54 reviews in this category.
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…...
The Alien franchise has been waiting for someone to bring the xenomorph to Earth in a serious way since at least the 1990s. Two Alien vs. Predator films tried and largely failed.…...
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....
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....
Let's start where the film earns its credibility....
Prey is the best Predator film since the 1987 original. That's not a low bar at this point.…...
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…...
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: …...
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.…...
Fallout Season 2 is competent prestige television that can't quite escape its own contradictions....
There are films that earn their politics and films that perform them. The Blue Trail earns every frame....
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.…...
E.T. is one of the few films where the word 'masterpiece' is not an overstatement.…...
The Creator is a genuinely beautiful film with a genuinely bad politics problem....
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.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Tenet is the easiest film on this list to analyze from a conservative perspective: it has essentially no ideology.…...
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.…...
The Matrix is the most politically contested movie in VirtueVigil history, not because it is propaganda but because everybody wants to own it....
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.…...
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.…...
Tron: Ares cost Disney between $180 and $220 million to make and grossed $142 million worldwide. That is not a small disaster.…...
Atlas is the kind of movie you watch on a Sunday afternoon with no expectations and find yourself mildly entertained.…...
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.…...
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....
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 …...
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.…...
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.…...
Captain Marvel is the MCU's most deliberately ideological film, and the filmmakers would not dispute this.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Avengers: Endgame is the highest-grossing film of all time (adjusted for inflation).…...
Denis Villeneuve completes his Dune trilogy with a film that is simultaneously his most visually ambitious and most explicitly ideological.…...
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.…...
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....
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.…...
Let's get this out of the way: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is not a film you watch for the story.…...
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.…...
Eternals is the most ambitious and the most divisive film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.…...
Greenland 2: Migration is a deeply traditional film wearing the clothes of a post-apocalyptic thriller.…...
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....
Jurassic World Rebirth is a $200 million movie that feels like it was written on a napkin during a studio lunch meeting.…...
Companion is a sharper movie than you expect and a more ideologically loaded one than the marketing lets on.…...
Timur Bekmambetov's Mercy arrives with a killer premise and proceeds to do almost nothing interesting with it.…...
Black Mirror returns for its seventh season with six new episodes that collectively demonstrate both why the show has endured and why it has never been fully co-opted by any one ideological tendency.…...
Andor Season 2 is probably the finest piece of television Disney has produced under the Star Wars banner - and it is, without reservation, the most explicitly political. These two facts are related.…...
Dune: Part Two is a cinematic achievement of genuine rarity. A sequel that expands the scale, deepens the craft, and improves on its predecessor at nearly every technical level.…...
Dan Fogelman built his reputation on This Is Us - a show that knew exactly how to make you cry, that understood emotional architecture with almost clinical precision, and that often used that precision in service of specific progressive narratives ab…...
Hollywood has always loved a metaphor. But rarely has the industry deployed one this nakedly, or this aggressively, and then handed it four Oscars.…...
There was a time when Stranger Things felt like a miracle. In the summer of 2016, Netflix dropped this weird little show about a missing kid in small-town Indiana, and it captured something audiences had been starving for.…...
