146 reviews in this category.
Apple TV+'s Widow's Bay is the best new show of 2026. It is also, against all expectations for a series about a demonic covenant maintained by a small-town government, surprisingly traditional....
Little Brother is a Netflix comedy that knows exactly what it is doing and does it better than you might expect.…...
Succession Season 1 is one of the most acclaimed television series of the past decade and one of the most ideologically coherent left-wing artifacts ever produced by a major American network. It is not a show with progressive themes.…...
The Invite is the best-directed film Olivia Wilde has made, a brittle, frequently hilarious dinner-party dramedy that doubles as an autopsy of modern marriage.…...
Scary Movie (2026) is not a good movie in any conventional sense. It is a loud, crude, aggressively stupid 96-minute assault on taste, logic, and the human attention span.…...
The Bear Season 3 is the season where the show stops trying to be loved and commits to being honest. That honesty is uncomfortable, often frustrating, and at times genuinely difficult to watch.…...
The Bear Season 2 is the story of what happens when people who have been surviving decide to build something instead. That turns out to be a more traditional story than Season 1, and a richer one....
The Bear is about what it costs to be good at something and what it takes to build something that lasts.…...
Stop! That! Train! is exactly what it says on the box. A disaster parody featuring drag queens, built for the RuPaul's Drag Race fan base, directed by a filmmaker who has spent his career in that cultural space....
Ant-Man has one of the stranger production histories in the MCU. Edgar Wright developed the screenplay for nearly a decade, left the project weeks before principal photography over creative differences with Marvel, and was replaced by Peyton Reed wit…...
Office Romance is a real romantic comedy. Not a deconstruction of one. Not a parody of one. Not a movie that uses the form to make a point about gender politics. A romantic comedy.…...
The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act is a cultural phenomenon wrapped in a genuine creative achievement. That combination is rare enough to deserve serious analysis, even for an audience that will find real objections in the content....
Ocean's Eleven is not a film about anything in particular. That is almost its highest compliment....
The Banshees of Inisherin is about a man ending a friendship and the destruction that follows. That is the whole plot. What Martin McDonagh does with that premise is something you will not forget....
Home Alone is the most financially successful live-action comedy ever made, and most people can tell you exactly why: Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, John Williams, and a script by John Hughes that knows the exact difference between comedy and cruelty....
The Princess Bride is thirty-nine years old and people still quote it at weddings....
The Last Viking opens with an animated fable that is worth describing in full because it announces the film's intentions more clearly than any plot synopsis could....
The Truman Show (1998) turns 28 this year, and revisiting it now is a genuinely different experience than watching it in 1998.…...
Deadpool 2 is a film that works emotionally harder than it has any right to, and that effort is what makes the MIXED verdict appropriate rather than simply WOKE LEAN....
There's a scene about forty-five minutes into Ghostbusters where the mayor of New York calls Peter Venkman into his office.…...
David Leitch is the co-director of the original John Wick, still the best action film of the 2010s. Bullet Train is not John Wick.…...
Boots Riley made Sorry to Bother You in 2018. That film, about a Black telemarketer who discovers his 'white voice' leads him into complicity with something monstrous, was a Marxist nightmare comedy that earned its politics through sheer formal inven…...
John Carney has now made five feature films about musicians. Once. Begin Again. Sing Street. Flora and Son. Power Ballad....
The question Tulsa King Season 2 has to answer is the same question every successful second season faces: did you have more story, or did you just have more episodes? The answer here is yes and yes, which is the good answer.…...
Parasite is a masterfully made film. Let's get that out of the way immediately. Bong Joon-ho is a technical virtuoso. The script architecture is near-perfect. The performances are uniformly excellent.…...
Darren Aronofsky makes a noir. That sentence should not work. The man who made mother!, who cast his own mother-goddess metaphor as a victim of ecological capitalism, who spent his career using cinema as a vehicle for progressive political theology, …...
Eddington is the film Ari Aster has been building to since Hereditary. His earlier work destroyed the family as a unit of safety. Midsommar destroyed the romantic relationship. Beau Is Afraid destroyed the male self.…...
Season 3 of The White Lotus is the most anticipated prestige television event of early 2025, and it delivers what it promises. Whether what it promises is what you want is a different question....
Fight or Flight is a film that knows exactly what it is and delivers that thing with efficiency and occasional flair.…...
Heads of State wants to be two things at once: a politically sharp satire and a big dumb action comedy. It's better at the second than the first, which means audiences willing to meet it on its own terms will have a decent time....
The Wizard of the Kremlin opens in the United States on May 15 after premiering at Venice in August 2025 and opening in France in January 2026.…...
Here's the thing about Rian Johnson: he's good at this....
Here's the premise: George is a shepherd. He reads detective novels to his sheep every night. He reads them good stories. His sheep listen. His sheep understand. His sheep learn how detectives think and solve problems.…...
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....
Red Notice is comfortable with being exactly what it is: a glossy, star-driven heist comedy with three A-listers in expensive locations doing expensive things. On those terms, it mostly works. The problem is the ideology underneath....
Fly Me to the Moon is an entertaining romantic comedy that does more things reasonably well than it does anything brilliantly....
The Breadwinner has not released at time of writing. But Nate Bargatze, Wonder Project, and the Mr. Mom premise tell you most of what you need to know....
Twenty-five years is a long time to keep doing anything, let alone keeping the same group of friends together to hurt each other on camera. Jackass: Best and Last is the franchise's farewell, and that framing matters more than it might seem....
Illumination is reliable. Not always great, sometimes very good, occasionally exceptional, but reliably delivering what it promises.…...
Over Your Dead Body opens with a marriage already in free fall. Dan (Jason Segel), a formerly successful advertising creative, has been reduced to directing pop-up ads. His ambitions are dead.…...
Deadpool 3 teams the Merc with a Mouth with Wolverine in a film that satirizes superhero narratives from every direction. Our verdict: MIXED with a +1 TRAD margin barely favoring traditional values....
The Christophers (2026) is a Steven Soderbergh-directed original drama starring Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel about artistic integrity, family betrayal, and what remains when a life's work is reduced to commodity.…...
California Schemin' is a story about two friends who tried to fake their way to success and faced the consequences. The film's lesson is traditional: authenticity matters, friendships matter, and sustained dishonesty damages both.…...
You, Me & Tuscany is a straightforward romantic comedy with no ideological baggage. It celebrates romantic love as transformative, honors family bonds, and shows a woman finding purpose through courage and connection.…...
The Devil Wears Prada 2 arrives as Hollywood's latest bid to repackage 2000s female-empowerment comfort food for the post-#MeToo moment.…...
Let us be direct about what The Drama is doing and what it costs....
There is a certain kind of New York romantic comedy that feels like it was made by someone who actually lives in New York and actually believes in love. Fantasy Life is that kind of film....
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....
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy arrives fourteen years after Bridget Jones's Baby and over two decades after the original made Renee Zellweger's hapless diarist a global icon.…...
There is a question that has been circulating in every corner of the comedy-fan internet since the Busboys trailer dropped: is it woke?...
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.…...
Let us start with the premise, because the premise is everything....
Twenty-nine years is a long time between sequels. Most of those films fail because the audience has grown up and the comedy has not.…...
The first season of Wednesday was a cultural phenomenon by Netflix's own metrics, becoming the second-most watched English-language Netflix series ever.…...
Here is what Stephen Curry apparently remembered about the sports movies that shaped him: the underdog does not win because the system is fixed for him. The underdog wins because he shows up every day, gets better, and earns it.…...
There's a store at the Highland Place mall called Free Eden. It sells cupcake-scented candles, charm bracelets, and the kind of overpriced cotton sundress that costs more than your rent. The employees are gorgeous. They have their own slang.…...
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.…...
The original Ready or Not (2019) was a tight, clever horror-comedy with a clear thesis: old money is a death cult, and the institution of marriage into elite families is a form of entrapment.…...
Wes Anderson's thirteenth feature is his most purely entertaining film since The Grand Budapest Hotel and his most emotionally direct film since Moonrise Kingdom.…...
The original Bad Guys was a pleasant surprise: a DreamWorks animated film that used French New Wave aesthetics and a genuinely clever premise to deliver one of the more entertaining family films of 2022.…...
A Man Called Otto is the American remake of the Swedish film A Man Called Ove, itself adapted from Fredrik Backman's bestselling novel.…...
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…...
Happy Gilmore is thirty years old and it still makes people laugh. That is not nothing. Most comedies from the mid-nineties feel like archaeology.…...
Billy Madison is not a film you defend to people who don't already like it. It operates on a specific frequency: loud, dumb, cheerfully juvenile, and completely unconcerned with whether you think it is smart. That is its whole deal.…...
Big Daddy is the film that revealed what Adam Sandler was actually capable of when someone gave him a story with real emotional stakes.…...
The Wedding Singer is the best Adam Sandler film. Not the funniest. Not the most ambitious. The best, because it is the one where his persona serves a story worth telling....
Grown Ups might be the most explicitly conservative mainstream comedy of its era, and the critics who demolished it on Rotten Tomatoes (10%) probably sensed that without being able to articulate it....
Click is a better film than it has any right to be, and the reason is that it has something real to say and is not ashamed to say it loudly....
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?...
Moonrise Kingdom is Wes Anderson's most sincere film, and sincerity is the quality he is most often accused of lacking.…...
The Royal Tenenbaums is Wes Anderson's most emotionally ambitious film and the one that best reveals both what he can do and where his sensibility falls short of what the material demands....
Zootopia is the most technically polished Disney has ever been. It is also one of the most ideologically explicit animated films a major studio has released.…...
Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino's masterpiece, and it may be the most unambiguously pro-military film in American cinema since The Longest Day. It is certainly the most gleefully patriotic.…...
The Wolf of Wall Street is a masterpiece about a man you should despise, made in a way that makes it hard to despise him.…...
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.…...
Ghostbusters: Afterlife is the most traditionally conservative blockbuster of 2021, and I mean that as a sincere compliment.…...
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.…...
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....
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino making a movie about men who are being left behind. Not metaphorically. Literally.…...
Let's start with what Knives Out is, because it is genuinely very good at what it does.…...
Here is something you don't say often about a Disney live-action remake: this one earns it....
Mike White's third season of his luxury-resort mortality play takes the show to Thailand, raises the body count's spiritual ambitions, and arrives at roughly the same place the previous two seasons arrived: the rich are hollow, the beautiful destroy …...
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'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.…...
Wednesday is the Netflix show that everyone watched. 252 million households in its first 28 days. The most-watched English-language Netflix series at its release. Jenna Ortega as the new Wednesday Addams became a genuine pop-culture moment.…...
Sylvester Stallone is 77 years old and he is having the best run of his career. Tulsa King is not a great show in the prestige television sense.…...
Here's the thing about Forrest Gump that critics have spent thirty years getting wrong: they treat its sentimentality as a flaw.…...
Here is what Rian Johnson is very good at: constructing mechanical puzzles. The Glass Onion mystery , Miles Bron's island, his orbit of enablers, the twist about who Janelle Monáe's character actually is , works as clockwork.…...
Damien Chazelle wanted to make a film about the magic of movies. He made it by putting that magic through a meat grinder for three hours and nine minutes to see if anything noble survived the processing....
The Menu is a slick, well-crafted class satire that will make you laugh and make you uneasy, sometimes at the same time. It is also a film whose ideological message is more muddled than its admirers want to admit....
Amsterdam is a film about friendship, decency, and the courage it takes to defend democracy against people with money and no conscience. It is also, unfortunately, a mess....
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…...
Argylle wants to be the smartest spy film in the room. It ends up being the most exhausting....
The Hangover is one of the most technically perfect comedies ever made, and it is also an R-rated film about three grown men behaving abominably in Las Vegas. Both things are true. VirtueVigil reviews the film as it is, not as it should be....
Alexander Payne's The Holdovers is a warmhearted old-school character study about three lonely people stuck together at a New England boarding school over Christmas break in 1970.…...
American Fiction is the most interesting progressive film of the 2023 season because it is willing to bite the hand it feeds.…...
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....
Nonnas is the kind of film that gets made once a year if you are lucky, and usually goes unnoticed because it does not fit the culture war narratives that drive algorithm engagement. It is not woke. It is not a reaction against woke.…...
The original 1993 Wedding Banquet was a film about a gay man living a double life, caught between the love he had chosen and the family expectations he had not been able to refuse. It was genuinely moving because it took the parents seriously.…...
One of Them Days is genuinely funny. Keke Palmer and SZA have the kind of chemistry that cannot be manufactured by a casting director - the loose, improvisational, finishing-each-other's-sentences energy of a friendship that reads as real even when t…...
Thirty-seven years after the original and fourteen years after the death of Leslie Nielsen, Hollywood finally made another Naked Gun movie. The question was always going to be: could anyone replace Nielsen? The answer is no.…...
Twenty-two years is a long time. Anna Coleman has grown up, built a career as a music producer, raised her teenage daughter Harper alone, and is about to marry a widowed father named Eric Reyes.…...
It's Valentine's Day in Seattle. A serial killer called the Heart Eyes Killer is hunting couples. Jay and Ally are coworkers pulling overtime who have made it professionally painful that they cannot stand each other.…...
Lucy Mason is a matchmaker in New York City. She is good at her job. She has matched nine couples into marriage.…...
Anyone But You is the romantic comedy Hollywood forgot how to make. Not because it is especially brilliant, but because it is the simplest possible version of the thing it is trying to be: a film about two attractive people who are clearly meant for …...
Migration is Illumination doing what Illumination does best: a fast-moving family comedy built around a strong emotional hook, driven by a celebrity voice cast, and produced to a standard of visual polish that justifies the theater experience.…...
Cocaine Bear is the rare case of a movie that fully delivers on its premise without apology or pretension. You came to see a bear on cocaine commit grievous violence against an ensemble of unlucky bystanders.…...
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....
Thor: Ragnarok is the MCU doing something it rarely does well: laughing at itself with genuine wit instead of nervous deflection.…...
Coyote vs. Acme has the most dramatic behind-the-scenes story of any film in 2026, and it hasn't even been released yet....
People We Meet on Vacation is the rom-com BookTok has been waiting for, and it delivers exactly what that audience wants: two impossibly attractive leads with crackling chemistry, beautiful international locations, a will-they-won't-they structure th…...
Yorgos Lanthimos's Bugonia is a skillfully made, darkly funny, and ultimately nihilistic black comedy thriller that wraps a radical anti-capitalist, environmentalist manifesto inside a genre-bending alien conspiracy kidnapping story.…...
Emilie Blichfeldt looked at Cinderella and asked the question nobody wanted answered: what would the ugly stepsister's story actually feel like if you told it honestly? The answer, it turns out, involves tapeworms, butcher knives, and more blood than…...
Richard Linklater's Blue Moon is a witty, melancholic chamber drama that unfolds over a single evening at Sardi's restaurant on March 31, 1943 - the opening night of Oklahoma! At its center is Lorenz Hart, the legendary lyricist behind 'My Funny Vale…...
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is one of those films that dares you to look away and then punishes you for trying.…...
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.…...
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come takes the original's eat-the-rich horror-comedy formula and dials it up to a global conspiracy. Whether that's a feature or a bug depends entirely on how you felt about the first film.…...
This review contains detailed plot analysis and reveals key story elements including the film's ending....
Paddington Bear has become one of the strangest cultural Rorschach tests in modern cinema.…...
Twenty-six years after the original and thirteen years after the widely reviled Scary Movie 5, the Wayans brothers are back. And they're bringing a flamethrower to the culture war....
Inside Out 2 is the movie Disney desperately needed. After a string of underperformers and culture war disasters (Lightyear's same-sex kiss controversy, Strange World's commercial implosion, Elemental's slow start), Pixar went back to basics.…...
Am I Racist? is Matt Walsh doing his best Borat impression, and it works more often than it doesn't....
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.…...
Here's the thing about Mean Girls (2024): it's not the culture war flashpoint that either side wants it to be....
Disney's Cruella is what happens when a studio takes one of its most iconic villains and runs her through the Joker-meets-The-Devil-Wears-Prada sympathy machine.…...
Solo Mio is the movie Kevin James was born to make. Not the one critics expected, and not the one his sitcom fans were waiting for, but the one that proves this guy has real range when he trusts the material....
Turning Red is a technically brilliant, emotionally effective Pixar film that is also one of the studio's most ideologically loaded projects.…...
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 …...
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....
Pluribus is the rarest thing in modern prestige television - a show that genuinely refuses to tell you what to think.…...
Let's get the headline out of the way. Yes, Death of a Unicorn has a political lean. It is an anti-capitalist satire wrapped in a creature feature, and it does not try to hide it. The rich people are cartoonishly evil.…...
Tim Burton made a sequel to Beetlejuice 36 years after the original, and the result is exactly what you'd expect from a director who has been coasting on his own aesthetic for at least a decade: a film that looks like a Tim Burton movie, sounds like …...
Hit Man is the most pleasant surprise of 2024's theatrical calendar. Richard Linklater and Glen Powell teamed up to make a romantic crime comedy that is so relentlessly charming, so well-paced, and so smartly cast that it's easy to overlook the fact …...
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....
Let's be precise about what this film is: a $4 million mockumentary in which Charli XCX - pop music's reigning progressive icon - produces, co-wrote, and stars in a fictional version of her own real life, distributed by A24, the most ideologically co…...
The original Scrubs ran nine seasons across NBC and ABC, and at its best it was something genuinely special: a workplace comedy that balanced absurdist fantasy with real emotional stakes, that portrayed medicine honestly enough to earn respect from a…...
Nobody took their kids to a $1.44 billion feminist manifesto. They bought the pink tickets, grabbed the popcorn, and settled in for what the trailers promised was a breezy, nostalgic romp through a world of plastic perfection.…...
A Minecraft Movie is not a good film. It is not a particularly bad one either. It is a loud, colorful, expensive screensaver with Jack Black yelling his way through two hours and Jason Momoa trying his hardest to make man-child former arcade champion…...
A24 and Apple Original Films team up for Eternity, a high-concept romantic comedy set in the afterlife where newly deceased souls have one week to decide which themed paradise they'll inhabit forever.…...
There's a moment early in Solo Mio where Kevin James, freshly abandoned at the altar in Rome, sits alone at a restaurant table set for two. He stares at Heather's empty chair, then quietly asks the waiter to take it away.…...
For audiences who agree with progressive critique of celebrity, capitalism, complicity: film works. For conservative audiences or those seeking entertainment: film is betrayal dressed in transgression. Woke trap real.…...
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.…...
