38 reviews in this category.
Dune: Part One is the rare epic blockbuster that takes itself seriously without becoming self-important. Denis Villeneuve spent years fighting to get this film made his way, and the result earns every frame of its 155-minute runtime.…...
Mortal Kombat 2021 delivers exactly what the franchise's fanbase wanted and exactly what its critics expected: hyper-violent martial arts action, faithful adaptations of the game's iconic moves and fatalities, and a story shallow enough not to get in…...
The Old Guard surprised a lot of people when it became one of Netflix's biggest hits of 2020.…...
Here's the honest take on the 2019 Aladdin: it's better than the critics said and not as good as the box office suggests. It grossed a billion dollars worldwide and earned a 57% critic score.…...
Wednesday is the Netflix show that everyone watched. 252 million households in its first 28 days. The most-watched English-language Netflix series at its release. Jenna Ortega as the new Wednesday Addams became a genuine pop-culture moment.…...
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.…...
Sally Hawkins ruins you in Bring Her Back. There is no other honest way to start this review.…...
Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is a better film than the first one, which is high praise given that the first film was not particularly good but grossed $297 million anyway....
Kevin Costner's Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 is an old-fashioned American epic Western of a kind that Hollywood has largely abandoned - sweeping, unhurried, deeply patriotic, and unapologetically romantic about the American frontier.…...
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.…...
The Nun II is the best entry in the Conjuring Universe since the original Conjuring.…...
Doctor Strange is the MCU's most spiritually interesting film, and that is saying something given the franchise's general allergy to anything resembling genuine metaphysics.…...
Denis Villeneuve completes his Dune trilogy with a film that is simultaneously his most visually ambitious and most explicitly ideological.…...
KPop Demon Hunters is the kind of cultural event that forces you to evaluate it on two entirely separate tracks: as a piece of entertainment, and as a vehicle for ideas. On the first track, it is an unqualified triumph.…...
Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! is a film that tells you exactly what it is from the very first frame, and it does not care if you approve. That was true before release, and it is doubly true now that audiences and critics have had their say....
Weapons is the rare horror film that conservatives do not need to apologize for enjoying. In fact, they may find themselves grinning through it....
Angel Studios just proved that faith-based cinema can compete with the big boys, and they did it with a 3,000-year-old story about a shepherd kid with a sling....
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.…...
The DCEU died the way it lived: drowning in its own ambition. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom was supposed to be a triumphant send-off for DC's most commercially successful franchise.…...
Disney's Frozen is both less radical and more subversive than its reputation suggests.…...
Frozen II is the rare Disney sequel that takes bigger ideological swings than the original, and it connects with roughly half of them.…...
Twenty-five years after the original Final Destination, the franchise delivers its best installment. That's not faint praise -- Final Destination (2000) was a genuinely clever horror film, and Bloodlines earns comparison to it.…...
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.…...
Wonka is the rare prequel that earns its existence. Where most origin stories exist to explain away the mystery of beloved characters, Wonka does something different: it deepens the mystery by showing you where the magic came from....
Encanto is that rare modern Disney film that actually earns its emotional payoff. Set in a magical Colombian valley, it tells the story of Mirabel Madrigal, the one family member without a supernatural gift, who must figure out why the family's magic…...
Disney's centennial celebration is a fitting monument to everything wrong with modern Disney. Wish is technically competent and thematically empty - a film that cost nearly $200 million and made audiences feel absolutely nothing....
Let's get the headline out of the way. Yes, Death of a Unicorn has a political lean. It is an anti-capitalist satire wrapped in a creature feature, and it does not try to hide it. The rich people are cartoonishly evil.…...
Tim Burton made a sequel to Beetlejuice 36 years after the original, and the result is exactly what you'd expect from a director who has been coasting on his own aesthetic for at least a decade: a film that looks like a Tim Burton movie, sounds like …...
Companion is a sharper movie than you expect and a more ideologically loaded one than the marketing lets on.…...
Timur Bekmambetov's Mercy arrives with a killer premise and proceeds to do almost nothing interesting with it.…...
Black Mirror returns for its seventh season with six new episodes that collectively demonstrate both why the show has endured and why it has never been fully co-opted by any one ideological tendency.…...
Andor Season 2 is probably the finest piece of television Disney has produced under the Star Wars banner - and it is, without reservation, the most explicitly political. These two facts are related.…...
Dune: Part Two is a cinematic achievement of genuine rarity. A sequel that expands the scale, deepens the craft, and improves on its predecessor at nearly every technical level.…...
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....
Dan Fogelman built his reputation on This Is Us - a show that knew exactly how to make you cry, that understood emotional architecture with almost clinical precision, and that often used that precision in service of specific progressive narratives ab…...
There was a time when Stranger Things felt like a miracle. In the summer of 2016, Netflix dropped this weird little show about a missing kid in small-town Indiana, and it captured something audiences had been starving for.…...
