84 reviews in this category.
Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments is the grandest biblical epic Hollywood ever produced and one of the most culturally significant films in American history.…...
Christine is a movie about a boy and his car, and if that sounds like a joke, the film is smart enough to know it is not.…...
William Wyler's 11-Oscar epic is a film of total moral clarity: a Jewish prince's journey from vengeance to redemption through encounter with Christ. Charlton Heston anchors one of cinema's richest traditional texts.…...
Hope is what happens when a filmmaker who spent 20 years studying spiritual darkness turns his camera toward the light.…...
Practical Magic 2 pulls off something genuinely difficult: a legacy sequel that honors what came before while building something that stands on its own.…...
Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone is one of the few television shows that genuinely deserves the word 'timeless.' Created at the end of the 1950s -- an era of conformity, Cold War anxiety, and the first stirrings of the civil rights movement -- it used…...
The Conjuring is one of the most traditionally conservative horror films ever made by a major studio, and its $319 million global box office on a $20 million budget suggests audiences were hungry for exactly that.…...
The Empire Strikes Back is not merely the best Star Wars film; it is arguably the greatest blockbuster sequel ever made, and it achieves this by rejecting every impulse that drives modern Hollywood storytelling. It makes its heroes lose -- badly.…...
Buddy is the kind of movie that parents will feel in their gut. It takes a cherished artifact of childhood, the brightly colored, relentlessly cheerful children's television show, and peels back the felt skin to reveal something with teeth.…...
To Kill a Mockingbird occupies a singular place in American culture, celebrated by progressives for its anti-racist message and by traditionalists for its portrait of fatherhood, moral courage, and the rule of law.…...
Twilight is one of the most ideologically misunderstood films of the 21st century. It was mocked by cultural conservatives as vampire drivel for teenage girls and condemned by feminists as a regressive fantasy of female submission.…...
Return of the Jedi completes the original Star Wars trilogy with an ending that is both emotionally satisfying and, in ways that are hard to appreciate until you have watched a lot of modern franchise cinema, ethically audacious.…...
It Ends cost $80,000 and was shot largely inside a parked Jeep Cherokee. On paper, that sounds like a student film stretched to feature length.…...
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is not merely a great science fiction film. It is the film that demonstrated, once and for all, that science fiction could be art.…...
Gremlins is not just a creature feature. It is a 1980s time capsule that happens to contain one of the most traditionally structured moral fables in the Amblin catalog.…...
Groundhog Day is the rare comedy that has become a moral touchstone, and for good reason. What looks like a high-concept gimmick is actually a tight, humane parable about redemption through humility and service.…...
It's a Wonderful Life is the most traditional American film ever made, and it accomplishes this without ever feeling like propaganda.…...
The Wizard of Oz is the most beloved film in American history, and it earns that status on every rewatch. Under VVWS methodology, it scores STRONGLY TRADITIONAL by a wide margin, and that scoring is not close.…...
There Will Be Blood is Paul Thomas Anderson's masterpiece and Daniel Day-Lewis's greatest performance, which is saying something in a career that includes My Left Foot and Lincoln.…...
Hadestown: The Musical is a proshot recording of one of the best American musicals of the 21st century, and the film preserves everything that made Anais Mitchell's folk-opera adaptation of Orpheus and Eurydice a Broadway triumph.…...
Apocalypse Now is the greatest war film ever made and one of the most morally serious works of art produced by the American studio system.…...
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the western that killed the clean-cut western. Sergio Leone's 1966 masterpiece closes his Dollars Trilogy with a three-hour epic about greed, survival, and the thin line between a good man and a bad one.…...
The Return of the King is not merely the greatest fantasy film ever made. It is arguably the most traditionally-themed blockbuster in Hollywood history. Adapted from J.R.R.…...
House of the Dragon faces an impossible task: follow Game of Thrones while avoiding the ideological rot that infected its predecessor in later seasons. Against all odds, it mostly succeeds.…...
Apple TV+'s Widow's Bay is the best new show of 2026. It is also, against all expectations for a series about a demonic covenant maintained by a small-town government, surprisingly traditional....
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is one of the most traditionally moral films ever made.…...
House of the Dragon Season 3 is the show's most consequential season by a considerable margin.…...
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.…...
Backrooms is A24's biggest box office success to date, and it earns that crown by delivering a genuinely unsettling horror experience that respects its source material.…...
The first Mortal Kombat (2021) was one of the franchise's best adaptations. Simon McQuoid understood that the game's appeal is not ironic. The tournament is genuinely meaningful within its mythology.…...
The 1976 Omen is one of the great supernatural horror films. Robert Thorn is an American diplomat who discovers his son may be the Antichrist. The film is about a father trying to protect his family from a truth too terrible to accept.…...
Here is what Curry Barker understands that too many horror filmmakers get wrong: the scariest thing isn't a monster. It's what a person does to themselves when they're desperate enough....
Tolkien spent decades building a mythology. Peter Jackson spent a decade turning it into cinema.…...
Here's the question VirtueVigil readers want answered: is Evil Dead Rise just another female-led horror film where the message is that men are useless and women are the only ones capable of defending what matters? Short answer: no.…...
Gothic horror has always understood something that secular literary culture keeps forgetting: the past does not stay buried....
George R.R. Martin's short story 'In the Lost Lands' is not a story about epic battles or sprawling political intrigue.…...
Evil Dead: Burn is the franchise asking the same question it has asked since 1981: what does it take to survive when the people you love try to kill you?...
There are moments in The Chosen: Last Supper that feel genuinely sacred. That is a word I rarely apply to film.…...
300 is not a subtle film. It has never claimed to be. It is 117 minutes of men choosing death over submission, shot in slow motion, set to Tyler Bates' driving metal-and-orchestra score, and delivered with the conviction of a director who genuinely b…...
The first season of Wednesday was a cultural phenomenon by Netflix's own metrics, becoming the second-most watched English-language Netflix series ever.…...
Sequels to successful horror films face a specific structural problem: the first film worked because you did not know what was coming. The second film's audience does.…...
Here is what horror films used to understand and largely forgot: the scariest thing in the world is not what you can see. It is what you almost see. What you hear from the next room.…...
Ishana Night Shyamalan's directorial debut is a better film than its 27% Rotten Tomatoes score suggests and a less complete film than its atmospheric first act promises. The gap between critical reception and audience response (27% critics vs.…...
PRE-RELEASE ANALYSIS: Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey releases July 17, 2026. This review is based on trailers, production information, cast confirmations, and Nolan's documented approach to the material....
Horror has always been one of cinema's most reliable delivery systems for traditional values. At its best, the genre insists that evil is real, that families are worth fighting for, and that some things are worse than death.…...
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.…...
Hereditary opened to $13.5 million and eventually grossed $80 million worldwide on a $10 million budget. It holds a 90% Rotten Tomatoes score and an 87 Metacritic, making it one of the most critically acclaimed horror films of the decade.…...
The Old Guard surprised a lot of people when it became one of Netflix's biggest hits of 2020.…...
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…...
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.…...
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.…...
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.…...
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 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.…...
Weapons is the rare horror film that conservatives do not need to apologize for enjoying. In fact, they may find themselves grinning through it....
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....
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.…...
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.…...
Frozen II is the rare Disney sequel that takes bigger ideological swings than the original, and it connects with roughly half of them.…...
Disney's Frozen is both less radical and more subversive than its reputation suggests.…...
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.…...
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....
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....
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.…...
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…...
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 …...
Timur Bekmambetov's Mercy arrives with a killer premise and proceeds to do almost nothing interesting with it.…...
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.…...
Companion is a sharper movie than you expect and a more ideologically loaded one than the marketing lets on.…...
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.…...
Hollywood has always loved a metaphor. But rarely has the industry deployed one this nakedly, or this aggressively, and then handed it four Oscars.…...
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.…...
