667 reviews in this category.
Pixar's first feature is not just a landmark of computer animation. It is a deeply traditional story about the things that matter most: loyalty, sacrifice, and earning your place in the world....
The Western is the most traditional American film genre, and The Isolate Thief appears to know exactly what that means....
Moana (2026) arrives in theaters with a question hanging over it that no amount of Dwayne Johnson charisma can fully answer: why does this exist? The 2016 animated film earned two Oscar nominations, grossed nearly $700 million worldwide, and remains …...
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.…...
Little Brother is a Netflix comedy that knows exactly what it is doing and does it better than you might expect.…...
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.…...
The Invite is the best-directed film Olivia Wilde has made, a brittle, frequently hilarious dinner-party dramedy that doubles as an autopsy of modern marriage.…...
The Godfather Part II is not merely the equal of its predecessor. It is, in some respects, a deeper and braver film.…...
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.…...
Blade Runner is the rare film whose reputation has grown with each passing decade.…...
The Mandalorian and Grogu is the first Star Wars theatrical film to come from the television wing of the franchise, and the result is a modest, heartfelt adventure that knows exactly what it is: a story about a father and his son.…...
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is one of the most traditionally moral films ever made.…...
Enola Holmes 3 continues the franchise's pivot from charming Victorian detective romp into something heavier and more politically pointed. The film opens in Malta, where Enola and Tewkesbury have arrived for their wedding.…...
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.…...
Scary Movie (2026) is not a good movie in any conventional sense. It is a loud, crude, aggressively stupid 96-minute assault on taste, logic, and the human attention span.…...
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…...
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.…...
The second Harry Potter film is darker, longer, and more confident than the first, and it holds up remarkably well....
The Green Mile is the best Christian film Hollywood has made without knowing it made one....
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....
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.…...
Citizen Vigilante is exactly the kind of film that mainstream critics despise and a specific audience genuinely wants.…...
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 …...
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....
Stop! That! Train! is exactly what it says on the box. A disaster parody featuring drag queens, built for the RuPaul's Drag Race fan base, directed by a filmmaker who has spent his career in that cultural space....
Hungry knows exactly what it is: a survival horror film about a hippo in the Louisiana bayou. It does not pretend to be anything else, and within that frame it delivers a tightly constructed 93 minutes of sustained tension....
Peter Parker has been in every version of Spider-Man's origin story. Uncle Ben dies, Peter learns the lesson, Peter becomes the hero. Spider-Man: Homecoming skips that story entirely. You have already seen it twice.…...
The critical consensus on Venom (2018) is well-established: thirty percent on Rotten Tomatoes, a thirty-five on Metacritic, reviews that use words like 'incoherent' and 'generic.' The audience consensus is different: eighty percent audience score, $8…...
Ant-Man has one of the stranger production histories in the MCU. Edgar Wright developed the screenplay for nearly a decade, left the project weeks before principal photography over creative differences with Marvel, and was replaced by Peyton Reed wit…...
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....
Office Romance is a real romantic comedy. Not a deconstruction of one. Not a parody of one. Not a movie that uses the form to make a point about gender politics. A romantic comedy.…...
The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act is a cultural phenomenon wrapped in a genuine creative achievement. That combination is rare enough to deserve serious analysis, even for an audience that will find real objections in the content....
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....
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....
Ocean's Eleven is not a film about anything in particular. That is almost its highest compliment....
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....
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....
Let me tell you the most surprising thing about Knock at the Cabin: it is a film about gay people that arrives at a verdict more theologically conservative than anything Hollywood has produced in a decade....
Drive is one of the best films made in the last two decades. That's a strong claim. Here's why it holds up....
Extraction is a very good action film that got dismissed by critics and embraced by audiences, which is probably the more accurate verdict....
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....
Star Wars didn't arrive quietly. On May 25, 1977, George Lucas released a film that redefined what movies could be, and nearly fifty years on, it still holds up as one of the most purely traditional pieces of popular entertainment ever made....
The Empire Strikes Back is the rare sequel that improves on everything the original established. It does this not by escalating spectacle but by deepening everything else: character, theme, moral complexity, and emotional cost....
Rogue One is the best Disney-era Star Wars film. It's also the most honest one. It ends with every hero dead, and it earns that ending completely....
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.…...
The Kraken is real. That is the only premise Kraken (2026) needs, and to the film's credit, it commits to that premise without reservation....
Carolina Caroline (2026) has a 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes critics score from its limited release. With 17 critics counted as of this writing, that is not a large sample, but the unanimity is notable.…...
Clint Eastwood made Juror #2 at 94 years old. Warner Bros. gave it 50 theaters. Critics gave it 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. That tension tells you almost everything you need to know about where Hollywood is and where Eastwood has always been....
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....
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.…...
Gone Girl came out in 2014 and it has not aged. If anything it has gotten more relevant....
Disclosure Day is Steven Spielberg's return to science fiction spectacle, but thirty years into his career, he is a different filmmaker than the man who made Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The wonder remains.…...
Alien is 47 years old and it still works. That says something about the quality of its construction....
Fury is a war film made by someone who actually cares about war. Not the spectacle of it. The weight of it....
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.…...
Exterritorial arrived on Netflix in April 2025 with minimal fanfare and quietly became one of the streaming platform's more competent action films of the year. It does not reinvent anything. But it knows what it is, and it executes it cleanly....
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.…...
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....
The original Crow is one of those films that should not work as well as it does. Brandon Lee plays a murdered rock musician who comes back from the dead to kill the people who murdered him and his fiancee, guided by a literal crow.…...
Barry Seal is the perfect subject for a certain kind of American movie. A former TWA pilot who got bored, got recruited by the CIA to fly reconnaissance missions over Central America, got further recruited by the Medellin Cartel to fly cocaine into t…...
Let's get something out of the way first: The Exorcist is not a woke movie. It is the opposite of a woke movie.…...
The Shining is the most debated horror film ever made. Room 237, a documentary about fan interpretations of the film, dedicates ninety minutes to theories about what Kubrick was really doing, including the theory that the film is a confession that he…...
Scarface is a great film that is telling you a lie about itself....
Twenty-five years later, this film still works....
Home Alone is the most financially successful live-action comedy ever made, and most people can tell you exactly why: Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, John Williams, and a script by John Hughes that knows the exact difference between comedy and cruelty....
The opening four minutes of Up contain more emotional truth than most films achieve in their entire runtime. You know the sequence. Carl meets Ellie. They share a dream. They build a life together. They plan to go to Paradise Falls. They don't.…...
Finding Nemo is twenty-three years old. It still works....
WALL-E is one of the most technically and emotionally ambitious animated films ever made. It is also one of the most ideologically complicated films Pixar has produced.…...
The Princess Bride is thirty-nine years old and people still quote it at weddings....
Tuner arrived in theaters on May 22, 2026, and it is quietly one of the best crime thrillers of the year so far.…...
The Last Viking opens with an animated fable that is worth describing in full because it announces the film's intentions more clearly than any plot synopsis could....
The Truman Show (1998) turns 28 this year, and revisiting it now is a genuinely different experience than watching it in 1998.…...
Here's what's remarkable about Captain America: The First Avenger. It came out in 2011, before the MCU became a machine, and it is still the most traditionally American film the franchise has ever produced.…...
Predator is 107 minutes of genre filmmaking executed at an extremely high level. It is also, quietly, a film that has gotten more interesting over the decades as the culture around it has shifted....
Deadpool 2 is a film that works emotionally harder than it has any right to, and that effort is what makes the MIXED verdict appropriate rather than simply WOKE LEAN....
Nobody expected Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl to be good. It was a theme park ride. An amusement park attraction turned into a two-and-a-half-hour blockbuster. The genre had produced very few memorable films.…...
The Revenant is one of the most physically demanding cinematic experiences ever put in front of an audience.…...
Every superhero origin story made after Batman Begins owes it a debt it will never fully repay....
There is a version of this review that starts with the film's feminist credentials and works backward. That version is not this review.…...
This review contains a genuine disagreement with itself, and that is appropriate for a film that has been doing the same thing since 1987....
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....
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....
Twenty-two years after the original Jurassic Park opened in theaters, Universal and Spielberg managed something genuinely difficult: they made a sequel to an iconic film that understood why the original worked and built on it rather than dismantling …...
Midsommar is a genuinely good film. That's the most important thing to say before everything else, because it shapes how dangerous it is....
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…...
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.…...
Twenty-five years after Shrek changed what an animated film could be, the 25th anniversary theatrical re-release gives audiences a chance to measure the original against its cultural legacy.…...
John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum opens exactly where Chapter 2 ended: John Wick is running. He has one hour before excommunicado takes effect, before every assassin in the Continental network has a $14 million bounty and legal license to kill him.…...
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.…...
Ready Player One is a Spielberg film pretending to be a nostalgia delivery mechanism. The pop-culture references, the Iron Giant, the DeLorean, Chucky, Buckaroo Banzai, the Shining, are the surface.…...
Let's start with the scorecard, because it's the clearest thing about The Furious....
Here's what Backrooms is: a door opens in the basement of a furniture showroom. That door should not be there.…...
There is a moment in Man of Steel where Clark Kent, maybe 12 years old, is overwhelmed in school by his newly awakening X-ray vision and super-hearing. The walls dissolve.…...
Batman v Superman begins with the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne, as every Batman story must. But it does not begin at Crime Alley.…...
Four hours. That is what Zack Snyder needed to tell this story properly, and for once in the history of the superhero blockbuster, a studio let a director find out if he was right....
Thirty years ago, Brian De Palma introduced Ethan Hunt in a film that made everyone who saw it lean forward in their seats. Tom Cruise was not playing a superhero. He was playing a man under pressure who refused to break.…...
The Fantastic Four has been one of the most difficult Marvel properties to adapt to film for twenty years.…...
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.…...
Let's start where the film earns its credibility....
There's a scene about forty-five minutes into Ghostbusters where the mayor of New York calls Peter Venkman into his office.…...
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.…...
Baz Luhrmann does not make subtle films. That is both the gift and the problem with Elvis.…...
David Leitch is the co-director of the original John Wick, still the best action film of the 2010s. Bullet Train is not John Wick.…...
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.…...
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....
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.…...
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.…...
The opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark lasts about six minutes and contains no dialogue worth remembering.…...
Prey is the best Predator film since the 1987 original. That's not a low bar at this point.…...
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…...
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....
Boots Riley made Sorry to Bother You in 2018. That film, about a Black telemarketer who discovers his 'white voice' leads him into complicity with something monstrous, was a Marxist nightmare comedy that earned its politics through sheer formal inven…...
John Carney has now made five feature films about musicians. Once. Begin Again. Sing Street. Flora and Son. Power Ballad....
Corporate Retreat is a survival horror film that uses the corporate team-building setting as a pressure cooker for examining moral choice, loyalty, and the true measure of a person under existential threat.…...
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.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Darren Aronofsky makes a noir. That sentence should not work. The man who made mother!, who cast his own mother-goddess metaphor as a victim of ecological capitalism, who spent his career using cinema as a vehicle for progressive political theology, …...
Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the most beloved animated series ever made. That is not opinion. It is measurement. Three seasons, 61 episodes, and a cultural footprint that has only grown in the eighteen years since it concluded.…...
The Tony Kiritsis standoff of February 8, 1977 was one of the most extraordinary events in Indianapolis history.…...
Eddington is the film Ari Aster has been building to since Hereditary. His earlier work destroyed the family as a unit of safety. Midsommar destroyed the romantic relationship. Beau Is Afraid destroyed the male self.…...
Tolkien spent decades building a mythology. Peter Jackson spent a decade turning it into cinema.…...
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....
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....
The Battle of Midway is one of the most improbable military victories in American history. Four Japanese fleet carriers sunk in a single day.…...
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.…...
Fight or Flight is a film that knows exactly what it is and delivers that thing with efficiency and occasional flair.…...
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....
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…...
August Wilson is underrated in contemporary culture. Not by academics or theater people, who treat him with the respect he deserves.…...
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.…...
Heads of State wants to be two things at once: a politically sharp satire and a big dumb action comedy. It's better at the second than the first, which means audiences willing to meet it on its own terms will have a decent time....
The critics were unfair to Fountain of Youth. A 35% on Rotten Tomatoes for a Guy Ritchie adventure film starring John Krasinski and Natalie Portman on a $180 million budget tells you more about critical expectations than it does about the film....
Gothic horror has always understood something that secular literary culture keeps forgetting: the past does not stay buried....
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.…...
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.…...
Ten years into the MCU's run, Captain America: The Winter Soldier still holds up as the franchise's best individual film. It knows what it is: a 1970s political thriller wearing a superhero costume.…...
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.…...
The gap between the critics and the audience on The Accountant tells you most of what you need to know. Critics gave it 52 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences gave it 86 percent.…...
George R.R. Martin's short story 'In the Lost Lands' is not a story about epic battles or sprawling political intrigue.…...
Here's the thing about Rian Johnson: he's good at this....
A man's wife died. He couldn't let her go. So he invented a way to keep watching her....
Here's the premise: George is a shepherd. He reads detective novels to his sheep every night. He reads them good stories. His sheep listen. His sheep understand. His sheep learn how detectives think and solve problems.…...
Ryan Coogler took one of Hollywood's most sacred franchises and made it matter again. That should have been impossible.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Jack Ryan: Ghost War arrives on Prime Video May 20 as something Hollywood has forgotten how to make at consistent quality: a serious American patriotism film.…...
Tom King wrote Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow in 2021 and 2022, and it won Eisner Awards and generated exactly two kinds of response: progressive critics calling it a feminist masterpiece and traditional fans asking why their character had been replace…...
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?...
Terminator 2 is not a film that needs defending. It is one of the most successful action films ever made, technically brilliant, emotionally devastating, and built on a moral framework that is, at its core, about the most traditional value there is: …...
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....
Se7en is the movie that made darkness fashionable in Hollywood for a decade. It is also, under honest VVWS analysis, a traditional film that earns its TRADITIONAL LEAN verdict through genuine ambiguity rather than hidden ideology....
Die Hard is one of the few action films where the traditional values aren't incidental decoration. They are the engine....
Back to the Future is the most quietly conservative film of the 1980s, and Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale probably never thought about it that way....
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....
Extraction 2 does something rare in action sequels: it actually justifies its existence....
Red Notice is comfortable with being exactly what it is: a glossy, star-driven heist comedy with three A-listers in expensive locations doing expensive things. On those terms, it mostly works. The problem is the ideology underneath....
The Gray Man is a frustrating film to assess because it contains the bones of something genuinely good but makes choices that undermine it at critical moments....
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.…...
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.…...
Blade Runner 2049 is the rarest kind of sequel: one that earns its existence by asking questions the original could not have asked, and answering them in ways that deepen rather than diminish what came before....
The Color Purple (2023) is a well-made musical adaptation of a story that VirtueVigil readers should understand before purchasing a ticket....
There are very few films that score STRONGLY TRADITIONAL on the VVWS scale and deserve it as completely as The Boys in the Boat....
Fly Me to the Moon is an entertaining romantic comedy that does more things reasonably well than it does anything brilliantly....
There are moments in The Chosen: Last Supper that feel genuinely sacred. That is a word I rarely apply to film.…...
In the Grey has not released at the time of this review. What we know comes from the trailer, production information, and Guy Ritchie's filmographic track record. That is enough to work with....
The Breadwinner has not released at time of writing. But Nate Bargatze, Wonder Project, and the Mr. Mom premise tell you most of what you need to know....
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.…...
The Godfather is not a film about crime. It's a film about family. Specifically, it's about what happens to a family when the values that held it together begin to corrupt, and what is lost when the patriarch who embodied those values passes his auth…...
Heat asks a simple question: what does it cost a man to be truly excellent at what he does? The answer, in nearly three hours of Michael Mann's finest filmmaking, is: everything else....
Whiplash presents a problem for people who think movies must take sides....
La La Land is the rare film that earns its reputation without being what its reputation suggests....
The Social Network is a brilliantly made film that requires some ideological sorting before you decide what to do with it....
The Last Jedi is a technically accomplished, cinematically confident film that is also one of the most ideologically aggressive studio blockbusters ever made....
1917 is the rare war film that makes you feel, rather than observe, the cost of duty....
Bohemian Rhapsody presents a genuinely complicated case for a site like VirtueVigil....
Twenty-five years is a long time to keep doing anything, let alone keeping the same group of friends together to hurt each other on camera. Jackass: Best and Last is the franchise's farewell, and that framing matters more than it might seem....
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.…...
Illumination is reliable. Not always great, sometimes very good, occasionally exceptional, but reliably delivering what it promises.…...
Three years ago, almost nobody in the West had heard of the Battle of Dhu Qar. If you ask a Saudi, they know it the way Americans know the Alamo. The first time Arabian tribes defeated the Persian Sassanid Empire in open battle.…...
Kiefer Sutherland has been playing certain characters his entire career. The most famous is Jack Bauer, who spent nine seasons demonstrating what a man trained to do impossible things looks like when he has no choice but to do them.…...
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....
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…...
No Country for Old Men has a conservative soul. You might not know it from the ending....
The phone call that made Liam Neeson a different kind of movie star....
Let's be direct about what Get Out is. It is a very effective horror film built on a very specific political argument: white liberals are the primary threat to Black Americans, they disguise their predation behind progressive language, and the approp…...
Mad Max: Fury Road is the best action filmmaking of the past twenty-five years, built on a feminist framework that George Miller imported deliberately and Eve Ensler helped construct on location. These two facts are inseparable.…...
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.…...
Over Your Dead Body opens with a marriage already in free fall. Dan (Jason Segel), a formerly successful advertising creative, has been reduced to directing pop-up ads. His ambitions are dead.…...
Shutter Island grossed $294 million worldwide, making it one of the most successful psychological thrillers ever made. It holds a 82% Rotten Tomatoes score and an 81 Metacritic.…...
Gladiator II is a sprawling, ambitious, violent, and visually magnificent sequel that expands the universe of the original film while asking profound questions about honor, resistance, and the cost of empire.…...
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is a gloriously stupid monster action film that knows exactly what it is and commits fully to the bit. It has no pretense of being serious cinema.…...
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.…...
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....
Interceptor Protocol is a military action thriller starring Charlize Theron as Commander Sarah Cross leading an elite special operations unit to intercept a catastrophic threat. Our verdict: TRADITIONAL with a +11 TRAD margin....
Deadpool 3 teams the Merc with a Mouth with Wolverine in a film that satirizes superhero narratives from every direction. Our verdict: MIXED with a +1 TRAD margin barely favoring traditional values....
Tom Holland's Spider-Man films have maintained something crucial that much contemporary superhero cinema has lost: a genuine moral framework. Peter Parker is not a tortured antihero questioning whether he should use his power.…...
Normal is exactly the kind of film its title ironically promises it is not: a small-town sheriff thriller that starts quiet and escalates into organized crime warfare, with Bob Odenkirk doing what he now does better than almost anyone in Hollywood....
Deep Water is Renny Harlin's return to the shark-thriller genre that made Deep Blue Sea a classic. The film centers on a ship in open water where a shark encounter forces the crew into a desperate survival situation.…...
Pressure is Ron Howard's historical submarine drama exploring military decision-making under crisis conditions.…...
The Mandalorian and Grogu is Jon Favreau's theatrical expansion of the Mandalorian universe, continuing the story of Din Djarin and the Child (Grogu).…...
Toy Story 5 is Andrew Stanton's meditation on childhood, play, and the siege of imagination by algorithmic entertainment.…...
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…...
Review of Wuthering Heights - See review for full details....
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.…...
François Ozon's The Stranger is a significant artistic achievement and a deliberate challenge to contemporary sensibility.…...
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.…...
Twenty-three years after her brother Matthew vanished without explanation on Vancouver Island, documentary filmmaker Tara Nichols (Miranda MacDougall) assembles a team to investigate the cold case using rediscovered 2001 VHS footage and modern found …...
Fuze is a crime heist thriller with traditional values at its core. The military and police work to protect public safety. The criminals plan a heist. The good guys and bad guys are defined by their competence, not their identity politics.…...
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.…...
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.…...
You, Me & Tuscany is a straightforward romantic comedy with no ideological baggage. It celebrates romantic love as transformative, honors family bonds, and shows a woman finding purpose through courage and connection.…...
A Skeptic Made Witness. Risen Is Unapologetically About What It Claims. - Read the full review for details....
The Devil Wears Prada 2 arrives as Hollywood's latest bid to repackage 2000s female-empowerment comfort food for the post-#MeToo moment.…...
George Orwell's Animal Farm is arguably the most powerful conservative text ever written. It is a thesis statement against totalitarianism, collectivism, and the betrayal of revolution by elites.…...
There is a version of Cliffhanger (2026) that nobody would want to see. It features a woman who is better than everyone around her because she is a woman, a villain who represents patriarchal power, and a father who needs to be rescued because compet…...
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.…...
Let us be direct about what The Drama is doing and what it costs....
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....
There are films that earn their politics and films that perform them. The Blue Trail earns every frame....
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.…...
There is a question that has been circulating in every corner of the comedy-fan internet since the Busboys trailer dropped: is it woke?...
Zazie Beetz has spent years being the best thing in movies that did not deserve her. Deadpool 2. Joker. Bullet Train. She arrives, she crackles, she elevates every scene, then the camera cuts away and the film does something lesser with itself.…...
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.…...
Take your family. Take your small group. Take the skeptic in your life who thinks faith stories are all saccharine nonsense.…...
Let us start with the premise, because the premise is everything....
Twenty-nine years is a long time between sequels. Most of those films fail because the audience has grown up and the comedy has not.…...
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…...
Let's start with the premise, because the premise is everything....
Let us be honest about what Pixar made here. Hoppers is a genuine return to form for a studio that had been coasting on nostalgia sequels and misfires for nearly a decade.…...
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.…...
Here is what Stephen Curry apparently remembered about the sports movies that shaped him: the underdog does not win because the system is fixed for him. The underdog wins because he shows up every day, gets better, and earns it.…...
Project Hail Mary opens with a man waking up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is or why he is there. It ends with him choosing to stay, alone, in a distant solar system, because someone else needs him more than Earth 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.…...
Hollywood has been making apology films for a decade. Every American action movie now comes loaded with a second-act speech about institutional corruption, military-industrial complex guilt, or the hero's own problematic violence.…...
There's a store at the Highland Place mall called Free Eden. It sells cupcake-scented candles, charm bracelets, and the kind of overpriced cotton sundress that costs more than your rent. The employees are gorgeous. They have their own slang.…...
They Will Kill You has exactly one thesis and it commits to it with admirable single-mindedness: put Zazie Beetz in a building full of immortal Satanists and watch what happens.…...
The original Ready or Not (2019) was a tight, clever horror-comedy with a clear thesis: old money is a death cult, and the institution of marriage into elite families is a form of entrapment.…...
Let's be honest about what Mother Mary is before we pretend it's a mystery....
Here's something you don't expect to say about a Faces of Death remake: it has something on its mind....
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.…...
Wes Anderson's thirteenth feature is his most purely entertaining film since The Grand Budapest Hotel and his most emotionally direct film since Moonrise Kingdom.…...
Here is what you need to know about The Woman in the Yard before you buy a ticket: this is not a haunted house film. There is no monster. The Woman standing in Ramona's yard is Ramona.…...
Let's be direct about what Blink Twice is doing and whether it succeeds at it....
There is a woman in this film who will make you deeply uncomfortable. That is the point....
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.…...
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.…...
PRE-RELEASE ANALYSIS: Spider-Man: Brand New Day releases July 31, 2026. This review is based on trailers, cast and crew confirmations, and the film's premise as described by Marvel and the production team....
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....
PRE-RELEASE ANALYSIS: Masters of the Universe releases June 5, 2026. This review is based on trailers, production information, cast confirmations, and the franchise's established character values....
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is the sequel to the $1.36 billion juggernaut that proved Nintendo's plumber could carry a Hollywood franchise.…...
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is the sequel to a $1.36 billion phenomenon. It delivers exactly what made the original successful: kinetic fan service, Jack Black's scene-stealing performance, and a clean adventure that never lectures.…...
There is a scene in The Final Reckoning where Ethan Hunt floats 400 feet underwater in a destroyed Russian submarine, completely alone, knowing that surfacing will take four minutes and every intelligence agency on the planet is hunting him.…...
Smile opened to $22 million on a $17 million budget and eventually grossed $217 million worldwide.…...
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 original Bad Guys was a pleasant surprise: a DreamWorks animated film that used French New Wave aesthetics and a genuinely clever premise to deliver one of the more entertaining family films of 2022.…...
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.…...
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.…...
A Man Called Otto is the American remake of the Swedish film A Man Called Ove, itself adapted from Fredrik Backman's bestselling novel.…...
This is the kind of film that almost doesn't get made anymore....
Uncut Gems is the most exhausting film on this list. That is not a complaint. The Safdie brothers have made a film designed to induce sustained anxiety in its audience, and they succeed completely.…...
Deadpool is many things: Marvel's first successful R-rated superhero film, Ryan Reynolds's career resurrection, the movie that proved you didn't have to be family-friendly to print money at the box office ($780 million worldwide on an $58 million bud…...
The Avengers arrived in 2012 as the culmination of a four-year Marvel experiment: could you build a cinematic universe, seed individual characters across separate films, and then bring them together for a shared story without everything collapsing? T…...
The Lion King is Disney's masterpiece and one of the most traditional films ever made by a major studio.…...
The Incredibles is the most explicitly conservative major studio animated film since The Lion King.…...
Fifty years later, Jaws is still the template. Not just for summer blockbusters, which it invented, but for a certain kind of American story: a man comes to a new community, finds it threatened, and risks everything to protect it.…...
E.T. is one of the few films where the word 'masterpiece' is not an overstatement.…...
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.…...
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.…...
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.…...
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…...
Happy Gilmore is thirty years old and it still makes people laugh. That is not nothing. Most comedies from the mid-nineties feel like archaeology.…...
Billy Madison is not a film you defend to people who don't already like it. It operates on a specific frequency: loud, dumb, cheerfully juvenile, and completely unconcerned with whether you think it is smart. That is its whole deal.…...
Big Daddy is the film that revealed what Adam Sandler was actually capable of when someone gave him a story with real emotional stakes.…...
The Wedding Singer is the best Adam Sandler film. Not the funniest. Not the most ambitious. The best, because it is the one where his persona serves a story worth telling....
Grown Ups might be the most explicitly conservative mainstream comedy of its era, and the critics who demolished it on Rotten Tomatoes (10%) probably sensed that without being able to articulate it....
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....
The Grand Budapest Hotel is Wes Anderson's most accessible film and possibly his best, which makes it the ideal entry point for the question conservatives have been circling: is Wes Anderson worth watching?...
Moonrise Kingdom is Wes Anderson's most sincere film, and sincerity is the quality he is most often accused of lacking.…...
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....
Fantastic Mr. Fox is Wes Anderson's most straightforward moral tale and his most entertaining film, which is not a coincidence.…...
There are animated films that earn their reputation and animated films that coast on it. Coco earns every bit of its 97% Rotten Tomatoes score, its two Oscars, and its place in the conversation about the greatest Pixar films ever made.…...
Zootopia is the most technically polished Disney has ever been. It is also one of the most ideologically explicit animated films a major studio has released.…...
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…...
Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc is one of the best anime films in years and also one of the most conservative-unfriendly Pixar-alternative entertainment options of 2025. That tension is the whole point....
Critics destroyed this movie. 31% on Rotten Tomatoes. 'Dopey,' 'formulaic,' 'overstuffed.' The usual verdict when professional critics encounter a movie built entirely for an audience they don't belong to....
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....
Guy Ritchie's The Covenant is one of the most traditionally coded war films of the 2020s, and it got criminally overlooked at the box office. That's worth talking about....
The Creator is a genuinely beautiful film with a genuinely bad politics problem....
Thanksgiving is exactly what it needs to be. That's not as easy as it sounds....
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is a film that understands what made the original games fun. It does not try to be more than it is. It is fast, funny, and focused on the core appeal of Sonic: speed, action, and friendship....
Mufasa: The Lion King is a prequel that has no right to work. How do you make a film about a character who is already legendary? How do you create stakes when the audience knows the ending? Director Barry Jenkins solves this by focusing entirely on t…...
The Iron Claw is a haunting film about the Von Erich wrestling dynasty and the way family legacy and cultural values can become weapons.…...
If you want to explain to someone what a traditional sports film looks like, you show them Hoosiers. That's it. Discussion over....
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.…...
Tarantino's debut is 99 minutes of men in a warehouse figuring out who lied to them, and it is riveting cinema.…...
Kill Bill: Volume 1 is a film that defies easy ideological scoring, which is exactly the kind of challenge VirtueVigil exists to tackle.…...
Django Unchained is the most misread film in Quentin Tarantino's filmography. Critics on the left called it a radical racial fantasy. Critics on the right called it exploitation with a woke message. Spike Lee refused to watch it.…...
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.…...
John Wick is the purest action film of the 21st century. Not because it is the most complex, or the most emotionally ambitious, but because it has total clarity of purpose and executes that purpose with absolute technical excellence.…...
The Avengers (2012) is the film that proved superhero cinema could operate at genuine cultural scale. Six heroes with competing egos, ideologies, and power sets assemble to stop an alien invasion of New York. They fight each other first.…...
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.…...
There is a moment in Wonder Woman where Diana strides into No Man's Land, deflecting bullets with her bracers while Allied soldiers watch in disbelief, and charges toward the German lines alone.…...
The Wolf of Wall Street is a masterpiece about a man you should despise, made in a way that makes it hard to despise him.…...
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....
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....
Remember the Titans scores traditional lean, and if that surprises you, let me explain the math....
Pulp Fiction scores Woke Lean at -6, and I want to explain why that number is actually lower than many people expect....
The first thing you need to know about Rebel Ridge is that it is not about race. It's about property rights....
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.…...
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.…...
No Time to Die is a film at war with itself, and the miracle is that it almost wins....
Blue Beetle is the most politically opinionated DC film since Zack Snyder left the franchise, and it is probably the most fun one since Shazam.…...
Free Guy arrived in August 2021 during a summer of pandemic-delayed blockbusters, and it did something almost no one expected: it worked. Really worked.…...
Ghostbusters: Afterlife is the most traditionally conservative blockbuster of 2021, and I mean that as a sincere compliment.…...
The Matrix Resurrections is a fascinating failure. By which I mean: it fails as a blockbuster sequel, it fails as an action film, it partially fails as a story, and yet it succeeds as a piece of cinema that forces genuine engagement.…...
Space Jam: A New Legacy is a mess. A watchable, occasionally charming, utterly cynical mess. It is the clearest example of a studio film that exists to serve an IP portfolio rather than tell a story, and it did not even bother to hide that fact....
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…...
Wonder Woman 1984 had the hardest job in superhero cinema: follow up one of the genre's most beloved entries while navigating a global pandemic release. It did not pull it off.…...
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.…...
Birds of Prey is an interesting film to analyze from a conservative perspective because it makes no pretense of being anything other than what it is: a feminist action comedy designed to feel like a girls' night out at a punk rock concert.…...
The Old Guard surprised a lot of people when it became one of Netflix's biggest hits of 2020.…...
Tenet is the easiest film on this list to analyze from a conservative perspective: it has essentially no ideology.…...
Spider-Man: Far From Home has one job. It has to be the first movie after Avengers: Endgame, and it has to make you feel okay about moving forward without Tony Stark. That's a brutal assignment. The film mostly pulls it off....
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino making a movie about men who are being left behind. Not metaphorically. Literally.…...
Jordan Peele's Us has a problem that Get Out didn't have: it's trying to do too many things. Get Out was a scalpel. Us is a Swiss Army knife that doesn't quite close back up properly....
Let's start with what Knives Out is, because it is genuinely very good at what it does.…...
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.…...
Ford v Ferrari is the kind of film that Hollywood used to make regularly and almost never makes anymore.…...
Here is something you don't say often about a Disney live-action remake: this one earns it....
Wes Ball's reboot arrives many generations after Caesar's legacy, and it works hard to honor that lineage without being enslaved by it.…...
Let me tell you what nobody expected in December 2022: that an eleventh-year sequel to a DreamWorks spin-off, featuring a talking cat from the Shrek franchise, would turn out to be one of the best animated films in a decade.…...
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.…...
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…...
James Cameron has now made three Avatar films. Each one is technically extraordinary and ideologically predictable. Fire and Ash is both the best-looking film of 2025 and an almost proud repetition of every idea the franchise put on the table in 2009.…...
A Minecraft Movie is an honest film. It is not pretending to be Citizen Kane. It is not sneaking in a gender studies lecture.…...
Here is the thing about Flow: it should not be this good. A Latvian animated film made by one person over five years, using free software, with no dialogue, no human characters, and a $3.5 million budget going up against Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks…...
The Order is about as complicated as VirtueVigil gets, and I want to be honest about that before I score it....
Here's the thing about Paddington 2: it might be the most morally serious film of the last twenty years. It doesn't feel like it. It's brightly colored and funny and stars a CGI bear who gets into scrapes with marmalade.…...
Moana is the Disney princess film that refuses to be about a princess, which is either the most Disney thing imaginable or a quiet act of subversion, depending on your perspective. Moana (Auli'i Cravalho) is the daughter of a Pacific Island chief.…...
Here is the most charitable reading of Toy Story 4 I can offer: it is a technically brilliant film that makes a catastrophic moral choice in its final fifteen minutes....
Return to Silent Hill is an adaptation of Silent Hill 2, which has been called the greatest psychological horror narrative ever made.…...
Together is a body horror film about codependency that takes its central metaphor more literally than any relationship drama has any right to.…...
Clown in a Cornfield is a competently made slasher with a clear political agenda that it conceals until past the midpoint and then delivers with zero ambiguity. If you enjoy slasher genre mechanics, the first half delivers them.…...
There is something fascinating about The Apprentice, and it is not what its makers intended....
September 5 is a film about the birth of something you might love or hate depending on your politics: 24-hour live crisis news coverage.…...
Daniel Craig gives the best performance of his career in a film that probably should not work as well as it does....
This is the review nobody else is writing yet. Avengers: Doomsday does not release until December 18, 2026. The trailers are out. The cast list is longer than a CVS receipt. Robert Downey Jr. is back, not as Tony Stark but as Doctor Doom.…...
Haymitch Abernathy has been one of cinema's great unexplained characters since Woody Harrelson stumbled through the original Hunger Games films as the perpetually drunk, permanently haunted mentor from District 12.…...
Sally Hawkins ruins you in Bring Her Back. There is no other honest way to start this review.…...
Here's the thing about Forrest Gump that critics have spent thirty years getting wrong: they treat its sentimentality as a flaw.…...
The Matrix is the most politically contested movie in VirtueVigil history, not because it is propaganda but because everybody wants to own it....
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%.…...
Maximus is a general. He commands the armies of Rome, wins battles for a dying emperor, and wants nothing more than to go home to his farm in Spain, to his wife, to his son, to the smell of wheat and horses in the morning.…...
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.…...
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.…...
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.…...
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.…...
There is a moment in Jurassic Park that I have never fully recovered from. Alan Grant is sitting in a tree with two children he barely knows, watching a brachiosaurus eat leaves in the moonlight.…...
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.…...
The Patriot is the kind of film Hollywood stopped making around the time it started worrying about how America looked to foreign markets. It is unabashedly pro-American, pro-family, and pro-violent-resistance-to-tyranny.…...
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.…...
Thunderbolts is the best Marvel film in several years, and the asterisk tells you something about what kind of film it wants to be. The studio insists the punctuation mark carries meaning. It does.…...
Black Adam is a movie that has everything it needs to be a great comic book film and makes almost none of it work....
Here is what Rian Johnson is very good at: constructing mechanical puzzles. The Glass Onion mystery , Miles Bron's island, his orbit of enablers, the twist about who Janelle Monáe's character actually is , works as clockwork.…...
Jordan Peele's third film is his most formally ambitious and his most politically restrained, which may be why it polarized audiences in ways his earlier work didn't.…...
Don't Worry Darling is a film with a beautiful surface and a sermon underneath. Olivia Wilde's second feature arrives packaged as a sexy, sun-drenched psychological thriller with Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, and some of the most luscious 1950s produc…...
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....
The Menu is a slick, well-crafted class satire that will make you laugh and make you uneasy, sometimes at the same time. It is also a film whose ideological message is more muddled than its admirers want to admit....
Amsterdam is a film about friendship, decency, and the courage it takes to defend democracy against people with money and no conscience. It is also, unfortunately, a mess....
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....
The pitch is perfect and absurd: what if Santa Claus is actually an immortal Viking warrior named Nicomund the Red who became the familiar Christmas figure after centuries of gift-giving penance, and what if he is forced to fight his way through a ho…...
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.…...
Uncharted spent fourteen years in development hell for a reason. The Naughty Dog game series is critically beloved and commercially enormous specifically because it transcended the video-game-adaptation trap by borrowing from Indiana Jones and creati…...
Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle is the most technically ambitious traditionally animated film since The Lion King, and it earns every frame of the $778.9 million it grossed worldwide....
Tron: Ares cost Disney between $180 and $220 million to make and grossed $142 million worldwide. That is not a small disaster.…...
Art the Clown is back. He is dressed as Santa Claus. And he is going to ruin your Christmas in the most graphically violent way imaginable....
Scream VI moves the franchise from Woodsboro to New York City, trades Sidney Prescott for the Carpenter sisters, and delivers exactly what a Scream sequel is supposed to deliver: a satisfying whodunit structure, escalating kill sequences, meta-commen…...
In the year of Barbie and Oppenheimer, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was the best pure adventure film Hollywood released and the one most people forgot to include in that conversation....
Argylle wants to be the smartest spy film in the room. It ends up being the most exhausting....
Atlas is the kind of movie you watch on a Sunday afternoon with no expectations and find yourself mildly entertained.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Mel Gibson did not make a movie. He made an act of witness....
The Hangover is one of the most technically perfect comedies ever made, and it is also an R-rated film about three grown men behaving abominably in Las Vegas. Both things are true. VirtueVigil reviews the film as it is, not as it should be....
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.…...
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....
American Fiction is the most interesting progressive film of the 2023 season because it is willing to bite the hand it feeds.…...
Everybody knew the Road House remake was going to either be a disaster or a surprise. What nobody expected was that it would land so firmly in entertaining, masculinity-affirming territory while generating almost zero ideological controversy.…...
The thing you need to know going in: Axel F is nostalgia delivery mechanism first and movie second. It knows this. It's comfortable with this. Whether that's satisfying or frustrating depends entirely on what you're bringing to it....
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.…...
Scott Derrickson's The Black Phone 2 is a sequel that earns its existence by asking a genuinely good question: what happens to the kids who survive?...
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.…...
The original 1993 Wedding Banquet was a film about a gay man living a double life, caught between the love he had chosen and the family expectations he had not been able to refuse. It was genuinely moving because it took the parents seriously.…...
Let me say something that will surprise you: Avatar: The Way of Water is a more conservative film than its politics suggest....
M3GAN 2.0 is a film at war with itself. The original M3GAN (2022) worked because Gerard Johnstone understood exactly what he was making: a Blumhouse horror-comedy about an AI doll whose protective programming lacked any ethical guardrails.…...
When Occupy Wall Street's David Graeber, one of the movement's most prominent intellectual voices, publicly called The Dark Knight Rises 'a piece of anti-Occupy propaganda,' he handed Nolan the most accurate review the film ever received.…...
Jason Statham has spent 25 years building a brand around one specific promise: a good man, pushed too far, will do what needs to be done. A Working Man is the purest distillation of that promise he has ever put on screen.…...
This is the film our audience has been waiting for....
One of Them Days is genuinely funny. Keke Palmer and SZA have the kind of chemistry that cannot be manufactured by a casting director - the loose, improvisational, finishing-each-other's-sentences energy of a friendship that reads as real even when t…...
M. Night Shyamalan's Trap is a high-concept thriller built on a genuinely clever premise: a serial killer attends a pop concert with his teenage daughter, only to discover the FBI has surrounded the venue knowing the killer will be there.…...
Jeff Nichols's The Bikeriders is a quietly magnificent film about what happens to institutions built on brotherhood when the culture around them changes.…...
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.…...
Three hundred feet below the North Sea, the umbilical line connecting Chris Lemons to the diving bell snaps. His oxygen lasts approximately five minutes. The surface crew has maybe thirty. What happens next is the reason this film exists....
Thirty-seven years after the original and fourteen years after the death of Leslie Nielsen, Hollywood finally made another Naked Gun movie. The question was always going to be: could anyone replace Nielsen? The answer is no.…...
Twenty-two years is a long time. Anna Coleman has grown up, built a career as a music producer, raised her teenage daughter Harper alone, and is about to marry a widowed father named Eric Reyes.…...
It's Valentine's Day in Seattle. A serial killer called the Heart Eyes Killer is hunting couples. Jay and Ally are coworkers pulling overtime who have made it professionally painful that they cannot stand each other.…...
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.…...
Lucy Mason is a matchmaker in New York City. She is good at her job. She has matched nine couples into marriage.…...
Parker Finn's Smile 2 is a bigger, louder, more technically ambitious horror film than its predecessor. It is also, paradoxically, a more traditionally structured morality tale.…...
M3GAN became a cultural phenomenon in January 2023. The viral dance clip. The meme economy. The gay icon discourse. The TikTok explosion. None of that tells you anything about what the film actually argues....
Everything Everywhere All at Once won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actor and Actress. It earned $77 million on a $14.3 million budget. Critics called it a generational masterpiece.…...
The Equalizer 3 is the rare third entry in an action franchise that improves on what came before. It is also the cleanest, most traditionally grounded film in a franchise that has always skewed traditional.…...
The Nun II is the best entry in the Conjuring Universe since the original Conjuring.…...
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the best animated TMNT film since the 2007 theatrical entry, and one of the most visually distinctive studio animated films in years.…...
Anyone But You is the romantic comedy Hollywood forgot how to make. Not because it is especially brilliant, but because it is the simplest possible version of the thing it is trying to be: a film about two attractive people who are clearly meant for …...
Migration is Illumination doing what Illumination does best: a fast-moving family comedy built around a strong emotional hook, driven by a celebrity voice cast, and produced to a standard of visual polish that justifies the theater experience.…...
Across the Spider-Verse is the most technically ambitious animated film ever made. That is not hyperbole. Director Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K.…...
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is the highest-grossing animated film of 2023 at $1.36 billion worldwide, and it earned that number honestly. It is not a great film by any measure of ambition or craft.…...
Seven films in, Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible franchise remains the gold standard for Hollywood action filmmaking. Dead Reckoning Part One is not just the best entry in the series; it is one of the best action films of the decade.…...
Fast X is exactly what the Fast and Furious franchise has always been: a maximalist action spectacle built around the unironic belief that family is the most powerful force in the universe.…...
Cocaine Bear is the rare case of a movie that fully delivers on its premise without apology or pretension. You came to see a bear on cocaine commit grievous violence against an ensemble of unlucky bystanders.…...
Christopher Nolan spent ten years writing Inception. It shows. This is one of the most structurally ambitious mainstream films ever produced: a heist story operating across five simultaneous dream levels, each with its own physics, each with its own …...
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.…...
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.…...
Kung Fu Panda 4 is the franchise equivalent of a talented athlete playing a slightly lesser sport: the fundamental skills are on display, the performance is creditable, but something of the original intensity has been traded for management comfort....
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…...
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is the best argument against itself: a film that demonstrates exactly what franchise resurrection done right looks like, while also demonstrating the limits of what nostalgia can accomplish on its own....
Thor: Ragnarok is the MCU doing something it rarely does well: laughing at itself with genuine wit instead of nervous deflection.…...
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.…...
Guardians of the Galaxy is one of the most purely enjoyable films the MCU ever produced, and by our scoring system it is also one of the most traditionally coded. The margin is not close.…...
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.…...
Avengers: Infinity War is the best argument that the Marvel Cinematic Universe ever made for its own existence. Ten years of narrative groundwork paid off in a film that is, almost in spite of itself, genuinely tragic. The heroes lose.…...
Captain Marvel is the MCU's most deliberately ideological film, and the filmmakers would not dispute this.…...
Avatar is the highest-grossing film in the history of cinema. It made $2.9 billion in its original 2009 release and over $2.3 billion more in its 2022 re-release. More human beings have paid to watch Avatar than any other movie ever made.…...
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.…...
The Hunger Games arrived in 2012 with a premise that seemed designed to alienate half its potential audience: a female protagonist, a dystopian critique of entertainment culture and government control, and a story where children kill each other as st…...
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is a much better film than its critics want to admit, and a more thoughtful one than its marketing suggests. Director Steven Caple Jr.…...
Pixar's Elemental arrived at the box office to an unexpectedly rocky opening weekend and then quietly became one of the most audience-beloved films of 2023. The critics gave it a middling 74%. The audiences gave it a 95%. That gap is not accidental.…...
Shazam! Fury of the Gods is a film critics abandoned and audiences found charming. The 50% critic score tells you about industry politics and franchise fatigue.…...
The Flash is a film that should not exist, barely does exist, and yet contains some of the best superhero filmmaking of 2023 embedded inside the most troubled production in DC history.…...
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.…...
Iron Man is the movie that started it all. Not just the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though that is the historical fact. It started the era of the franchise superhero film as the dominant mode of big-budget Hollywood storytelling.…...
The Dark Knight is not just the best superhero film ever made. It is one of the best crime films ever made, full stop.…...
Avengers: Endgame is the highest-grossing film of all time (adjusted for inflation).…...
Coyote vs. Acme has the most dramatic behind-the-scenes story of any film in 2026, and it hasn't even been released yet....
People We Meet on Vacation is the rom-com BookTok has been waiting for, and it delivers exactly what that audience wants: two impossibly attractive leads with crackling chemistry, beautiful international locations, a will-they-won't-they structure th…...
Denis Villeneuve completes his Dune trilogy with a film that is simultaneously his most visually ambitious and most explicitly ideological.…...
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…...
RaMell Ross has made a film that does not want you to watch it. It wants you to live inside it....
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....
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.…...
Yorgos Lanthimos's Bugonia is a skillfully made, darkly funny, and ultimately nihilistic black comedy thriller that wraps a radical anti-capitalist, environmentalist manifesto inside a genre-bending alien conspiracy kidnapping story.…...
Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value is that rarest of Oscar contenders - a deeply personal, genuinely humanistic film that resists easy ideological categorization.…...
The Gorge is a high-concept premise executed with genuine craft. Two elite soldiers, one American and one Lithuanian, are posted to guard towers on opposite sides of a remote classified gorge for one year. No contact with each other.…...
Mel Gibson directs his first film in nearly a decade, and the result is exactly what you would expect from a director of his caliber working a contained genre script: competent, unpretentious, and functional....
Until Dawn is the rarest thing in video game adaptations: it is honest about what the source material is and makes smart choices about what to translate.…...
Emilie Blichfeldt looked at Cinderella and asked the question nobody wanted answered: what would the ugly stepsister's story actually feel like if you told it honestly? The answer, it turns out, involves tapeworms, butcher knives, and more blood than…...
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…...
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.…...
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....
Matt Reeves made the rare superhero film where you forget you are watching a superhero film....
Spider-Man: No Way Home is not just the best Spider-Man film ever made. It is one of the most emotionally devastating blockbusters of the decade, and it earned every tear....
Five Nights at Freddy's is not a great horror film. But it is something rarer and more interesting: a mainstream Hollywood production built on a conservative Christian creator's values, made with his direct creative control, and released at a moment …...
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.…...
Weapons is the rare horror film that conservatives do not need to apologize for enjoying. In fact, they may find themselves grinning through it....
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.…...
Better Man is the most creatively audacious biopic in recent memory and also one of the most commercially disastrous.…...
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....
Take Cujo, replace the dog with a chimpanzee, move it to a gorgeous Hawaiian cliff house, and crank the gore to eleven. That is Primate in a sentence, and honestly, that sentence sells it better than any marketing campaign could....
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…...
Nobody 2 is exactly the film its trailer promises and nothing more: 89 minutes of Bob Odenkirk getting beaten up, beaten down, and beating back.…...
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man delivers exactly what its six seasons of television promised: a masculine, violent, morally complex crime drama about a deeply flawed man who comes out of hiding to save his son, fight fascists, and protect his family…...
Jacques Audiard's Emilia Perez is a film that managed the rare feat of uniting both progressive and conservative critics against it while simultaneously earning 13 Oscar nominations - the most for any non-English-language film in Academy history.…...
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come takes the original's eat-the-rich horror-comedy formula and dials it up to a global conspiracy. Whether that's a feature or a bug depends entirely on how you felt about the first film.…...
War Machine is a glorious throwback to the testosterone-fueled sci-fi action films of the 1980s and 1990s, and it does not apologize for it.…...
This review contains detailed plot analysis and reveals key story elements including the film's ending....
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....
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 Electric State is a $320 million argument that money cannot buy a soul....
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.…...
Ti West's X trilogy ends the way it began - with a woman who refuses to apologize for wanting more.…...
Zack Snyder is the most misunderstood filmmaker in the culture war. His fans think he is their guy - the anti-Disney, anti-woke auteur who makes movies for men.…...
Kraven the Hunter had a simple job: make a cool vigilante film about a man who uses superhuman hunting skills to kill criminals instead of animals. It mostly fails at this simple job.…...
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....
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....
This review contains detailed plot analysis and reveals key story elements including the film's ending....
Paddington Bear has become one of the strangest cultural Rorschach tests in modern cinema.…...
Elio is the most politically interesting Pixar film in years - not because of what is on screen, but because of the firestorm around what was taken off it.…...
Twenty-six years after the original and thirteen years after the widely reviled Scary Movie 5, the Wayans brothers are back. And they're bringing a flamethrower to the culture war....
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.…...
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.…...
Not a woke trap. This is the most important thing conservative audiences need to hear: Ballerina is not a hostile takeover of the John Wick franchise. It's a spinoff built around a character who already existed in Chapter 3.…...
Inside Out 2 is the movie Disney desperately needed. After a string of underperformers and culture war disasters (Lightyear's same-sex kiss controversy, Strange World's commercial implosion, Elemental's slow start), Pixar went back to basics.…...
Twisters is that rare modern blockbuster that feels like it was made for the entire country, not just the coasts.…...
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…...
Ne Zha 2 is one of the most extraordinary animated films made anywhere in the world in the past decade. Full stop. The first film was a surprise phenomenon.…...
The Alto Knights is a late-career gift from two of the most important figures in American crime cinema.…...
Drop is the best contained thriller since Searching (2018) and one of the most effectively constructed genre films in recent memory.…...
Am I Racist? is Matt Walsh doing his best Borat impression, and it works more often than it doesn't....
Let's address the elephant in the Wasteland right up front: Furiosa is not woke. It's not even close.…...
Let's get this out of the way: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is not a film you watch for the story.…...
Madame Web is one of the most comprehensively terrible superhero films ever produced by a major studio.…...
Wolf Man is a small, grim, effective horror film that works best when it stops trying to say something and just lets you watch a man fall apart....
The Beekeeper is the best Jason Statham movie in years, and it got there by doing something Hollywood has mostly forgotten how to do: make a straightforward action film for adults with a moral compass that actually points somewhere....
Borderlands is what happens when a studio spends $115 million trying to turn a beloved M-rated video game into a PG-13 Guardians of the Galaxy knockoff.…...
Here's the thing about Mean Girls (2024): it's not the culture war flashpoint that either side wants it to be....
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....
Captain America: Brave New World is a deeply confused film that cannot decide whether it wants to be a political thriller, a superhero spectacle, or a meditation on race in America. It tries to be all three and succeeds fully at none of them.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the rarest thing in Phase Five of the MCU: a movie that earns its emotions without lecturing its audience.…...
Thor: Love and Thunder is a film at war with itself. It contains the raw materials for a genuinely powerful story about grief, faith, and the failure of the gods, but it buries that story under a relentless avalanche of jokes, self-aware comedy, and …...
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.…...
Disney's Cruella is what happens when a studio takes one of its most iconic villains and runs her through the Joker-meets-The-Devil-Wears-Prada sympathy machine.…...
John Wick: Chapter 4 is the rare action sequel that earns the word epic. Chad Stahelski's nearly three-hour opus scales everything that made the first film work to operatic proportions without losing the personal stakes at its core.…...
Transformers One is the best Transformers film since the original 1986 animated movie. It does what no live-action entry ever managed: it makes you genuinely care about Optimus Prime and Megatron as characters before they become myths.…...
Speak No Evil is one of the most uncomfortable films of 2024. It's a clinical, precise horror film about a man who cannot protect his family because he has spent his adult life outsourcing confrontation to social norms. Deeply effective.…...
The Amateur is a revenge thriller about a man who is not supposed to be in the revenge business. Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) is a CIA cryptographer, basement-dweller, a code-breaker who restores old Cessnas on weekends. He's not a killer.…...
G20 wants to be Air Force One for the streaming era. The setup is solid: terrorists seize a G20 summit in Cape Town, take world leaders hostage, and the U.S.…...
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.…...
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....
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…...
Solo Leveling: ReAwakening is two things stitched together: a rushed 80-minute recap of Season 1 and a spectacular 40-minute preview of Season 2. The first part is mediocre. The second part is genuinely thrilling.…...
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is the MCU's most interesting mess. Sam Raimi brings genuine horror filmmaking to a franchise that desperately needed it, Elizabeth Olsen delivers a villain performance for the ages, and the multiverse conc…...
The fourth SpongeBob theatrical outing arrives with the kind of refreshing simplicity that has become almost exotic in modern animated filmmaking: it tells a straightforward story about friendship and courage, delivers its moral without a lecture, an…...
Anaconda (2025) is a film that sounds better as an elevator pitch than it plays as a ninety-nine-minute movie.…...
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is a 97-minute love letter to the greatest live performer in American history, and it earns every minute of that devotion.…...
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....
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....
Turning Red is a technically brilliant, emotionally effective Pixar film that is also one of the studio's most ideologically loaded projects.…...
Lightyear is a mediocre Pixar film that became a cultural flashpoint for reasons that have almost nothing to do with its quality.…...
Eternals is the most ambitious and the most divisive film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.…...
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....
Strange World is the movie where Disney finally stopped pretending and went full ideological accelerator.…...
Black Panther is the most culturally significant MCU film ever made, and scoring it requires separating the cultural event from the actual film. The movie tells a surprisingly traditional story wrapped in progressive packaging....
Black Widow arrives as Natasha Romanoff's belated solo film and the first entry in MCU Phase Four.…...
Shang-Chi is the most pleasant surprise in the MCU's representation era. Where many expected Marvel's first Asian-led film to be a diversity lecture, what we got is a deeply traditional family drama with spectacular fight choreography that draws from…...
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…...
The Marvels is the film that broke the MCU's aura of commercial invincibility. With a worldwide gross of $206 million against a production budget of $374 million, it represents a loss of over $200 million for Disney and stands as the lowest-grossing …...
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania had one job: introduce Kang the Conqueror as the next Thanos-level threat. It failed at everything except the Kang part, and then Jonathan Majors' conviction destroyed even that....
Greenland 2: Migration is a deeply traditional film wearing the clothes of a post-apocalyptic thriller.…...
The Accountant 2 does something rare: it delivers a sequel that is as good as the original without flinching from what made the first film work....
Back in Action is exactly what Netflix spent $200 million to make: a perfectly disposable action comedy that will perform huge numbers, entertain audiences for 114 minutes, and be forgotten inside a week....
Havoc is the closest thing to a Gareth Evans Raid film in English, and for a certain kind of audience, that is exactly enough....
Director Kathryn Bigelow returns with Silent Storm, a Cold War submarine thriller that represents American military cinema at its finest.…...
Dean DeBlois is a rarity in Hollywood. He directed all three animated How to Train Your Dragon films and insisted on full creative control for the live-action remake. That condition shows in the finished product.…...
Tom Cruise's final turn as Ethan Hunt is, by any reasonable measure, a triumph of old-school filmmaking values.…...
Marvel needed a win, and they mostly got one....
Den of Thieves 2 does not break any new ground. It does not need to....
Presence is the most technically inventive horror film of early 2025. It is also a quietly progressive film wearing an arthouse horror mask....
28 Years Later is two movies welded together, and the seam shows....
The Bone Temple is better than it has any right to be. After the messy second half of 28 Years Later, expectations for this direct sequel were low.…...
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.…...
Kevin Williamson returns to direct the franchise he created 30 years ago, and the result is a film that corrects course from the progressive meta-heavy recent entries without abandoning what makes the franchise tick.…...
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is the best film in this franchise and, honestly, one of the most enjoyable family action movies of 2024. It does something Hollywood rarely manages: it gets darker in its third installment without losing its soul....
A Quiet Place: Day One is a frustrating film to score because it's genuinely well-made and carries real emotional weight, right up until you look at what it's actually saying....
This franchise was never supposed to work. A Venom movie without Spider-Man, built around Tom Hardy doing a two-man improv show with a CGI alien living in his chest. It worked twice already.…...
The name alone carries enough weight to sell tickets. Mufasa. The great king. The father James Earl Jones voiced into immortality. The ghost in the clouds.…...
The moment the first marketing image dropped, showing Halle Bailey as Ariel, the internet divided cleanly in two. One half celebrated. The other half complained.…...
Harrison Ford is 80 years old. Indiana Jones is a few years younger on screen, but the arithmetic of time is the same.…...
Jurassic World Rebirth is a $200 million movie that feels like it was written on a napkin during a studio lunch meeting.…...
The Wild Robot might be the most subversive film of 2024, and not in the way Hollywood usually means that word.…...
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.…...
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 …...
Wicked: For Good picks up where Part One left off, and the question facing conservative viewers is essentially the same: are you willing to sit through two and a half hours of progressive allegory in exchange for genuinely spectacular filmmaking? Bec…...
Paul Thomas Anderson makes movies for people who love movies. That has always been true. And One Battle After Another might be his most entertaining work, period.…...
The Conjuring: Last Rites is not the best film in the franchise. That distinction still belongs to James Wan's 2013 original.…...
This review discusses the full plot including the ending....
Spoiler context: Warfare is a real-time depiction of real events. The real Elliott Miller, to whom the film is dedicated, lost his leg and his ability to speak as a result of the events depicted. This is not entertainment in the conventional sense.…...
Spoiler note: the film's villain twist is better experienced unspoiled. The review discusses it briefly but the mechanics are not a significant part of what makes the film work....
Spoiler warning: the twist at the end of the second act is worth preserving. If you plan to see Novocaine unspoiled, read only the first three paragraphs....
This review contains spoilers. Iron Lung earns its ending and the ending requires discussion....
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.…...
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.…...
Companion is a sharper movie than you expect and a more ideologically loaded one than the marketing lets on.…...
Let's be honest about what The Housemaid is before we decide whether it's any good.…...
Let's get something out of the way. Hurry Up Tomorrow is a vanity project. It may be the most unambiguous vanity project to receive a wide theatrical release in recent memory.…...
Luc Besson's Dracula: A Love Tale is a strange, kitschy, deeply sincere movie. And that sincerity is precisely what saves it....
Bart Layton's Crime 101 is the kind of movie Hollywood used to make all the time and rarely bothers with anymore.…...
Dan Trachtenberg clearly loves the Predator franchise. That much is obvious from three films in three years.…...
Timur Bekmambetov's Mercy arrives with a killer premise and proceeds to do almost nothing interesting with it.…...
Zootopia 2 is exactly what it looks like. It is a Disney animated buddy cop sequel with gorgeous animation, sharp voice performances, a cracking mystery plot, and a progressive allegory that does not hide behind the fur.…...
Old-school doesn't have to mean simple. Crime 101 is the kind of crime picture Hollywood used to make before every heist had to double as a statement about something. There's a jewel thief with a code.…...
Sam Raimi has been making gloriously unhinged movies for over 40 years. From the cabin in the Tennessee woods to the streets of Manhattan to the multiverse itself, the guy runs on one fuel: controlled chaos delivered with a grin.…...
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights survived 179 years, multiple adaptations, and the entire twentieth century with its reputation intact.…...
Ridley Scott made Gladiator II because he wanted to make another Gladiator. That is essentially the whole story behind this sequel, and it explains both its strengths and its limits.…...
The short version: Moana 2 is fine. Better than fine for fans of the original. Not as good as the original.…...
Robert Eggers' Nosferatu is one of the most uncompromisingly traditional horror films made by a major director in the past decade.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Alien: Romulus is the best Alien film since James Cameron's Aliens (1986). That is not faint praise.…...
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.…...
Deadpool & Wolverine is exactly what it advertises itself as: an audacious, frequently profane, nostalgically loaded buddy film that smashes two beloved superhero personas together and dares the audience not to have fun.…...
Longlegs is the most unnerving American horror film of 2024 and one of the few in recent memory that takes Satanism seriously as a moral force rather than as ironic aesthetic.…...
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.…...
Hit Man is the most pleasant surprise of 2024's theatrical calendar. Richard Linklater and Glen Powell teamed up to make a romantic crime comedy that is so relentlessly charming, so well-paced, and so smartly cast that it's easy to overlook the fact …...
Kinds of Kindness is a nearly three-hour endurance test from Yorgos Lanthimos that systematically dismantles any structure that might give human life meaning.…...
The Fall Guy is one of the most genuinely enjoyable action movies in recent memory, and it achieves that by doing something remarkably simple: it actually likes its protagonist....
Despicable Me 4 is the franchise at its most comfortable and its most predictable. That is not entirely a bad thing....
IF is John Krasinski's most emotionally ambitious film and his most uneven one. But when it works, which is more often than its mixed reviews suggest, it works because Krasinski trusts the audience to feel something genuine....
Bad Boys: Ride or Die is a franchise that knows exactly what it is and has stopped pretending otherwise.…...
Thelma is based on something that actually happened to director Josh Margolin's grandmother. A scammer called her, pretending to be Josh, and told her he had been arrested. She sent $10,000 to an address he gave her. She was 93.…...
Alex Garland spent years watching political tribalism eat the American conversation, and his response was to make a movie that would give everyone something to hate and something to love.…...
Dev Patel spent seven years developing Monkey Man, got a broken nose, multiple injuries, and a Netflix deal that then collapsed. Then Jordan Peele watched the film and made sure it got into theaters.…...
Rose Glass made Saint Maud on a very small budget, got it into A24's catalog, and watched it become a cult film about a woman whose religious intensity crosses into psychosis.…...
Sydney Sweeney spent years developing Immaculate as a vehicle that would let her operate in the horror genre while carrying a message she clearly believed in.…...
Abigail does exactly what it promises and does it with more craft than the premise deserves. That is meant as a compliment....
Guy Ritchie has spent thirty years making films about men who are very good at dangerous things, and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is the logical culmination of that career.…...
Lisa Frankenstein is Diablo Cody's Jennifer's Body with worse reviews and a better aesthetic. That sentence is both a description and a verdict....
Somewhere between the 400 brand partnerships, the Limited Edition pink-and-green Stanley cups, and the church-group holiday matinees, something got lost in translation. Universal sold Wicked as the feel-good movie event of 2024.…...
Glen Powell murdering his way through a family tree to reclaim stolen wealth sounds like the pitch for a crowd-pleasing dark comedy - and largely, How to Make a Killing delivers exactly that.…...
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....
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....
Andrew Kevin Walker wrote Se7en - one of the most morally coherent crime films of the past thirty years, a movie that understood evil as evil and paid the price for staring too long. That screenplay took years to get made. So did this one.…...
The original The Strangers (2008) earned its place in horror history with a deceptively simple premise: three masked killers, a couple, an isolated house, no explanation offered and none needed.…...
There is a line of conservative cinema that barely announces itself: the masculine protector story, dressed in action-genre clothes, that has always been one of Hollywood's most durable formulas.…...
Let's be precise about what this film is: a $4 million mockumentary in which Charli XCX - pop music's reigning progressive icon - produces, co-wrote, and stars in a fictional version of her own real life, distributed by A24, the most ideologically co…...
Nobody took their kids to a $1.44 billion feminist manifesto. They bought the pink tickets, grabbed the popcorn, and settled in for what the trailers promised was a breezy, nostalgic romp through a world of plastic perfection.…...
James Gunn handed America's oldest superhero symbol a progressive megaphone and pointed it at every culture-war flashpoint of the moment - immigration, media distrust, foreign intervention - and then had the audacity to make a movie with genuine emot…...
Let's not dance around it. Heretic is not a horror film that happens to touch on religion.…...
Hollywood doesn't often make movies that tell you to put down your phone - and mean it.…...
Hollywood has always loved a metaphor. But rarely has the industry deployed one this nakedly, or this aggressively, and then handed it four Oscars.…...
Edward Berger's Conclave is the most dangerous kind of progressive film: one that is genuinely excellent....
Here is what you need to know about Sound of Freedom before anything else: studios sat on this film for five years. Fox (which became Disney after the acquisition) shelved it. Not because it was bad - test screenings were strong.…...
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.…...
They sold you a gothic aesthetic. They delivered a manifesto wrapped in designer lighting....
Hollywood has always fed on its own. Stars rise, burn bright, and are discarded - usually on a schedule dictated by age, gender, and the appetite of an industry that treats women as decorative objects with expiration dates.…...
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 …...
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.…...
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…...
Captain America: Brave New World is a Frankenstein's monster of a movie, stitched together from at least three different scripts, multiple rounds of reshoots, and the remnants of a 2008 plotline nobody was asking to resolve.…...
Disney's live-action Snow White arrives carrying more baggage than a royal carriage.…...
A Minecraft Movie is not a good film. It is not a particularly bad one either. It is a loud, colorful, expensive screensaver with Jack Black yelling his way through two hours and Jason Momoa trying his hardest to make man-child former arcade champion…...
Thunderbolts asks you to care about six characters you either forgot existed or could not name at gunpoint. The question is whether it delivers a story worth telling. The answer, with significant reservations, is: sort of....
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....
A24 and Apple Original Films team up for Eternity, a high-concept romantic comedy set in the afterlife where newly deceased souls have one week to decide which themed paradise they'll inhabit forever.…...
There's a moment early in Solo Mio where Kevin James, freshly abandoned at the altar in Rome, sits alone at a restaurant table set for two. He stares at Heather's empty chair, then quietly asks the waiter to take it away.…...
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.…...
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.…...
This transcript is a glossy, crowd-pleasing heist fantasy that repeatedly moralizes theft as “justice” and uses modern political talking points as applause lines.…...
Independence Day is built on a traditional moral structure centered on individual courage, earned leadership, and collective survival through merit and sacrifice.…...
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.…...
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…...
For audiences who agree with progressive critique of celebrity, capitalism, complicity: film works. For conservative audiences or those seeking entertainment: film is betrayal dressed in transgression. Woke trap real.…...
Love Hurts is kind of film dismissed by critics, enjoyed by audiences. Understands what it is: fun action-comedy about good man forced back into violence protecting loved ones. Does not pretend to be more. Does not attempt social commentary.…...
