Chernobyl (2019)
Chernobyl is the best thing HBO has ever produced and one of the most morally coherent works of television in the medium's history.…...
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 27.72
AUTH: 93%
The Isolate Thief
The Western is the most traditional American film genre, and The Isolate Thief appears to know exactly what that means....
WOKE: 2
TRAD: 17.7
AUTH: 90%
Silo (Season 3)
Silo is one of the best dystopian series on television, and its third season is its most structurally ambitious yet.…...
WOKE: 5.32
TRAD: 2.45
AUTH: 67%
The Death of Robin Hood
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.…...
WOKE: 5.9
TRAD: 34.46
AUTH: 85%
Citizen Vigilante
Citizen Vigilante is exactly the kind of film that mainstream critics despise and a specific audience genuinely wants.…...
WOKE: 3.1
TRAD: 26.73
AUTH: 85%
United 93
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 …...
WOKE: 2.45
TRAD: 25.2
AUTH: 91%
Hungry
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....
WOKE: 3.4
TRAD: 12.52
AUTH: 63%
Zero Day
Zero Day wants to be the definitive post-9/11 political thriller for the current moment: a catastrophic cyberattack on American infrastructure, a former president recalled to lead an investigation, and a Washington ecosystem so corroded by partisan w…...
WOKE: 15.22
TRAD: 14.6
AUTH: 49%
Disclosure Day
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.…...
WOKE: 18.6
TRAD: 16.8
AUTH: 68%
Exterritorial
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....
WOKE: 8.78
TRAD: 13.72
AUTH: 61%
Firebreak
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.…...
WOKE: 4.8
TRAD: 12.52
AUTH: 72%
The Shining
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…...
WOKE: 13.7
TRAD: 20.64
AUTH: 58%
John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
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.…...
WOKE: 6.1
TRAD: 22.54
AUTH: 79%
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
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.…...
WOKE: 2.4
TRAD: 22.54
AUTH: 88%
Corporate Retreat
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.…...
WOKE: 16.4
TRAD: 29.4
AUTH: 68%
Eddington
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.…...
WOKE: 23.7
TRAD: 8.2
AUTH: 35%
The Hurt Locker
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.…...
WOKE: 12.88
TRAD: 8.96
AUTH: 44%
The Pitt
The Pitt is the best network-style medical procedural in years, possibly since ER was at its height. It is not accidental that Noah Wyle, who spent years on ER, is the lead. Creator R. Scott Gemmill also came up through that show's writer's room.…...
WOKE: 3.4
TRAD: 20.58
AUTH: 86%
Is God Is
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.…...
WOKE: 17.56
TRAD: 7.18
AUTH: 34%
Jack Ryan: Ghost War
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.…...
WOKE: 4
TRAD: 20.02
AUTH: 74%
Die Hard
Die Hard is one of the few action films where the traditional values aren't incidental decoration. They are the engine....
WOKE: 2.5
TRAD: 15.05
AUTH: 81%
Extraction 2
Extraction 2 does something rare in action sequels: it actually justifies its existence....
WOKE: 3.4
TRAD: 16.24
AUTH: 79%
The Gray Man
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....
WOKE: 8.04
TRAD: 14.49
AUTH: 58%
In the Grey
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....
WOKE: 2.7
TRAD: 14.28
AUTH: 80%
The Death of Robin Hood
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.…...
WOKE: 6.18
TRAD: 12.18
AUTH: 68%
Brothers Under Fire
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.…...
WOKE: 1.2
TRAD: 20.58
AUTH: 82%
Taken
The phone call that made Liam Neeson a different kind of movie star....
WOKE: 2.75
TRAD: 20.3
AUTH: 88%
Get Out
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…...
WOKE: 16
TRAD: 4
AUTH: 20%
Shutter Island
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.…...
WOKE: 3.4
TRAD: 16.8
AUTH: 82%
The Last Witness
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....
WOKE: 18.9
TRAD: 12.4
AUTH: 55%
Interceptor Protocol
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....
WOKE: 7.8
TRAD: 19.2
AUTH: 71%
Pressure
Pressure is Ron Howard's historical submarine drama exploring military decision-making under crisis conditions.…...
WOKE: 7.2
TRAD: 11.8
AUTH: 66%
Mother Mary
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.…...
WOKE: 28.4
TRAD: 19.8
AUTH: 71%
Fuze
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.…...
WOKE: 2.45
TRAD: 11.27
AUTH: 72%
Dhurandhar: The Revenge
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.…...
WOKE: 0
TRAD: 26.74
AUTH: 95%
Mother Mary
Let's be honest about what Mother Mary is before we pretend it's a mystery....
WOKE: 18.8
TRAD: 7.88
AUTH: 78%
The Phoenician Scheme
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.…...
WOKE: 4.5
TRAD: 10.85
AUTH: N/A
The Woman in the Yard
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.…...
WOKE: 6.44
TRAD: 10.92
AUTH: 55%
Blink Twice
Let's be direct about what Blink Twice is doing and whether it succeeds at it....
WOKE: 22.24
TRAD: 5.88
AUTH: 28%
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
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.…...
WOKE: 3.15
TRAD: 21.2
AUTH: 78%
Carry-On
Netflix does not often deliver a film that feels this old-fashioned in the best sense.…...
WOKE: 3
TRAD: 20.23
AUTH: N/A
Smile
Smile opened to $22 million on a $17 million budget and eventually grossed $217 million worldwide.…...
WOKE: 5.04
TRAD: 14.82
AUTH: 75%
Captain Phillips
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.…...
WOKE: 9.55
TRAD: 15.75
AUTH: 82%
Uncut Gems
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.…...
WOKE: 6.23
TRAD: 8.75
AUTH: 72%
Jaws
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.…...
WOKE: 3.5
TRAD: 18.48
AUTH: 94%
Bridge of Spies
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…...
WOKE: 2.1
TRAD: 19.32
AUTH: 93%
Guy Ritchie's The Covenant
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....
WOKE: 5.67
TRAD: 21.28
AUTH: 82%
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is exactly what it needs to be. That's not as easy as it sounds....
WOKE: 9.18
TRAD: 8.68
AUTH: 55%
Reservoir Dogs
Tarantino's debut is 99 minutes of men in a warehouse figuring out who lied to them, and it is riveting cinema.…...
WOKE: 20.43
TRAD: 16.38
AUTH: 45%
Fight Club
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.…...
WOKE: 17.34
TRAD: 9.94
AUTH: 54%
Black Swan
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....
WOKE: 8.88
TRAD: 7.28
AUTH: 75%
Rebel Ridge
The first thing you need to know about Rebel Ridge is that it is not about race. It's about property rights....
WOKE: 8.18
TRAD: 18.5
AUTH: 78%
No Time to Die
No Time to Die is a film at war with itself, and the miracle is that it almost wins....
WOKE: 11.98
TRAD: 12.25
AUTH: 82%
Tenet
Tenet is the easiest film on this list to analyze from a conservative perspective: it has essentially no ideology.…...
WOKE: 1.5
TRAD: 17.23
AUTH: 95%
Us
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....
WOKE: 13.14
TRAD: 8.89
AUTH: 88%
The Order
The Order is about as complicated as VirtueVigil gets, and I want to be honest about that before I score it....
WOKE: 10.14
TRAD: 10.99
AUTH: 86%
The Terminal List
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....
WOKE: 2.8
TRAD: 26.64
AUTH: 82%
September 5
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.…...
WOKE: 5.4
TRAD: 12.6
AUTH: 75%
Don't Worry Darling
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…...
WOKE: 21.84
TRAD: 2.7
AUTH: 72%
A Working Man
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.…...
WOKE: 1
TRAD: 17.36
AUTH: 88%
Trap
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.…...
WOKE: 13.5
TRAD: 14.24
AUTH: 51%
Last Breath
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....
WOKE: 3.4
TRAD: 24.29
AUTH: 85%
The Equalizer 3
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.…...
WOKE: 3
TRAD: 20.88
AUTH: 88%
Inception
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 …...
WOKE: 2.9
TRAD: 20.44
AUTH: 92%
Flight Risk
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....
WOKE: 2.1
TRAD: 10.99
AUTH: 55%
It Was Just an Accident
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.…...
WOKE: 16.59
TRAD: 13.02
AUTH: 92%
Five Nights at Freddy's
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 …...
WOKE: 2.5
TRAD: 14.35
AUTH: 34%
Primate
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....
WOKE: 10
TRAD: 12
AUTH: 30%
The Secret Agent
This review contains detailed plot analysis and reveals key story elements including the film's ending....
WOKE: 17
TRAD: 18
AUTH: 70%
Babygirl
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....
WOKE: 19.22
TRAD: 4.4
AUTH: 35%
The Night Agent: Season 3
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.…...
WOKE: 22
TRAD: 38
AUTH: 68%
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina
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.…...
WOKE: 11.28
TRAD: 18.76
AUTH: 65%
Drop
Drop is the best contained thriller since Searching (2018) and one of the most effectively constructed genre films in recent memory.…...
WOKE: 5.6
TRAD: 10.5
AUTH: 71%
Wolf Man
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....
WOKE: 9.8
TRAD: 18.9
AUTH: 58%
The Beekeeper
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....
WOKE: 4.25
TRAD: 25.48
AUTH: 72%
Speak No Evil
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.…...
WOKE: 9.18
TRAD: 6.78
AUTH: 44%
The Amateur
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.…...
WOKE: 4.9
TRAD: 14.62
AUTH: 62%
G20
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.…...
WOKE: 14.46
TRAD: 7.6
AUTH: 38%
Silent Storm
Director Kathryn Bigelow returns with Silent Storm, a Cold War submarine thriller that represents American military cinema at its finest.…...
WOKE: 5.1
TRAD: 18.6
AUTH: 88%
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
Tom Cruise's final turn as Ethan Hunt is, by any reasonable measure, a triumph of old-school filmmaking values.…...
WOKE: 1.1
TRAD: 21.4
AUTH: 93%
Presence
Presence is the most technically inventive horror film of early 2025. It is also a quietly progressive film wearing an arthouse horror mask....
WOKE: 18.1
TRAD: 8.5
AUTH: 32%
The Housemaid
Let's be honest about what The Housemaid is before we decide whether it's any good.…...
WOKE: 8
TRAD: 5
AUTH: 42%
Hurry Up Tomorrow
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.…...
WOKE: 4
TRAD: 5
AUTH: 52%
Crime 101
Bart Layton's Crime 101 is the kind of movie Hollywood used to make all the time and rarely bothers with anymore.…...
WOKE: 6
TRAD: 8
AUTH: 62%
Crime 101 (2026)
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.…...
WOKE: 8
TRAD: 19
AUTH: 65%
Love Lies Bleeding
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.…...
WOKE: 26
TRAD: 9
AUTH: 70%
How to Make a Killing (2026)
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.…...
WOKE: 9
TRAD: 14
AUTH: 50%
Scarpetta
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....
WOKE: 58
TRAD: 42
AUTH: 55%
Psycho Killer
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.…...
WOKE: 3
TRAD: 29
AUTH: 78%
Conclave
Edward Berger's Conclave is the most dangerous kind of progressive film: one that is genuinely excellent....
WOKE: 42.6
TRAD: 3.85
AUTH: 10%
Saltburn
They sold you a gothic aesthetic. They delivered a manifesto wrapped in designer lighting....
WOKE: 35
TRAD: 3
AUTH: 50%
Ozark
Ozark is genuinely good television. Across its four-season run, it delivered some of the tightest crime-thriller writing on any streaming platform.…...
WOKE: 9
TRAD: 5
AUTH: 64%
Yellowjackets
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.…...
WOKE: 8
TRAD: 6
AUTH: 70%
Now You See Me: Now You Don't
This transcript is a glossy, crowd-pleasing heist fantasy that repeatedly moralizes theft as “justice” and uses modern political talking points as applause lines.…...
WOKE: 18
TRAD: 7
AUTH: 50%
Severance - Season 2
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.…...
WOKE: 6
TRAD: 4
AUTH: 72%