That is not opinion. It is measurement. Three seasons, 61 episodes, and a cultural footprint that has only grown in the eighteen years since it concluded.…...
The critics were unfair to Fountain of Youth. A 35% on Rotten Tomatoes for a Guy Ritchie adventure film starring John Krasinski and Natalie Portman on a $180 million budget tells you more about critical expectations than it does about the film....
The Sheep Detectives is the most tonally surprising family film of the year: a genuinely funny, genuinely sad murder mystery told from the perspective of a flock of sheep.…...
Back to the Future is the most quietly conservative film of the 1980s, and Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale probably never thought about it that way....
The Last Jedi is a technically accomplished, cinematically confident film that is also one of the most ideologically aggressive studio blockbusters ever made....
Three years ago, almost nobody in the West had heard of the Battle of Dhu Qar. If you ask a Saudi, they know it the way Americans know the Alamo. The first time Arabian tribes defeated the Persian Sassanid Empire in open battle.…...
Tom Holland's Spider-Man films have maintained something crucial that much contemporary superhero cinema has lost: a genuine moral framework. Peter Parker is not a tortured antihero questioning whether he should use his power.…...
The Mandalorian and Grogu is Jon Favreau's theatrical expansion of the Mandalorian universe, continuing the story of Din Djarin and the Child (Grogu).…...
Toy Story 5 is Andrew Stanton's meditation on childhood, play, and the siege of imagination by algorithmic entertainment.…...
George Orwell's Animal Farm is arguably the most powerful conservative text ever written. It is a thesis statement against totalitarianism, collectivism, and the betrayal of revolution by elites.…...
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…...
Let us be honest about what Pixar made here. Hoppers is a genuine return to form for a studio that had been coasting on nostalgia sequels and misfires for nearly a decade.…...
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....
PRE-RELEASE ANALYSIS: Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey releases July 17, 2026. This review is based on trailers, production information, cast confirmations, and Nolan's documented approach to the material....
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....
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is the sequel to the $1.36 billion juggernaut that proved Nintendo's plumber could carry a Hollywood franchise.…...
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is the sequel to a $1.36 billion phenomenon. It delivers exactly what made the original successful: kinetic fan service, Jack Black's scene-stealing performance, and a clean adventure that never lectures.…...
There are films that remind you what cinema can do when it stops trying to be clever. Society of the Snow is one of them....
The Grand Budapest Hotel is Wes Anderson's most accessible film and possibly his best, which makes it the ideal entry point for the question conservatives have been circling: is Wes Anderson worth watching?...
Fantastic Mr. Fox is Wes Anderson's most straightforward moral tale and his most entertaining film, which is not a coincidence.…...
There are animated films that earn their reputation and animated films that coast on it. Coco earns every bit of its 97% Rotten Tomatoes score, its two Oscars, and its place in the conversation about the greatest Pixar films ever made.…...
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....
Ghostbusters: Afterlife is the most traditionally conservative blockbuster of 2021, and I mean that as a sincere compliment.…...
Here's the honest take on the 2019 Aladdin: it's better than the critics said and not as good as the box office suggests. It grossed a billion dollars worldwide and earned a 57% critic score.…...
Wes Ball's reboot arrives many generations after Caesar's legacy, and it works hard to honor that lineage without being enslaved by it.…...
Let me tell you what nobody expected in December 2022: that an eleventh-year sequel to a DreamWorks spin-off, featuring a talking cat from the Shrek franchise, would turn out to be one of the best animated films in a decade.…...
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.…...
A Minecraft Movie is an honest film. It is not pretending to be Citizen Kane. It is not sneaking in a gender studies lecture.…...
Here is the thing about Flow: it should not be this good. A Latvian animated film made by one person over five years, using free software, with no dialogue, no human characters, and a $3.5 million budget going up against Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks…...
Here's the thing about Paddington 2: it might be the most morally serious film of the last twenty years. It doesn't feel like it. It's brightly colored and funny and stars a CGI bear who gets into scrapes with marmalade.…...
Moana is the Disney princess film that refuses to be about a princess, which is either the most Disney thing imaginable or a quiet act of subversion, depending on your perspective. Moana (Auli'i Cravalho) is the daughter of a Pacific Island chief.…...
Here is the most charitable reading of Toy Story 4 I can offer: it is a technically brilliant film that makes a catastrophic moral choice in its final fifteen minutes....
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.…...
There is a moment in Jurassic Park that I have never fully recovered from. Alan Grant is sitting in a tree with two children he barely knows, watching a brachiosaurus eat leaves in the moonlight.…...
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…...
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....
Let me say something that will surprise you: Avatar: The Way of Water is a more conservative film than its politics suggest....
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.…...
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is the highest-grossing animated film of 2023 at $1.36 billion worldwide, and it earned that number honestly. It is not a great film by any measure of ambition or craft.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Guardians of the Galaxy is one of the most purely enjoyable films the MCU ever produced, and by our scoring system it is also one of the most traditionally coded. The margin is not close.…...
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.…...
The Electric State is a $320 million argument that money cannot buy a soul....
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.…...
Paddington Bear has become one of the strangest cultural Rorschach tests in modern cinema.…...
Elio is the most politically interesting Pixar film in years - not because of what is on screen, but because of the firestorm around what was taken off it.…...
Let's address the elephant in the Wasteland right up front: Furiosa is not woke. It's not even close.…...
Disney's 2019 Lion King is a technically stunning but emotionally hollow recreation of one of the most traditionally structured stories in the studio's catalog.…...
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.…...
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 …...
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.…...
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…...
The fourth SpongeBob theatrical outing arrives with the kind of refreshing simplicity that has become almost exotic in modern animated filmmaking: it tells a straightforward story about friendship and courage, delivers its moral without a lecture, an…...
Anaconda (2025) is a film that sounds better as an elevator pitch than it plays as a ninety-nine-minute movie.…...
Strange World is the movie where Disney finally stopped pretending and went full ideological accelerator.…...
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....
Black Widow arrives as Natasha Romanoff's belated solo film and the first entry in MCU Phase Four.…...
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…...
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....
Dean DeBlois is a rarity in Hollywood. He directed all three animated How to Train Your Dragon films and insisted on full creative control for the live-action remake. That condition shows in the finished product.…...
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....
