64 reviews in this category.
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.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Let's be honest about what Mother Mary is before we pretend it's a mystery....
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 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.…...
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.…...
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.…...
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.…...
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…...
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....
Thanksgiving is exactly what it needs to be. That's not as easy as it sounds....
Tarantino's debut is 99 minutes of men in a warehouse figuring out who lied to them, and it is riveting cinema.…...
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.…...
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....
The first thing you need to know about Rebel Ridge is that it is not about race. It's about property rights....
No Time to Die is a film at war with itself, and the miracle is that it almost wins....
Tenet is the easiest film on this list to analyze from a conservative perspective: it has essentially no ideology.…...
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....
The Order is about as complicated as VirtueVigil gets, and I want to be honest about that before I score it....
The Terminal List has a 40% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and a 94% audience score. That gap tells you everything you need to know about where the show sits culturally....
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.…...
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…...
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.…...
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.…...
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....
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.…...
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 …...
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....
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.…...
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 …...
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....
This review contains detailed plot analysis and reveals key story elements including the film's ending....
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....
Not a woke trap. The Night Agent is one of Netflix's most reliable action properties precisely because it delivers exactly what it promises: a good-looking guy with a badge chasing bad guys through exotic locations.…...
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.…...
Drop is the best contained thriller since Searching (2018) and one of the most effectively constructed genre films in recent memory.…...
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....
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.…...
Director Kathryn Bigelow returns with Silent Storm, a Cold War submarine thriller that represents American military cinema at its finest.…...
Tom Cruise's final turn as Ethan Hunt is, by any reasonable measure, a triumph of old-school filmmaking values.…...
Presence is the most technically inventive horror film of early 2025. It is also a quietly progressive film wearing an arthouse horror mask....
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.…...
Bart Layton's Crime 101 is the kind of movie Hollywood used to make all the time and rarely bothers with anymore.…...
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.…...
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.…...
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....
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.…...
Edward Berger's Conclave is the most dangerous kind of progressive film: one that is genuinely excellent....
They sold you a gothic aesthetic. They delivered a manifesto wrapped in designer lighting....
Ozark is genuinely good television. Across its four-season run, it delivered some of the tightest crime-thriller writing on any streaming platform.…...
Yellowjackets arrived with a pitch that practically dared you to watch: a girls' soccer team crashes in the Canadian wilderness, and over nineteen months they descend into tribal violence and cannibalism. Season one delivers on that promise, mostly.…...
This transcript is a glossy, crowd-pleasing heist fantasy that repeatedly moralizes theft as “justice” and uses modern political talking points as applause lines.…...
The anti-corporate themes are structurally embedded and largely organic to the world-building. Some ideological markers are present but remain secondary to genuine narrative ambition.…...
Netflix does not often deliver a film that feels this old-fashioned in the best sense.…...
