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%
Wuthering Heights
Review of Wuthering Heights - See review for full details....
WOKE: 35
TRAD: 26
AUTH: 45%
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%
Mother Mary
Mother Mary is David Lowery's first major engagement with the machinery of celebrity and pop music, and it emerges as a film about power, intimacy, and the cost of being watched.…...
WOKE: 28.4
TRAD: 19.8
AUTH: 71%
California Schemin'
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.…...
WOKE: 3.14
TRAD: 10.89
AUTH: 68%
I Swear
I Swear is one of the most profoundly human and profoundly traditional films in recent cinema. It celebrates family love, personal courage, and the dignity of every human being.…...
WOKE: 1.4
TRAD: 22.1
AUTH: 89%
Risen
A Skeptic Made Witness. Risen Is Unapologetically About What It Claims. - Read the full review for details....
WOKE: 1.8
TRAD: 28.6
AUTH: 91%
The Devil Wears Prada 2
The Devil Wears Prada 2 arrives as Hollywood's latest bid to repackage 2000s female-empowerment comfort food for the post-#MeToo moment.…...
WOKE: 18.9
TRAD: 19.6
AUTH: 51%
Sinners
Ryan Coogler made a vampire movie set in Jim Crow Mississippi and turned it into one of the best films of 2025. That sentence should not work. It does.…...
WOKE: 15.04
TRAD: 29.96
AUTH: 78%
The Drama
Let us be direct about what The Drama is doing and what it costs....
WOKE: 22.68
TRAD: 8.44
AUTH: 27%
Fantasy Life
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....
WOKE: 2.4
TRAD: 16.24
AUTH: 87%
Fallout - Season 2
Fallout Season 2 is competent prestige television that can't quite escape its own contradictions....
WOKE: 9.89
TRAD: 4.9
AUTH: 40%
The Blue Trail
There are films that earn their politics and films that perform them. The Blue Trail earns every frame....
WOKE: 1.35
TRAD: 21.84
AUTH: 88%
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
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.…...
WOKE: 11.2
TRAD: 26.18
AUTH: 70%
A Great Awakening
Take your family. Take your small group. Take the skeptic in your life who thinks faith stories are all saccharine nonsense.…...
WOKE: 0.35
TRAD: 28.7
AUTH: 91%
The Devil Wears Prada 2
Let us start with the premise, because the premise is everything....
WOKE: 12.5
TRAD: 25.38
AUTH: 67%
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%
Exit 8
Let's start with the premise, because the premise is everything....
WOKE: 0.7
TRAD: 31.64
AUTH: 96%
Reminders of Him
This is a tearjerker built around one of the most traditional premises in modern romance fiction: a mother fighting to know her child. It is not a politically complicated film. It is not interested in being provocative.…...
WOKE: 5.6
TRAD: 16.38
AUTH: 72%
Mother Mary
Let's be honest about what Mother Mary is before we pretend it's a mystery....
WOKE: 18.8
TRAD: 7.88
AUTH: 78%
Hard Truths
There is a woman in this film who will make you deeply uncomfortable. That is the point....
WOKE: 3.92
TRAD: 11.82
AUTH: 63%
Michael
Michael Jackson is the most complicated subject a biopic could attempt in 2026. He is the most successful recording artist in American history. He may have sexually abused children.…...
WOKE: 11.88
TRAD: 17.29
AUTH: 82%
Daredevil: Born Again Season 2
Season 2 of Daredevil: Born Again premiered March 24, 2026 on Disney+ and is being released weekly through May 5. What follows is a review based on episodes 1 through 5, which constitute the majority of the season. Spoilers follow....
WOKE: 25.9
TRAD: 14.28
AUTH: 55%
The Pitt: Season 2
The Pitt Season 2 premiered January 8, 2026 on HBO Max. It follows the same format as Season 1: each episode covers roughly one hour of a single fifteen-hour shift at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, nicknamed 'the Pitt.' This season is set on t…...
WOKE: 29.9
TRAD: 9.94
AUTH: 33%
S
Society of the Snow
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....
WOKE: 1.4
TRAD: 31.99
AUTH: N/A
Megalopolis
Here is the thing about Megalopolis that most critics got wrong in both directions: it is not a failure of craft. Francis Ford Coppola knows how to direct. Adam Driver gives a genuinely magnetic performance.…...
WOKE: 20.83
TRAD: 8.98
AUTH: 60%
Cast Away
Cast Away is one of the most stripped-down films Hollywood has ever produced. A FedEx systems analyst named Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) survives a plane crash in the South Pacific and spends four years alone on an uninhabited island.…...
WOKE: 1.75
TRAD: 18.97
AUTH: 88%
Captain Phillips
Captain Phillips is one of the best thrillers of the 2010s and, for VirtueVigil's purposes, one of the more interesting ideological exercises in our database.…...
WOKE: 9.55
TRAD: 15.75
AUTH: 82%
A Man Called Otto
A Man Called Otto is the American remake of the Swedish film A Man Called Ove, itself adapted from Fredrik Backman's bestselling novel.…...
WOKE: 5.5
TRAD: 14
AUTH: 78%
Brave the Dark
This is the kind of film that almost doesn't get made anymore....
WOKE: 1.35
TRAD: 26.18
AUTH: 91%
The Lion King
The Lion King is Disney's masterpiece and one of the most traditional films ever made by a major studio.…...
WOKE: 1.05
TRAD: 24.85
AUTH: 95%
Schindler's List
There are films that are good. There are films that are great. And then there are films that feel morally necessary, films that exist not just to entertain or to provoke but to bear witness. Schindler's List is in the third category.…...
WOKE: 4.9
TRAD: 22.82
AUTH: 97%
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%
Lincoln
Lincoln is a film that makes arguments about political leadership and moral conviction that no single ideological faction can fully claim. It is a great film.…...
WOKE: 9.24
TRAD: 15.89
AUTH: 90%
Bridge of Spies
Bridge of Spies is the kind of film that does not get made very often, not because it is difficult or dark, but because it requires a belief in something unfashionable: that a man who does his duty with integrity, even when everyone around him is tel…...
WOKE: 2.1
TRAD: 19.32
AUTH: 93%
Big Daddy
Big Daddy is the film that revealed what Adam Sandler was actually capable of when someone gave him a story with real emotional stakes.…...
WOKE: 5.5
TRAD: 17.85
AUTH: 87%
Click
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....
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 19.95
AUTH: 90%
Moonrise Kingdom
Moonrise Kingdom is Wes Anderson's most sincere film, and sincerity is the quality he is most often accused of lacking.…...
WOKE: 5.88
TRAD: 7.84
AUTH: 87%
The Royal Tenenbaums
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....
WOKE: 7
TRAD: 9.1
AUTH: 86%
The Greatest Showman
The Greatest Showman is critic-proof. It has been critic-proof since it opened Christmas 2017 to 55% on Rotten Tomatoes and then proceeded to play in theaters for months, drive one of the most commercially successful soundtracks of the decade, and be…...
WOKE: 7.28
TRAD: 20.58
AUTH: 89%
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%
The Iron Claw
The Iron Claw is a haunting film about the Von Erich wrestling dynasty and the way family legacy and cultural values can become weapons.…...
WOKE: 9.2
TRAD: 11.1
AUTH: 83%
Hoosiers
If you want to explain to someone what a traditional sports film looks like, you show them Hoosiers. That's it. Discussion over....
WOKE: 2.75
TRAD: 34.51
AUTH: 97%
Miracle
Miracle has the easiest setup in sports film history. You already know the ending. The 1980 US Olympic hockey team beating the Soviet Union is one of the most famous moments in American sports, in American history. The miracle is not a spoiler.…...
WOKE: 1.4
TRAD: 37.38
AUTH: 98%
Inglourious Basterds
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.…...
WOKE: 9.35
TRAD: 16.5
AUTH: 72%
Fight Club
Fight Club is one of American cinema's most complicated films to score on VirtueVigil's scale, because it contains genuine traditional insight embedded in a deeply anti-traditional ideological framework.…...
WOKE: 17.34
TRAD: 9.94
AUTH: 54%
Black Swan
Black Swan is a brilliant film about a woman who destroys herself to achieve perfection. Whether you find that portrait beautiful or disturbing probably tells you more about your relationship to ambition than it does about Aronofsky's politics....
WOKE: 8.88
TRAD: 7.28
AUTH: 75%
Rocky
Rocky is 50 years old and it still works. That's not a small thing. Most films that win Best Picture feel like artifacts within a decade. Rocky feels like it was made last year. The reason is simple: it's about something real....
WOKE: 1.4
TRAD: 29.54
AUTH: 97%
Remember the Titans
Remember the Titans scores traditional lean, and if that surprises you, let me explain the math....
WOKE: 9.14
TRAD: 16.24
AUTH: 72%
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%
Landman
Taylor Sheridan has built an empire making television for the people coastal media forgot. Landman is that empire's newest flagship, and it's the most specifically industrial show he's ever made....
WOKE: 5.6
TRAD: 20.3
AUTH: 82%
Sing Sing
Here is my honest admission before this review begins: Sing Sing is a film made by progressive filmmakers, distributed by A24, featuring a Black actor nominated for an Oscar, about a rehabilitation program in a maximum-security prison.…...
WOKE: 8.84
TRAD: 16.24
AUTH: 71%
Soul
Soul is the rare animated film that asks a genuinely adult question and answers it with honesty rather than sentiment. The question: is having a passion you dedicate your life to the same thing as having a reason to live? Pixar's answer is no.…...
WOKE: 3.2
TRAD: 21.14
AUTH: 96%
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino making a movie about men who are being left behind. Not metaphorically. Literally.…...
WOKE: 6.8
TRAD: 19.25
AUTH: 90%
Knives Out
Let's start with what Knives Out is, because it is genuinely very good at what it does.…...
WOKE: 13.44
TRAD: 8.05
AUTH: 89%
Ford v Ferrari
Ford v Ferrari is the kind of film that Hollywood used to make regularly and almost never makes anymore.…...
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 22.05
AUTH: 93%
Air
Air is the kind of movie that shouldn't work and completely does. A 112-minute film about a sneaker deal. No action, no explosions, no love story to speak of. Just a group of men in bad 1980s clothes arguing about basketball shoes in conference rooms.…...
WOKE: 2.4
TRAD: 15.2
AUTH: 92%
The Boy and the Heron
There are filmmakers, and then there is Hayao Miyazaki. The Boy and the Heron is his final film, if we choose to believe that this time, and it is a work of art in the fullest sense: personal, symbolic, emotionally demanding, and visually unlike anyt…...
WOKE: 3.6
TRAD: 14.7
AUTH: 90%
The White Lotus: Season 3
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 …...
WOKE: 19.5
TRAD: 12.8
AUTH: 78%
Bridgerton: Season 4
Bridgerton Season 4 is a Cinderella story set in a version of Regency England that has no memory of actual Regency England.…...
WOKE: 16.2
TRAD: 10
AUTH: 74%
Yellowstone
Yellowstone is the most culturally significant conservative television show of the 21st century.…...
WOKE: 8.2
TRAD: 23.38
AUTH: 74%
Shogun
Shogun is the best television event of 2024 and one of the finest historical dramas ever made. That is not hyperbole.…...
WOKE: 5.88
TRAD: 24.64
AUTH: 81%
House of the Dragon
House of the Dragon is Game of Thrones's best legacy: a prequel that proves the world Martin built is deep enough to sustain great television without the Stark family at its center. It is also, from a VirtueVigil perspective, genuinely complicated.…...
WOKE: 12.92
TRAD: 14.54
AUTH: 58%
The Apprentice
There is something fascinating about The Apprentice, and it is not what its makers intended....
WOKE: 21
TRAD: 6.65
AUTH: 25%
Queer
Daniel Craig gives the best performance of his career in a film that probably should not work as well as it does....
WOKE: 17.5
TRAD: 4.2
AUTH: 20%
Forrest Gump
Here's the thing about Forrest Gump that critics have spent thirty years getting wrong: they treat its sentimentality as a flaw.…...
WOKE: 3
TRAD: 17.08
AUTH: 96%
The Notebook
The professional critics never liked The Notebook. 53% on Rotten Tomatoes, 53 on Metacritic. 'Shameless manipulation,' one reviewer called it. 'A tearjerker with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.' The audience score is 86%.…...
WOKE: 3.4
TRAD: 17.14
AUTH: 93%
Saving Private Ryan
The first twenty-five minutes of Saving Private Ryan are among the most important minutes in the history of American cinema. Not because they are the most technically impressive war footage ever shot, though they are that.…...
WOKE: 2.5
TRAD: 30.8
AUTH: 96%
Good Will Hunting
Will Hunting is twenty years old, smarter than everyone in any room he has ever walked into, and entirely alone. He works as a janitor at MIT.…...
WOKE: 6.8
TRAD: 18.2
AUTH: 82%
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 Shawshank Redemption
The Shawshank Redemption failed at the box office in 1994. It earned $16 million against a $25 million budget, received seven Academy Award nominations, and lost all seven. Then it went to home video. Then cable. Then streaming.…...
WOKE: 6.3
TRAD: 15.4
AUTH: 88%
Hacksaw Ridge
Hacksaw Ridge is one of the most purely traditional films Hollywood has produced in the last twenty years. It is a story about faith, and it takes that faith seriously in a way that most war films don't dare.…...
WOKE: 2.4
TRAD: 21.35
AUTH: 88%
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%
Babylon
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....
WOKE: 10.5
TRAD: 14.9
AUTH: 68%
Till
Till is not a film about Emmett Till. It is a film about Mamie Till, and that distinction is what elevates it above the civil rights drama genre and into something genuinely moving....
WOKE: 10.29
TRAD: 17.99
AUTH: 78%
Father Stu
Mark Wahlberg paid for this film himself. Sony looked at the premise, a Catholic boxing biopic about a man who embraces progressive muscle disease as participation in Christ's suffering, and declined to fund it.…...
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 21.84
AUTH: 95%
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%
The Passion of the Christ
Mel Gibson did not make a movie. He made an act of witness....
WOKE: 0
TRAD: 45.29
AUTH: 98%
The Holdovers
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.…...
WOKE: 6.5
TRAD: 14.35
AUTH: 72%
Past Lives
Celine Song's Past Lives is a film about what you give up when you choose to become someone. It is quiet, devastating, and almost defiantly apolitical in a cultural moment when apolitical means brave....
WOKE: 5.6
TRAD: 7.35
AUTH: 58%
American Fiction
American Fiction is the most interesting progressive film of the 2023 season because it is willing to bite the hand it feeds.…...
WOKE: 13.3
TRAD: 5.25
AUTH: 38%
Bob Marley: One Love
Bob Marley: One Love earned $150 million worldwide against mixed critical reviews, which tells you something important: the audience for a reverential Bob Marley biopic that centers his faith and his music is enormous.…...
WOKE: 11
TRAD: 16
AUTH: 71%
Nonnas
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.…...
WOKE: 1
TRAD: 17
AUTH: 88%
The King of Kings
This is the film our audience has been waiting for....
WOKE: 0
TRAD: 19.6
AUTH: 96%
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%
The Life of Chuck
The universe is ending. Nobody knows why. Billboards are appearing all over the world with the face of a man named Charles Krantz, an accountant, with the words: '39 Great Years.…...
WOKE: 3.5
TRAD: 15.75
AUTH: 82%
Materialists
Lucy Mason is a matchmaker in New York City. She is good at her job. She has matched nine couples into marriage.…...
WOKE: 9.18
TRAD: 13.7
AUTH: 60%
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%
Interstellar
Interstellar is Christopher Nolan's most emotionally direct film. Where Inception hides its heart inside puzzle boxes, Interstellar puts its heart on the table in the first ten minutes and then spends three hours testing it.…...
WOKE: 7.72
TRAD: 23.16
AUTH: 88%
Cabrini
Cabrini tells a story that mainstream Hollywood would never make, featuring a protagonist that contemporary progressive culture cannot quite process: a 19th-century Catholic nun who built hospitals, orphanages, and schools through sheer force of pray…...
WOKE: 3
TRAD: 15
AUTH: 83%
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%
Titanic
Titanic holds a strange place in film history. It won eleven Academy Awards and $2.2 billion at the global box office in 1997. It made Leonardo DiCaprio a global superstar and Kate Winslet one of the defining actresses of her generation.…...
WOKE: 18.54
TRAD: 13.65
AUTH: N/A
Creed III
Creed III is the best pure sports drama since Rocky II and the most traditional-values-aligned major film of 2023. It is also Michael B.…...
WOKE: 5.1
TRAD: 22.4
AUTH: 88%
I'm Still Here
Walter Salles has made the most restrained political film of the decade. I'm Still Here tells the true story of Eunice Paiva, whose husband Rubens, a former left-wing congressman, was taken from their Rio de Janeiro home by agents of Brazil's militar…...
WOKE: 10.54
TRAD: 17.24
AUTH: N/A
Nickel Boys
RaMell Ross has made a film that does not want you to watch it. It wants you to live inside it....
WOKE: 21.84
TRAD: 8.74
AUTH: N/A
Song Sung Blue
Craig Brewer found a true story so improbable, so heartbreaking, and so genuinely joyful that all he had to do was get out of its way. Mostly, he does....
WOKE: 3.6
TRAD: 22.54
AUTH: N/A
Hamnet
Chloe Zhao's Hamnet is a beautifully crafted, emotionally devastating period drama that tells the story of Shakespeare's family through the eyes of his wife Agnes.…...
WOKE: 8.63
TRAD: 18.41
AUTH: 10%
Sentimental Value
Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value is that rarest of Oscar contenders - a deeply personal, genuinely humanistic film that resists easy ideological categorization.…...
WOKE: 16.64
TRAD: 23.59
AUTH: 87%
Blue Moon
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…...
WOKE: 11.54
TRAD: 14.07
AUTH: 10%
It Was Just an Accident
Jafar Panahi's It Was Just an Accident is a taut, morally complex thriller about former Iranian political prisoners who kidnap a man they believe tortured them in jail.…...
WOKE: 16.59
TRAD: 13.02
AUTH: 92%
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
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.…...
WOKE: 15.14
TRAD: 11.42
AUTH: 75%
The Room Next Door
Pedro Almodovar's first English-language film is a meditation on death, friendship, and the right to choose when and how one's life ends.…...
WOKE: 16
TRAD: 12
AUTH: 65%
Better Man
Better Man is the most creatively audacious biopic in recent memory and also one of the most commercially disastrous.…...
WOKE: 10
TRAD: 12
AUTH: 70%
The Optimist: The Bravest Act Is Truth
The Optimist is the kind of film that should not need a culture war review. It is a small, independent drama about a real Holocaust survivor named Herbert Heller who kept his past secret for 60 years and the friendship that finally gave him the coura…...
WOKE: 3.01
TRAD: 24.82
AUTH: 78%
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%
The Secret Agent
This review contains detailed plot analysis and reveals key story elements including the film's ending....
WOKE: 17
TRAD: 18
AUTH: 70%
Train Dreams
Train Dreams is the kind of film that doesn't get made very often anymore. It's quiet. It's patient. It trusts its audience to sit with silence and find meaning in the accumulation of small moments across a long, hard, beautiful life....
WOKE: 5.3
TRAD: 20.6
AUTH: 62%
Frankenstein
Guillermo del Toro has been trying to make this movie since the mid-1990s. That is not a figure of speech. He first announced Frankenstein as a project at Universal in 2008. Before that, he had been sketching designs and taking script notes for years.…...
WOKE: 11.66
TRAD: 20.86
AUTH: 68%
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%
We Live in Time
We Live in Time is a weepie. An exceptionally well-made one, built on two of the finest performances in recent romantic cinema. It will make you cry. Whether it should is a more interesting question....
WOKE: 8.8
TRAD: 13.44
AUTH: 60%
Babygirl
Babygirl is a well-made, beautifully shot, expertly performed film built around an argument most traditional viewers will find deeply objectionable. It is not a film to dismiss. It is a film to understand before dismissing....
WOKE: 19.22
TRAD: 4.4
AUTH: 35%
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%
Joker: Folie a Deux
Joker: Folie a Deux is a $200 million act of cinematic self-immolation. Todd Phillips took one of the most commercially successful and culturally resonant character studies of the 2010s and produced a sequel that exists primarily to punish its predec…...
WOKE: 24.5
TRAD: 22.13
AUTH: 52%
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%
It Ends with Us
It Ends with Us arrives as two films at war with each other, and the battle behind the camera turned out to be far more interesting than what ended up on screen....
WOKE: 12.18
TRAD: 17.6
AUTH: 62%
The Lion King
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.…...
WOKE: 2.7
TRAD: 25.34
AUTH: 82%
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%
Solo Mio
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....
WOKE: 1
TRAD: 21.88
AUTH: 75%
Is Wuthering Heights (2026) Woke? | VirtueVigil Review
Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights is a bold, frequently beautiful, and ultimately frustrating adaptation of Emily Bronte's novel.…...
WOKE: 20
TRAD: 13.88
AUTH: 38%
Black Bag
Black Bag is the kind of adult thriller Hollywood forgot how to make. Steven Soderbergh directs a 94-minute spy puzzle that treats its audience like grown-ups, trusts its actors to carry the material, and never once stops to explain itself for the ch…...
WOKE: 5.94
TRAD: 18.75
AUTH: 74%
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%
Napoleon
Ridley Scott's Napoleon is a film at war with itself. The battle sequences are extraordinary. The portrait of Napoleon the man is deliberately, sometimes frustratingly, small.…...
WOKE: 10.18
TRAD: 11.28
AUTH: 48%
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%
Is Pluribus Woke? | VirtueVigil Review
Pluribus is the rarest thing in modern prestige television - a show that genuinely refuses to tell you what to think.…...
WOKE: 15.6
TRAD: 27.51
AUTH: 55%
A Complete Unknown (2024)
James Mangold made a Bob Dylan biopic that is secretly a film about the dangers of ideological conformity. That might sound like a stretch for a movie about a folk singer in Greenwich Village, but hear it out.…...
WOKE: 14
TRAD: 16
AUTH: 53%
Melania
A spoiler: Melania is not a documentary in any traditional journalistic sense. Melania Trump said this herself during the film's promotion, describing it as 'a created experience' and 'purposeful storytelling' rather than a documentary.…...
WOKE: 0
TRAD: 8
AUTH: 82%
Marty Supreme
A spoiler warning is necessary here: Marty Supreme is not the movie its marketing suggests it is. If you are expecting a conventional sports underdog triumph, a Rocky for ping pong, you will be blindsided by what Josh Safdie has actually made.…...
WOKE: 4
TRAD: 7
AUTH: 63%
Wuthering Heights (2026)
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights survived 179 years, multiple adaptations, and the entire twentieth century with its reputation intact.…...
WOKE: 36
TRAD: 26
AUTH: 48%
The Brutalist
Brady Corbet's The Brutalist is a serious, demanding, three-and-a-half-hour epic that positions itself as a meditation on the American Dream, artistic integrity, and the immigrant experience.…...
WOKE: 9
TRAD: 6
AUTH: 58%
A Real Pain
Jesse Eisenberg's A Real Pain is a small, honest, and unexpectedly moving film about two cousins who travel to Poland to honor their recently deceased grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. It is 90 minutes long. It does not waste a minute.…...
WOKE: 5
TRAD: 7
AUTH: 62%
Challengers
Challengers is a technically brilliant film and a moral void. Luca Guadagnino is one of the most gifted visual stylists working today, and he brings his full arsenal to this story of a love triangle set across thirteen years of competitive tennis.…...
WOKE: 7
TRAD: 3
AUTH: 32%
Kinds of Kindness
Kinds of Kindness is a nearly three-hour endurance test from Yorgos Lanthimos that systematically dismantles any structure that might give human life meaning.…...
WOKE: 9
TRAD: 2
AUTH: 22%
Outlander - Season 8
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: 4
TRAD: 6
AUTH: 68%
Youngblood (2026)
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: 48
TRAD: 52
AUTH: 62%
Oppenheimer
There's a moment roughly two-thirds through Oppenheimer when J. Robert Oppenheimer - fresh from watching the bomb he built vaporize 80,000 people - stands before a cheering crowd in Los Alamos and tries to look triumphant.…...
WOKE: 30
TRAD: 26
AUTH: 46%
Anora
Hollywood handed its highest honor - Best Picture at the 97th Academy Awards - to a film whose protagonist is a sex worker and exotic dancer, whose marriage to a Russian oligarch's failson disintegrates in real time, and whose director dedicated his …...
WOKE: 36
TRAD: 10
AUTH: 50%
Killers of the Flower Moon
The most disorienting thing about Killers of the Flower Moon is not its three-and-a-half-hour runtime. It is not the murders - dozens of them, deliberate and methodical.…...
WOKE: 19
TRAD: 15
AUTH: 75%
Tár
Here is a film that has been celebrated by progressive film critics as a sober reckoning with #MeToo, praised by conservative commentators as the most explicitly anti-woke monologue delivered in a mainstream movie since anyone can remember, dismissed…...
WOKE: 7
TRAD: 28
AUTH: 50%
The Bear
Season 1 of The Bear is genuinely great television. Carmen Berzatto returns to Chicago after his brother Michael's suicide, inheriting a failing Italian beef shop, a mountain of debt, and a staff that ranges from hostile to barely functional.…...
WOKE: 5
TRAD: 9
AUTH: 82%
Blue Moon
Richard Linklater's Blue Moon is a 100-minute hangout movie set in one restaurant on one night, and it works because Ethan Hawke refuses to let you look away....
WOKE: 13.25
TRAD: 18
AUTH: 90%
I Can Only Imagine 2
The original "I Can Only Imagine" was a genuine phenomenon in faith-based cinema, pulling in $83 million on a shoestring budget and proving that audiences hungry for sincere Christian storytelling would show up in droves.…...
WOKE: 0
TRAD: 8
AUTH: 95%
Blitz
Steve McQueen's "Blitz" arrives dressed in the clothing of a wartime survival story, the kind of tale that should celebrate British resilience, familial devotion, and the quiet heroism of ordinary people under extraordinary duress.…...
WOKE: 11
TRAD: 7
AUTH: 65%
Nightbitch
Nightbitch opens as a character study of maternal exhaustion - a woman losing her identity in the repetitive isolation of full-time parenthood. The performances are grounded. The frustration feels earned.…...
WOKE: 14
TRAD: 0
AUTH: 28%
The Last of Us - Season 2
Season 1 earned enormous trust through grounded storytelling and earned emotional beats. Season 2 leverages that trust to introduce ideological reframing that would not have survived scrutiny if presented upfront.…...
WOKE: 11
TRAD: 3
AUTH: 35%
1923 - Season 2
Continues the Yellowstone universe's commitment to depicting traditional American values - land stewardship, family loyalty, personal sacrifice - without apology. Characters are defined by their choices and virtues, not by demographic categories.…...
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 10
AUTH: 88%
Butterfly Dreams
Director Dee Rees brings formidable craft and genuine humanity to Butterfly Dreams, a coming-of-age drama about a sixteen-year-old trans girl named Maya who leaves her conservative religious hometown in rural Kentucky to live with her estranged grand…...
WOKE: 18.4
TRAD: 11.2
AUTH: 85%