93 reviews in this category.
Nightcrawler is a film that earns its verdict through honesty rather than balance. It critiques predatory capitalism unsparingly but refuses to use that critique as an excuse to let its protagonist off the moral hook.…...
Brian De Palma's The Untouchables is one of the great crime films of the 1980s, a Prohibition-era gangster drama that pits Treasury agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) against Chicago bootlegging kingpin Al Capone (Robert De Niro) in a battle for the so…...
Primetime walks a tightrope between two competing truths, and it walks it with considerable nerve. On one side is the unmistakable moral good of the predator stings: real men who arrived to sexually assault children, real arrests, real justice.…...
Gangs of New York is a great, flawed, essential American film. It is too long, its central love triangle between DiCaprio, Diaz, and Day-Lewis never quite ignites, and Cameron Diaz is visibly out of her depth in a cast of heavyweights.…...
American Hostage is the kind of project that would have been easy to ruin. Take a true story from 1977 about a small businessman driven to violence by predatory lending, cast Jon Hamm as the square-jawed journalist who saves the day, and it would tak…...
The French Connection is not merely a great film. It is a time capsule from an era before Hollywood decided its job was to lecture the audience.…...
Ryan Murphy has found a formula with Monster that is as reliable as it is predictable: take a notorious American crime, reinterpret the perpetrator as a victim of systemic oppression, and let the audience decide whether they are watching true crime o…...
Neagley arrives with a question baked into its premise: can you spin off a Reacher character into her own show without turning the franchise's traditional masculinity into a problem to be solved? The answer, gratifyingly, is yes....
Only Murders in the Building earns its TRADITIONAL LEAN verdict not by being a conservative show, but by being a show that genuinely respects the things conservatives care about: friendship across generational divides, the wisdom that comes with age,…...
By Any Means is a solid historical crime thriller that uses its 1960s Mississippi setting to tell a story about justice pursued through unconventional means.…...
The Sopranos is the most important television show ever made, and twenty-seven years after it premiered, it remains the standard against which all prestige drama is measured. David Chase's mobster-in-therapy premise could have been a gimmick.…...
Christopher Nolan's Memento is a film that should not work. A story told in reverse chronology about a man who cannot form new memories, hunting his wife's killer using tattoos and Polaroids -- on paper it sounds like a film school exercise.…...
Don Siegel's Dirty Harry did not invent the rogue cop genre; it did something more interesting.…...
Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad is the most morally conservative masterpiece in the history of prestige television, and almost nobody noticed because it was too busy being the best show ever made.…...
Better Call Saul had no right to be this good. The Breaking Bad prequel was greenlit as a cash grab -- take the comic-relief lawyer, give him his own show, print money -- but Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould had something stranger and sadder in mind.…...
True Detective: Night Country arrives with the kind of prestige-TV pedigree that makes criticism feel almost impolite. Nineteen Emmy nominations. Jodie Foster's first major television role. The highest viewership in the anthology's history.…...
The Rivals of Amziah King is a throwback in the best sense: a slow-burn Western built on mentorship, craft, and the slow passing of hard-won skill from one generation to the next.…...
The Equalizer (2014) is a film about a man who knows the right thing to do and does it, at considerable personal cost, with extraordinary precision. That's the whole movie. It sounds simple.…...
Reacher Season 4 is the most unapologetically traditional show on streaming television, and it knows exactly what it is. It does not apologize. It does not equivocate. It does not pause to let a character explain that violence is actually problematic.…...
The Godfather Part II is the greatest sequel ever made and one of the three or four best films in the history of American cinema. It won six Academy Awards including Best Picture, the first sequel ever to do so.…...
Fifty years later, Taxi Driver remains the most uncomfortable film in the American canon. Not because of the violence, which is extreme but not gratuitous.…...
Robert Towne wrote a different ending for Chinatown. In his version, Evelyn shoots her father Noah Cross and escapes with Katherine. Good wins. The detective's efforts mean something. Roman Polanski refused to shoot it....
The Silence of the Lambs is that rare film whose reputation is not inflated by nostalgia.…...
The Usual Suspects endures nearly three decades after its release because it understands something that most twist-ending thrillers forget: the twist is not the point. The point is the story.…...
Motor City arrives as a stripped-down revenge thriller that wears its 1970s grindhouse influences proudly.…...
Elizabeth Meriwether's Elizabeth Meriwether's Furious: Season 1 arrives on Hulu with a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score and a premise that reads like an algorithm trained on the post-MeToo, post-Epstein zeitgeist.…...
Thirty years after its release, the Coen brothers' Fargo remains one of the most purely moral crime films ever made. Set in the snow-blanketed expanses of 1987 Minnesota, it tells the story of car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H.…...
True Detective Season 1 is the best single season of television HBO has ever produced, and the reason has nothing to do with the Yellow King, Carcosa, or the six-minute tracking shot.…...
David Fincher's Seven is a medieval morality play dressed in a detective's trench coat, and it may be the most theologically serious film ever to gross $327 million at the box office.…...
The Wire Season 1 is a masterpiece of television that earns its reputation precisely because it refuses to serve any ideology cheaply.…...
The Sopranos: Season 1 is a masterwork of American television and one of the least ideologically captured prestige dramas ever produced.…...
The Debt Collector is a Thai action thriller that arrives on Netflix with a premise so archetypal it could have been written on a napkin: a dying man with a violent past seeks redemption by protecting the powerless. That is not a criticism.…...
Casino is Martin Scorsese's longest film, his most operatic, and in some ways his most conservative.…...
Splash City is a small, scrappy independent crime drama from the Bay Area that knows exactly what it wants to be. That is rarer than it sounds, and it is worth more than most things a film can be.…...
Lucky is a sleek, confident crime thriller that arrives on Apple TV+ with the kind of pedigree that commands attention: Anya Taylor-Joy as the con artist on the run, Annette Bening as the mob matriarch who wants her dead, and Jonathan Tropper (Banshe…...
Daredevil: Born Again arrives with a question hanging over it: can Disney make something as raw as what Netflix made? The answer, after a creative overhaul that scrapped the original legal-procedural vision in favor of a proper continuation, is a qua…...
Breaking Bad Season 1 is a masterclass in moral storytelling that arrived on AMC in January 2008 and changed television forever.…...
12 Angry Men is 96 minutes of men arguing in one room, with no action, no romance, no special effects, and a cast of twelve actors most modern audiences could not name. It is also one of the greatest films ever made.…...
Blade Runner is the rare film whose reputation has grown with each passing decade.…...
A Clockwork Orange is one of the most misunderstood films in cinema history. At the time of its release, it was condemned as glorifying violence. In reality, it is a deeply conservative philosophical argument disguised as a dystopian thriller.…...
The Green Mile is the best Christian film Hollywood has made without knowing it made one....
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.…...
Ocean's Eleven is not a film about anything in particular. That is almost its highest compliment....
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....
Extraction is a very good action film that got dismissed by critics and embraced by audiences, which is probably the more accurate verdict....
Drive is one of the best films made in the last two decades. That's a strong claim. Here's why it holds up....
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.…...
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....
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…...
Scarface is a great film that is telling you a lie about itself....
Tuner arrived in theaters on May 22, 2026, and it is quietly one of the best crime thrillers of the year so far.…...
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....
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…...
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…...
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.…...
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.…...
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.…...
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.…...
The Tony Kiritsis standoff of February 8, 1977 was one of the most extraordinary events in Indianapolis history.…...
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.…...
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.…...
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....
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....
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…...
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....
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.…...
No Country for Old Men has a conservative soul. You might not know it from the ending....
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....
François Ozon's The Stranger is a significant artistic achievement and a deliberate challenge to contemporary sensibility.…...
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.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Tarantino's debut is 99 minutes of men in a warehouse figuring out who lied to them, and it is riveting cinema.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Pulp Fiction scores Woke Lean at -6, and I want to explain why that number is actually lower than many people expect....
The Order is about as complicated as VirtueVigil gets, and I want to be honest about that before I score it....
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.…...
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.…...
Jeff Nichols's The Bikeriders is a quietly magnificent film about what happens to institutions built on brotherhood when the culture around them changes.…...
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.…...
The Dark Knight is not just the best superhero film ever made. It is one of the best crime films ever made, full stop.…...
Matt Reeves made the rare superhero film where you forget you are watching a superhero film....
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…...
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.…...
Ti West's X trilogy ends the way it began - with a woman who refuses to apologize for wanting more.…...
Adolescence is the most important piece of television produced in 2025, and that's not the same thing as saying it's the best....
The Alto Knights is a late-career gift from two of the most important figures in American crime cinema.…...
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.…...
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.…...
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....
Havoc is the closest thing to a Gareth Evans Raid film in English, and for a certain kind of audience, that is exactly enough....
Den of Thieves 2 does not break any new ground. It does not need to....
