A24 is the most acclaimed indie studio in Hollywood right now. Critics love it. Awards voters love it. The studio has collected more Oscar nominations per film than any distributor of its size in recent memory. It also has one of the most consistent ideological profiles in the business. That consistency is what this list is about.
VirtueVigil has now reviewed 13 A24 films using our Woke-Watch Scoring System. The data tells a clear story. A24 is not a monolith. The studio produces everything from warrior-class war films with zero woke content to prestige dramas with explicit progressive framing. But the average leans left, the most celebrated releases tend to skew woke, and the studio's brand identity is built partly on a willingness to greenlight content that mainstream studios avoid. That is not a guess. That is what the numbers say.
Below, every A24 film in our database is ranked from most woke to least woke. The ranking is based on score margin: the difference between woke score and traditional score. Films with a negative margin lean woke. Films with a positive margin lean traditional. Each entry draws directly from our full review data. No fabricated scores, no guesswork.
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1
Babygirl (2024)
WOKE -15 WOKENicole Kidman plays a CEO who pursues a sexual submissive relationship with a 25-year-old intern, and the film treats this as self-discovery rather than a crisis. The woke score of 19.22 against a trad score of just 4.4 makes Babygirl the most ideologically progressive film in our A24 database. Director Halina Reijn builds an entire worldview around female sexual autonomy untethered from marriage or consequence, with the husband (Antonio Banderas) rendered sympathetic but irrelevant. A well-made film. Not a traditional one.
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2
Queer (2024)
WOKE -13 WOKELuca Guadagnino adapts William S. Burroughs' autobiographical novella about obsessive queer love in 1950s Mexico City, and Daniel Craig delivers the best performance of his career in a film that probably should not work as well as it does. The woke score of 17.5 against a trad score of 4.2 puts this firmly in WOKE territory. The film's explicit gay relationship, drug use framed as consciousness expansion, and rejection of conventional moral frameworks are central, not incidental. The craft is extraordinary. The ideology is just as deliberate.
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3
Civil War (2024)
WOKE LEAN -4 WOKEAlex Garland's dystopian war film set a culture-war debate in motion when it dropped in April 2024 as one of A24's biggest box office hits ever. The woke score of 22 reflects real content: both sides in the fictional civil war are deliberately left undefined, which conservatives read as moral equivalence and progressives read as a critique of fascism. Our review flags this as a Significant Woke Trap. The traditional score of 18 keeps it from tipping further, driven by journalistic neutrality as a virtue and real consequences for violence. Where you land on this film depends on which ambiguity you find more troubling.
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4
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025)
WOKE LEAN -4 WOKERose Byrne plays a psychotherapist whose own life is collapsing under the weight of a sick child, a failing marriage, and a vanishing support system. It is one of the rawest performances in recent memory, and the film earns its score margin of -4 through genuine complexity rather than simple advocacy. The woke score of 15.14 comes from how the film deconstructs motherhood without offering a faith-based or redemptive framework, and how abortion guilt is treated as a character detail rather than a moral crisis. The trad score of 11.42 reflects the film's authentic treatment of parental sacrifice and its refusal to let Linda off the hook.
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5
The Brutalist (2024)
WOKE LEAN -3 WOKEBrady Corbet's three-and-a-half-hour epic follows a Hungarian Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and arrives in postwar America, only to discover that the country's promise of freedom masks its own forms of exploitation. The film is the most explicitly anti-capitalist A24 release in our database, treating America as a beautiful trap that destroys the artists it claims to celebrate. Adrien Brody won the Oscar for Best Actor. The woke score of 9 and trad score of 6 land it at -3 WOKE. A demanding film made with enormous craft. Its thesis about America is not flattering.
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6
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
MIXED +1 TRADSeven Academy Awards. $77 million on a $14 million budget. And the most ideologically difficult film to categorize in A24's library. The Daniels built a multiverse action comedy where the emotional core is simultaneously a lesbian relationship and a marriage worth saving. The woke score of 15.34 and trad score of 16.32 produce the thinnest MIXED verdict in our database. A middle-aged Chinese immigrant fighting multiverse nihilism to save her family earns the traditional points. Her daughter's queer identity as the moral center of the film earns the woke points. Both are central. Neither can be edited out. VirtueVigil calls this one genuinely, rigorously mixed.
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7
undertone (2026)
MIXED +1 TRADIan Tuason's A24 horror film follows a paranormal podcast host who moves home to care for her comatose mother and starts hearing something deeply wrong in audio files sent by a troubled couple. It is the horror film equivalent of a room with bad acoustics: you cannot locate the source of the wrongness, and that is the point. The woke score of 5 and trad score of 6 land it at +1 TRAD, making it one of the more ideologically neutral A24 releases in our database. The fear here is existential, not political.
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8
Eternity (2026)
MIXED +2 TRADA24 and Apple Original Films co-produced this high-concept romantic comedy where newly deceased souls have one week to choose which themed paradise they will inhabit forever. Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller, and Callum Turner form a love triangle that stretches across life and death. The woke score of 3 and trad score of 5 land at +2 TRAD, making this one of A24's lighter ideological footprints. The film's premise is inherently about what you value most when everything else is stripped away, and the answer it gives is surprisingly traditional: love, commitment, choosing the harder thing.
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9
Past Lives (2023)
MIXED +2 TRADCeline Song's debut feature is about what you give up when you choose to become someone. A childhood romance between two Koreans is interrupted when the girl's family immigrates to Canada. Twelve years later they reconnect. Twelve years after that, he visits her in New York where she is now married to an American man. The film is quiet, devastating, and almost defiantly apolitical. The woke score of 5.6 and trad score of 7.35 land at +2 TRAD. The marriage is treated with genuine weight. The Korean-American immigrant experience is handled without political framing. Song became the first Asian woman nominated for Best Director. The film deserves that recognition.
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10
Marty Supreme (2025)
TRADITIONAL LEAN +3 TRADJosh Safdie's ping pong film is not the underdog sports triumph the marketing implied. It is a portrait of a man consuming himself alive in pursuit of a dream the world has decided does not matter. Timothee Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a ping pong hustler in 1970s New York whose obsession is both his gift and his destruction. The woke score of 4 and trad score of 7 land at +3 TRAD. The film earns traditional points for its treatment of obsession disconnected from community as a form of self-destruction. Safdie's chaotic energy is admired but hard to sit with. That discomfort is the whole point.
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11
Materialists (2025)
TRADITIONAL LEAN +5 TRADCeline Song's follow-up to Past Lives is a sophisticated New York romantic comedy where a high-end matchmaker discovers her systematic approach to love may not apply to her own heart. Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal form a love triangle the film resolves with a sincere marriage proposal and a traditional ending. The woke score of 9.18 and trad score of 13.7 land at +5 TRAD. An A24 romantic comedy that ends at the altar is worth noting. Chris Evans delivers his best non-Marvel performance. The film's moral compass points where it sounds like it should not.
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12
We Live in Time (2024)
TRADITIONAL LEAN +5 TRADFlorence Pugh and Andrew Garfield build one of the most genuinely affecting screen romances in recent memory in this non-linear love story structured around terminal illness. The woke score of 8.8 and trad score of 13.44 land at +5 TRAD. The film earns its traditional score through the centrality of marriage, the weight it gives to the partnership being dismantled by cancer, and the absence of any progressive moralizing. It will make you cry. Whether it should is a more interesting question, but the traditional content is real and it is the film's emotional core.
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13
Warfare (2025)
TRADITIONAL LEAN +7 TRADAlex Garland and Ray Mendoza's real-time depiction of a 2006 Navy SEAL operation in Ramadi, Iraq is the cleanest film in A24's catalog by our scoring. Woke score: 2. Trad score: 9. Score margin: +7 TRAD. This is not entertainment in the conventional sense. It is testimony, built from the first-hand accounts of the men who were there, dedicated to Elliott Miller, the real SEAL who lost his leg and his ability to speak during the events depicted. There is no political framing, no ideological commentary, no lesson about the war. Just eleven men in a house in Ramadi with incoming fire and each other. A24 distributed it. That took some guts.
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What the Data Says About A24
Thirteen films reviewed. Five lean traditional. Four lean woke. Four are mixed. That is not the studio profile that A24's reputation suggests, but the picture is more complicated than the headline number. The most celebrated A24 releases, the ones that win Oscars and get written about in major publications, tend to cluster in the woke or woke-lean categories. Babygirl, Queer, The Brutalist, Everything Everywhere All at Once: these are the films that define A24's cultural identity. Warfare and Materialists exist in the same catalog, but they are not the films the studio markets as its identity.
The honest read: A24 is a studio with genuine range and a genuine ideological tilt. It will greenlight a zero-woke war film and a lesbian coming-of-age film and a submission-fantasy Nicole Kidman drama in the same year without blinking. The throughline is not ideology. It is craft and controversy. Whatever gets talked about, A24 will make it. And right now, what gets talked about skews left. Browse every A24 review and every film in our database at virtuevigil.com/reviews/.