Severance (Season 1)
Severance Season 1 is the best new television series of 2022 and one of the most thematically ambitious shows of the streaming era.…...
WOKE: 10.82
TRAD: 12.32
AUTH: 78%
Chernobyl (2019)
Chernobyl is the best thing HBO has ever produced and one of the most morally coherent works of television in the medium's history.…...
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 27.72
AUTH: 93%
12 Angry Men (1957)
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.…...
WOKE: 0
TRAD: 30.59
AUTH: 97%
Little House on the Prairie (2026)
Netflix has done something genuinely surprising with Little House on the Prairie (2026): they made a period drama about pioneer life that respects its source material.…...
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 20.16
AUTH: 84%
Casablanca (1942)
Casablanca is the greatest film Hollywood ever made, not because it set out to be great but because everything that could go right did. The script was written day by day during production. Nobody knew how it would end until the final week of shooting.…...
WOKE: 0.7
TRAD: 23.52
AUTH: 94%
Succession (Season 1)
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.…...
WOKE: 16.9
TRAD: 2.4
AUTH: 42%
The Godfather Part II
The Godfather Part II is not merely the equal of its predecessor. It is, in some respects, a deeper and braver film.…...
WOKE: 1.05
TRAD: 19.18
AUTH: 89%
Young Washington
Young Washington is the most confident film Angel Studios has ever released. Jon Erwin, the director who built a faith-based empire on modest budgets and underserved audiences, has taken on his most ambitious subject: the making of George Washington.…...
WOKE: 0
TRAD: 21.98
AUTH: 99%
House of the Dragon (Season 3)
House of the Dragon Season 3 is the show's most consequential season by a considerable margin.…...
WOKE: 8.33
TRAD: 5.07
AUTH: 80%
A Clockwork Orange
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.…...
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 9.31
AUTH: 80%
Game of Thrones (Season 1)
Game of Thrones Season 1 is one of the most culturally significant television seasons of the twenty-first century, and it is also one of the most traditionally moral.…...
WOKE: 1
TRAD: 20.3
AUTH: 95%
The Shawshank Redemption
The Shawshank Redemption is the most conservative film ever to be voted the greatest movie of all time, and the fact that it holds that title on IMDb despite containing not a single progressive message should tell you something about what audiences a…...
WOKE: 5.18
TRAD: 47.32
AUTH: 95%
The Bear (Season 3)
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.…...
WOKE: 7.28
TRAD: 25.76
AUTH: 80%
The Death of Robin Hood
The Death of Robin Hood is a medieval Christian film about a mass murderer who finds redemption through confession, forgiveness, and sacrificial death. A24 did not make a woke Robin Hood.…...
WOKE: 5.9
TRAD: 34.46
AUTH: 85%
The Bear (Season 2)
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....
WOKE: 4.2
TRAD: 34.86
AUTH: 82%
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%
The Sixth Sense
The Sixth Sense made $672 million in 1999 because it is, at its core, one of the most purely emotional movies ever made in Hollywood. The twist is the mechanism. The love story is the point....
WOKE: 3.4
TRAD: 19.32
AUTH: 85%
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%
United 93
There are films you watch and films you endure. United 93 is one you endure, in the best possible sense: it places you inside the most significant domestic terrorist attack in American history, in real time, with the knowledge of what is coming, and …...
WOKE: 2.45
TRAD: 25.2
AUTH: 91%
The Bear (Season 1)
The Bear is about what it costs to be good at something and what it takes to build something that lasts.…...
WOKE: 5.45
TRAD: 23.52
AUTH: 78%
Leviticus
Leviticus is a competent horror film with a very clear ideological mission: to argue that religious communities opposed to homosexuality are not just wrong, but monstrous....
WOKE: 23.8
TRAD: 4
AUTH: 12%
Girls Like Girls
Girls Like Girls is exactly what it advertises itself to be. That is both its most honest quality and, for VirtueVigil readers, its most important characteristic to understand upfront....
WOKE: 16.84
TRAD: 4.2
AUTH: 20%
The Karate Kid
Forty-two years later, The Karate Kid still works. It works for the same reason it worked in 1984: because it believes in something, and it has the craft to make you believe it too....
WOKE: 1.7
TRAD: 22.4
AUTH: 90%
Rudy
Rudy does not have a twist. It does not have irony. It does not subvert your expectations. It does exactly what it says it is going to do, and it makes you cry anyway. That is not a trick. That is craft....
WOKE: 1
TRAD: 23.1
AUTH: 92%
The Banshees of Inisherin
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....
WOKE: 8.68
TRAD: 16.2
AUTH: 65%
All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front is a technically brilliant film with a clear ideological agenda, and those two things are inseparable from each other....
WOKE: 13.86
TRAD: 8.96
AUTH: 39%
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%
Lucky Strike
The Battle of the Bulge lasted six weeks in the winter of 1944 and 1945, and it killed, wounded, or captured more than 75,000 Americans. It was the worst defeat of the U.S. Army in the European theater. The Germans nearly broke through to Antwerp.…...
WOKE: 1.2
TRAD: 20.58
AUTH: 90%
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%
Zero Day
Zero Day wants to be the definitive post-9/11 political thriller for the current moment: a catastrophic cyberattack on American infrastructure, a former president recalled to lead an investigation, and a Washington ecosystem so corroded by partisan w…...
WOKE: 15.22
TRAD: 14.6
AUTH: 49%
Maria
Maria (2024) is the third film in Pablo Larrain's unofficial biographical trilogy of iconic women who lived under the weight of impossible public expectation. Jackie examined the widow. Spencer examined the princess. Maria examines the diva....
WOKE: 4.9
TRAD: 14.28
AUTH: 74%
Platoon
Platoon won Best Picture in 1986. It is Oliver Stone's Vietnam experience rendered as cinema. And it is, forty years later, still one of the most honest American war films ever made.…...
WOKE: 13.58
TRAD: 18.48
AUTH: 58%
Gone Girl
Gone Girl came out in 2014 and it has not aged. If anything it has gotten more relevant....
WOKE: 6.18
TRAD: 12.18
AUTH: 66%
Fury
Fury is a war film made by someone who actually cares about war. Not the spectacle of it. The weight of it....
WOKE: 4.9
TRAD: 31.08
AUTH: 86%
13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
On September 11, 2012, Islamic militants attacked the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith were killed in the initial attack.…...
WOKE: 1.7
TRAD: 32.34
AUTH: 95%
Squid Game: Season 3
Squid Game Season 3 is the conclusion Hwang Dong-hyuk was always building toward. It is bleak, morally committed, and technically excellent. Whether you find it satisfying depends almost entirely on whether you share his politics....
WOKE: 18.7
TRAD: 12.92
AUTH: 41%
Firebreak
Firebreak takes a premise that could have been a standard missing-child thriller and builds something with more psychological weight. The fire is not just a backdrop.…...
WOKE: 4.8
TRAD: 12.52
AUTH: 72%
Sully
January 15, 2009. Both engines failed over New York City. 155 people on board. Three minutes to decide. Captain Chesley Sullenberger chose the Hudson River, flew the approach by hand, and put the plane down so cleanly that everyone walked off alive....
WOKE: 2.7
TRAD: 18.34
AUTH: 88%
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 Truman Show
The Truman Show (1998) turns 28 this year, and revisiting it now is a genuinely different experience than watching it in 1998.…...
WOKE: 12.8
TRAD: 17.64
AUTH: 101%
The Revenant
The Revenant is one of the most physically demanding cinematic experiences ever put in front of an audience.…...
WOKE: 12.39
TRAD: 21.49
AUTH: 63%
Batman Begins
Every superhero origin story made after Batman Begins owes it a debt it will never fully repay....
WOKE: 5.53
TRAD: 26.04
AUTH: 80%
Full Metal Jacket
This review contains a genuine disagreement with itself, and that is appropriate for a film that has been doing the same thing since 1987....
WOKE: 13.18
TRAD: 10.22
AUTH: 44%
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
This is the film the Hunger Games franchise needed to make and the one it was most afraid to make: a story where the villain wins, the hero leaves, and nobody is redeemed....
WOKE: 13.24
TRAD: 9.14
AUTH: 41%
Cobra Kai
Cobra Kai is the most unexpectedly traditional piece of entertainment American television produced in the 2020s. That is not a qualified statement. It is a simple observation that requires no asterisk and no apology....
WOKE: 3.9
TRAD: 27.02
AUTH: 87%
Stranger Things Season 5
The final season of Stranger Things carries the weight of a cultural event. This is a show that built a genuine audience relationship over nearly a decade across five seasons. The finale has to be worth that investment. It mostly is....
WOKE: 10.66
TRAD: 18.48
AUTH: 63%
A Quiet Place
A Quiet Place is, without question, one of the most pro-family mainstream studio films of the past decade. That's not a political argument. It's a description of what the movie is about....
WOKE: 2.9
TRAD: 22.54
AUTH: 89%
Midsommar
Midsommar is a genuinely good film. That's the most important thing to say before everything else, because it shapes how dangerous it is....
WOKE: 20.58
TRAD: 2.4
AUTH: 10%
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%
We Bury the Dead
The Australian zombie film has developed a distinct subgenre identity in recent years, and We Bury the Dead belongs to the thoughtful end of it. This is not a film about survival.…...
WOKE: 6.44
TRAD: 15.54
AUTH: 71%
A Star Is Born
A Star Is Born is, first and last, a love story. Everything else, the music, the industry commentary, the feminist readings, the addiction narrative, runs through and around that core.…...
WOKE: 7.4
TRAD: 16.24
AUTH: 69%
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%
Elvis
Baz Luhrmann does not make subtle films. That is both the gift and the problem with Elvis.…...
WOKE: 7.88
TRAD: 11.62
AUTH: 70%
The Whale
Brendan Fraser won the Academy Award for Best Actor for this role. He deserved it. That does not make The Whale an easy film to watch, and it does not make it a film that conservative audiences will embrace without reservation.…...
WOKE: 9.14
TRAD: 9.14
AUTH: 72%
Jesus Revolution
The critic consensus on Jesus Revolution is 54 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The audience score is 99 percent. That gap tells you everything you need to know about how professional film critics and ordinary Americans see faith differently....
WOKE: 2.35
TRAD: 21.28
AUTH: 82%
American Underdog
There's a version of Kurt Warner's story that gets made as a gritty prestige drama. Dark photography, ambivalent faith, a marriage under strain, the question hanging over everything about what all this suffering was for.…...
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 26.04
AUTH: 88%
Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot
The story of Possum Trot, Texas, is one of the most extraordinary stories in American religious life in the last thirty years. A small church. A community that most people in most coastal cities couldn't find on a map.…...
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 29.82
AUTH: 90%
The Northman
Robert Eggers spent years trying to make The Northman. He had to secure a $90 million budget, assemble a cast of heavy European actors, shoot in Ireland and Iceland, and convince a studio that audiences would follow a Viking revenge epic told with th…...
WOKE: 4.4
TRAD: 24.64
AUTH: 85%
Power Ballad
John Carney has now made five feature films about musicians. Once. Begin Again. Sing Street. Flora and Son. Power Ballad....
WOKE: 0.7
TRAD: 13.02
AUTH: 95%
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%
Parasite
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.…...
WOKE: 16.52
TRAD: 7.78
AUTH: 32%
Gran Torino
There is a scene near the end of Gran Torino where Walt Kowalski walks up a driveway knowing exactly what is about to happen to him. He has thought it through. He has made his confession. He has put his affairs in order.…...
WOKE: 4.48
TRAD: 21.98
AUTH: 83%
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%
The Last Showgirl
Here is what Pamela Anderson knew when she agreed to play Shelly: nobody was expecting this from her. That gap between expectation and reality is the film's engine....
WOKE: 13.22
TRAD: 10.22
AUTH: 40%
Black Hawk Down
The Battle of Mogadishu took 18 American lives, wounded 73, and lasted 18 hours. Black Hawk Down puts you inside those 18 hours and doesn't let you out until it's done....
WOKE: 2.8
TRAD: 24.78
AUTH: 86%
Midway
The Battle of Midway is one of the most improbable military victories in American history. Four Japanese fleet carriers sunk in a single day.…...
WOKE: 0.7
TRAD: 22.82
AUTH: 84%
The Hurt Locker
The Hurt Locker opens with a quote from Chris Hedges: 'The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.' That quote is the film's thesis, its argument, and its final verdict.…...
WOKE: 12.88
TRAD: 8.96
AUTH: 44%
The White Lotus: Season 3
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....
WOKE: 14.52
TRAD: 5.5
AUTH: 28%
The Pitt
The Pitt is the best network-style medical procedural in years, possibly since ER was at its height. It is not accidental that Noah Wyle, who spent years on ER, is the lead. Creator R. Scott Gemmill also came up through that show's writer's room.…...
WOKE: 3.4
TRAD: 20.58
AUTH: 86%
Priscilla
Sofia Coppola is one of the most consistent directors working in American cinema. Consistent in craft. Consistent in worldview. And in Priscilla, consistent in producing a film that is both genuinely beautiful and ideologically predictable....
WOKE: 11.62
TRAD: 1.5
AUTH: 29%
Maestro
The critics who said Maestro was a vanity project were not entirely wrong. Bradley Cooper spent seven years making a film in which he transforms himself into Leonard Bernstein, wears a prosthetic nose, trains to conduct a real orchestra, and plays op…...
WOKE: 5.18
TRAD: 8.54
AUTH: 62%
The Piano Lesson
August Wilson is underrated in contemporary culture. Not by academics or theater people, who treat him with the respect he deserves.…...
WOKE: 3.92
TRAD: 8.7
AUTH: 65%
Is God Is
Is God Is arrives on May 15 as one of the most explicitly ideological films of the year. Director Aleshea Harris has been clear about what she's making. A Black feminist revenge myth.…...
WOKE: 17.56
TRAD: 7.18
AUTH: 34%
The Wizard of the Kremlin
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.…...
WOKE: 7.88
TRAD: 10.92
AUTH: 55%
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 Shrouds
A man's wife died. He couldn't let her go. So he invented a way to keep watching her....
WOKE: 6.2
TRAD: 11.82
AUTH: 66%
Creed
Ryan Coogler took one of Hollywood's most sacred franchises and made it matter again. That should have been impossible.…...
WOKE: 2.7
TRAD: 24.64
AUTH: 88%
Dunkirk
Christopher Nolan made Dunkirk at the height of his commercial and critical power, coming off Interstellar and The Dark Knight trilogy, with the creative freedom to do whatever he wanted.…...
WOKE: 1.7
TRAD: 24.08
AUTH: 89%
Lone Survivor
Peter Berg made Lone Survivor because Marcus Luttrell asked him to. That origin matters. This is not a Hollywood producer's decision to exploit military sacrifice for box office returns.…...
WOKE: 2.45
TRAD: 25.34
AUTH: 90%
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%
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is Tolkien's worldview made visible, and Tolkien's worldview is explicitly pre-modern, Catholic, and traditional in its moral bones....
WOKE: 1
TRAD: 25.9
AUTH: 93%
Logan
There is a scene near the end of Logan where Laura cradles the dying Wolverine, turns the cross marking his grave sideways to make an X, and cries for the first time in the film.…...
WOKE: 5.8
TRAD: 23.52
AUTH: 80%
It
Stephen King's It is one of the longest novels ever written by a major American author. It is also one of the most thematically traditional.…...
WOKE: 7.4
TRAD: 15.54
AUTH: 68%
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%
The Color Purple
The Color Purple (2023) is a well-made musical adaptation of a story that VirtueVigil readers should understand before purchasing a ticket....
WOKE: 18.34
TRAD: 9.94
AUTH: 35%
The Boys in the Boat
There are very few films that score STRONGLY TRADITIONAL on the VVWS scale and deserve it as completely as The Boys in the Boat....
WOKE: 3.4
TRAD: 24.22
AUTH: 88%
Fly Me to the Moon
Fly Me to the Moon is an entertaining romantic comedy that does more things reasonably well than it does anything brilliantly....
WOKE: 5.78
TRAD: 14.28
AUTH: 71%
The Chosen: Last Supper
There are moments in The Chosen: Last Supper that feel genuinely sacred. That is a word I rarely apply to film.…...
WOKE: 0.85
TRAD: 23.8
AUTH: 95%
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%
Whiplash
Whiplash presents a problem for people who think movies must take sides....
WOKE: 2.4
TRAD: 16.45
AUTH: 85%
La La Land
La La Land is the rare film that earns its reputation without being what its reputation suggests....
WOKE: 9.84
TRAD: 11.62
AUTH: 54%
The Social Network
The Social Network is a brilliantly made film that requires some ideological sorting before you decide what to do with it....
WOKE: 13.02
TRAD: 6.74
AUTH: 34%
1917
1917 is the rare war film that makes you feel, rather than observe, the cost of duty....
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 21.28
AUTH: 91%
Bohemian Rhapsody
Bohemian Rhapsody presents a genuinely complicated case for a site like VirtueVigil....
WOKE: 7.88
TRAD: 13.18
AUTH: 63%
The Death of Robin Hood
A24 has built its brand on dark, challenging films that push back against mainstream genre conventions. For most of that library, 'dark and challenging' means ideologically loaded. The Witch. Hereditary. Midsommar.…...
WOKE: 6.18
TRAD: 12.18
AUTH: 68%
Lorne
Lorne Michaels once said that he didn't create Saturday Night Live to be a political show. He created it to be a comedy show. The politics followed from the talent, and the talent, from 1975 to today, has skewed left....
WOKE: 10.92
TRAD: 6.58
AUTH: 75%
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%
Top Gun
Top Gun is 1986 in a bottle. It is a film that does not apologize for what it is, does not hedge, and does not flinch.…...
WOKE: 1
TRAD: 17
AUTH: 94%
A Different Man
A Different Man is a film about male entitlement, romantic rejection, and violent revenge disguised as an indie character study about self-acceptance and social anxiety.…...
WOKE: 18.52
TRAD: 6.3
AUTH: 51%
The Last Witness
The Last Witness stars Saoirse Ronan as a witness to organized crime who discovers the judicial system is as compromised as the criminals she fears. Directed by Greta Gerwig, written by Aaron Sorkin. Our verdict: WOKE LEAN with a -6 WOKE margin....
WOKE: 18.9
TRAD: 12.4
AUTH: 55%
Pressure
Pressure is Ron Howard's historical submarine drama exploring military decision-making under crisis conditions.…...
WOKE: 7.2
TRAD: 11.8
AUTH: 66%
Remarkably Bright Creatures
Remarkably Bright Creatures follows Tova, an elderly widow who finds unexpected connection and meaning through her work at an aquarium. Sally Field anchors the film with dignity and presence.…...
WOKE: 8.4
TRAD: 9.1
AUTH: 55%
Omaha
Omaha (2026) is a pre-release predicted triumph of quiet American cinema: a stripped-down 84-minute road film about a father who loses his house in the 2008 financial crisis and drives his two young children across the country toward an uncertain fut…...
WOKE: 10.35
TRAD: 30.8
AUTH: 88%
Wuthering Heights
Review of Wuthering Heights - See review for full details....
WOKE: 35
TRAD: 26
AUTH: 45%
The Christophers
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.…...
WOKE: 9.44
TRAD: 14.28
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%
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%
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%
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%