The Green Mile
The Green Mile is the best Christian film Hollywood has made without knowing it made one....
WOKE: 9.44
TRAD: 21.28
AUTH: 69%
American History X
American History X is the most honest film ever made about the appeal of white supremacy, which is also what makes it so difficult to score ideologically. It understands its subject too well to be purely a condemnation.…...
WOKE: 12.04
TRAD: 17.14
AUTH: 59%
Ocean's Eleven
Ocean's Eleven is not a film about anything in particular. That is almost its highest compliment....
WOKE: 6.78
TRAD: 15.18
AUTH: 66%
Drive
Drive is one of the best films made in the last two decades. That's a strong claim. Here's why it holds up....
WOKE: 4
TRAD: 14.49
AUTH: 67%
Extraction
Extraction is a very good action film that got dismissed by critics and embraced by audiences, which is probably the more accurate verdict....
WOKE: 4.8
TRAD: 16.54
AUTH: 74%
Prisoners
Prisoners is Denis Villeneuve's most morally demanding film and one of the best American thrillers of the last twenty years. Coming back to it years later, what strikes you is how seriously it takes its own question....
WOKE: 5
TRAD: 14.14
AUTH: 70%
Carolina Caroline
Carolina Caroline (2026) has a 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes critics score from its limited release. With 17 critics counted as of this writing, that is not a large sample, but the unanimity is notable.…...
WOKE: 5.6
TRAD: 12.88
AUTH: 70%
Juror #2
Clint Eastwood made Juror #2 at 94 years old. Warner Bros. gave it 50 theaters. Critics gave it 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. That tension tells you almost everything you need to know about where Hollywood is and where Eastwood has always been....
WOKE: 5.95
TRAD: 15.54
AUTH: 74%
American Made
Barry Seal is the perfect subject for a certain kind of American movie. A former TWA pilot who got bored, got recruited by the CIA to fly reconnaissance missions over Central America, got further recruited by the Medellin Cartel to fly cocaine into t…...
WOKE: 12.18
TRAD: 5.6
AUTH: 55%
Scarface
Scarface is a great film that is telling you a lie about itself....
WOKE: 18.38
TRAD: 14.28
AUTH: 46%
Tuner
Tuner arrived in theaters on May 22, 2026, and it is quietly one of the best crime thrillers of the year so far.…...
WOKE: 4.1
TRAD: 14.98
AUTH: 99%
The Last Viking
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....
WOKE: 5.92
TRAD: 15.04
AUTH: 100%
Daredevil: Born Again
Daredevil: Born Again earns the name. More than that: it earns the right to exist....
WOKE: 5.8
TRAD: 18.48
AUTH: 76%
Drishyam 3
Fifteen years after Jeethu Joseph introduced the world to Georgekutty, the cable TV operator from Goa who outsmarted an entire police department to protect his family, Drishyam 3 asks a question the previous films deliberately avoided: what does it c…...
WOKE: 5.78
TRAD: 20.58
AUTH: 78%
I Love Boosters
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…...
WOKE: 20.02
TRAD: 1
AUTH: 5%
Reacher - Season 3
Reacher Season 3 does something the third season of almost any television series struggles to do: it deepens without diluting. The premise is unchanged. Jack Reacher wanders into a problem, identifies who is responsible, and makes them regret it.…...
WOKE: 2.7
TRAD: 21.63
AUTH: 89%
Tulsa King - Season 2
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.…...
WOKE: 6.18
TRAD: 22.68
AUTH: 79%
Landman - Season 2
Landman Season 2 picks up where the first season left it: Tommy Norris is still the man between the world that produces energy and the world that consumes it without acknowledging what that production costs.…...
WOKE: 4.62
TRAD: 20.58
AUTH: 82%
The Departed
The Departed is not a comfortable film. It never wants to be. Martin Scorsese spent his career making films about men who choose the wrong path and pay everything for it.…...
WOKE: 6.28
TRAD: 18.48
AUTH: 75%
Dead Man's Wire
The Tony Kiritsis standoff of February 8, 1977 was one of the most extraordinary events in Indianapolis history.…...
WOKE: 14.72
TRAD: 9.04
AUTH: 38%
Sicario
Sicario opens with the discovery of dozens of bodies. An FBI hostage rescue team raids a suburban Arizona house and finds human remains packed into the walls.…...
WOKE: 17.84
TRAD: 15.88
AUTH: 47%
The Accountant
The gap between the critics and the audience on The Accountant tells you most of what you need to know. Critics gave it 52 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences gave it 86 percent.…...
WOKE: 6
TRAD: 22.96
AUTH: 79%
The Silence of the Lambs
The Silence of the Lambs is one of the greatest films ever made. It is also, under the VVWS framework, a traditional film. Those two facts coexist without tension....
WOKE: 6.48
TRAD: 21.42
AUTH: 77%
Se7en
Se7en is the movie that made darkness fashionable in Hollywood for a decade. It is also, under honest VVWS analysis, a traditional film that earns its TRADITIONAL LEAN verdict through genuine ambiguity rather than hidden ideology....
WOKE: 10.82
TRAD: 17.78
AUTH: 62%
Blade Runner 2049
Blade Runner 2049 is the rarest kind of sequel: one that earns its existence by asking questions the original could not have asked, and answering them in ways that deepen rather than diminish what came before....
WOKE: 16.6
TRAD: 16.24
AUTH: 50%
GoodFellas
Let's be direct: GoodFellas is one of the greatest American films ever made. That's not a controversial statement in 2026 and it wasn't controversial in 1990.…...
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 13
AUTH: 76%
The Godfather
The Godfather is not a film about crime. It's a film about family. Specifically, it's about what happens to a family when the values that held it together begin to corrupt, and what is lost when the patriarch who embodied those values passes his auth…...
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 23
AUTH: 91%
Heat
Heat asks a simple question: what does it cost a man to be truly excellent at what he does? The answer, in nearly three hours of Michael Mann's finest filmmaking, is: everything else....
WOKE: 5
TRAD: 16
AUTH: 73%
No Country for Old Men
No Country for Old Men has a conservative soul. You might not know it from the ending....
WOKE: 6.58
TRAD: 11.34
AUTH: 63%
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%
The Stranger
François Ozon's The Stranger is a significant artistic achievement and a deliberate challenge to contemporary sensibility.…...
WOKE: 6.8
TRAD: 3.1
AUTH: 38%
Fuze
Fuze is a crime heist thriller with traditional values at its core. The military and police work to protect public safety. The criminals plan a heist. The good guys and bad guys are defined by their competence, not their identity politics.…...
WOKE: 2.45
TRAD: 11.27
AUTH: 72%
Uncut Gems
Uncut Gems is the most exhausting film on this list. That is not a complaint. The Safdie brothers have made a film designed to induce sustained anxiety in its audience, and they succeed completely.…...
WOKE: 6.23
TRAD: 8.75
AUTH: 72%
Catch Me If You Can
Catch Me If You Can is one of the most purely enjoyable films Spielberg ever made. It is also the most morally complicated entry in his filmography from a traditional perspective.…...
WOKE: 6.3
TRAD: 11.76
AUTH: 88%
Reservoir Dogs
Tarantino's debut is 99 minutes of men in a warehouse figuring out who lied to them, and it is riveting cinema.…...
WOKE: 20.43
TRAD: 16.38
AUTH: 45%
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 Wolf of Wall Street
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.…...
WOKE: 10.14
TRAD: 4.2
AUTH: 70%
Pulp Fiction
Pulp Fiction scores Woke Lean at -6, and I want to explain why that number is actually lower than many people expect....
WOKE: 17.98
TRAD: 10.08
AUTH: 55%
The Order
The Order is about as complicated as VirtueVigil gets, and I want to be honest about that before I score it....
WOKE: 10.14
TRAD: 10.99
AUTH: 86%
Tulsa King
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.…...
WOKE: 4.9
TRAD: 20.44
AUTH: 76%
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%
The Bikeriders
Jeff Nichols's The Bikeriders is a quietly magnificent film about what happens to institutions built on brotherhood when the culture around them changes.…...
WOKE: 5.5
TRAD: 23.1
AUTH: 81%
Joker
Joker made a billion dollars. Critics gave it a 69% on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences gave it an 88%. The FBI and several law enforcement agencies issued security warnings before its release, fearing it would inspire mass violence.…...
WOKE: 13.05
TRAD: 13.6
AUTH: 78%
The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight is not just the best superhero film ever made. It is one of the best crime films ever made, full stop.…...
WOKE: 3.5
TRAD: 19.6
AUTH: N/A
The Batman
Matt Reeves made the rare superhero film where you forget you are watching a superhero film....
WOKE: 8
TRAD: 22.05
AUTH: 43%
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man delivers exactly what its six seasons of television promised: a masculine, violent, morally complex crime drama about a deeply flawed man who comes out of hiding to save his son, fight fascists, and protect his family…...
WOKE: 5
TRAD: 28
AUTH: 82%
Emilia Pérez
Jacques Audiard's Emilia Perez is a film that managed the rare feat of uniting both progressive and conservative critics against it while simultaneously earning 13 Oscar nominations - the most for any non-English-language film in Academy history.…...
WOKE: 28
TRAD: 6
AUTH: 40%
Adolescence
Adolescence is the most important piece of television produced in 2025, and that's not the same thing as saying it's the best....
WOKE: 22.54
TRAD: 14.76
AUTH: 88%
MaXXXine
Ti West's X trilogy ends the way it began - with a woman who refuses to apologize for wanting more.…...
WOKE: 32
TRAD: 14
AUTH: 55%
The Alto Knights
The Alto Knights is a late-career gift from two of the most important figures in American crime cinema.…...
WOKE: 2.1
TRAD: 13.58
AUTH: 75%
Cruella
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.…...
WOKE: 14
TRAD: 12
AUTH: 70%
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%
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%
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%
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%