A24 is the most acclaimed indie studio in Hollywood. Critics love it. Awards voters love it. The studio has collected more Oscar nominations per film than any distributor of its size. 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 21 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 near-zero woke content to prestige dramas with explicit progressive framing. The ideological range is enormous: from Euphoria at -38 WOKE to Exit 8 at +31 TRAD. That is a 69-point spread within a single studio. The average leans left, and the most celebrated releases, the ones that win Oscars and get written about in major publications, tend to cluster in the woke or woke-lean categories. But the most traditional films in the A24 catalog are also its newest. The 2026 releases include the three most conservative A24 films ever made.
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
Euphoria - Season 1 (2019)
STRONGLY WOKE -38 WOKESam Levinson's HBO series is the most ideologically aggressive title in the A24 catalog by a wide margin. The woke score of 43.5 against a trad score of 5.3 produces a -38 margin that is not close. The show's ideology is embedded in its assumptions: that gender is performed, that sexuality is the primary site of identity, that traditional institutions cannot help you, and that beauty and trauma are inseparable. Jules Vaughn, a trans girl played by Hunter Schafer, is the show's best person and its most effective ideological argument. The show is also, paradoxically, one of the most effective anti-drug, anti-promiscuity arguments ever aired on television. Every character who uses drugs suffers. Every character who treats sex as recreation is harmed. Euphoria is a text at war with itself, and the war is worth studying.
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2
Midsommar (2019)
WOKE -18 WOKEAri Aster's sunlit horror film is technically extraordinary and ideologically transparent. The woke score of 20.58 against a trad score of 2.4 makes it the second most woke A24 film in our database. The film's ideological project is the presentation of feminist liberation through the lens of ritual murder. The male characters exist on a spectrum from useless to monstrous, and Dani's eventual choice to burn her boyfriend alive is framed as catharsis. The progressive critical establishment celebrated the ending as a breakup movie. The craft is extraordinary. What the craft is serving is not.
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3
Eddington (2025)
WOKE -15 WOKEAri Aster's COVID-era western stars Joaquin Phoenix as a small-town sheriff whose journey from decent lawman to conspiratorial extremist is framed as a study of cultural pathology. The woke score of 23.7 against a trad score of 8.2 reflects a film that argues conservative epistemology itself produces dangerous outcomes. Emma Stone and Pedro Pascal provide the moral counterpoint. The filmmaking is masterful. The argument is that your worldview is a disease. Both things are true.
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4
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 one of the most ideologically progressive films 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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5
The Drama (2026)
WOKE -14 WOKEKristoffer Borgli's film is built on a devastating premise: what happens when you discover the person you love once planned to murder children at their school? The woke score of 22.68 against a trad score of 8.44 reflects a film whose central project is making a would-be mass murderer sympathetic without consequence. Zendaya and Robert Pattinson deliver extraordinary performances. The film's moral framework, in which a school shooting plan is processed as a relationship anxiety rather than a crime, is the ideological problem. Tom Mauser, whose son Daniel was killed at Columbine, has spoken publicly against the film. His objection deserves more weight than the 79% Rotten Tomatoes score.
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6
The Invite (2026)
WOKE -14 WOKEOlivia Wilde directs and stars in a brittle, frequently hilarious dinner-party dramedy that doubles as an autopsy of modern marriage. The woke score of 17.2 against a trad score of 3.15 reflects a film that assumes marriage is a prison, monogamy is a slow death, and the emotionally stunted husband is the primary problem. Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz, and Edward Norton are all operating at the top of their games. The filmmaking is superb, shot chronologically over 23 days with a lived-in quality that feels overheard rather than written. The ideology is unmistakable: traditional marriage is a bad deal, and sexual fidelity is optional.
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7
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. 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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8
Priscilla (2023)
WOKE -10 WOKESofia Coppola's adaptation of Priscilla Presley's memoir frames marriage to Elvis as captivity and self-discovery as departure. The woke score of 11.62 against a trad score of 1.5 makes this one of the most lopsided scores in the database. Cailee Spaeny won the Venice Best Actress prize for a performance that conveys years of patient endurance in small gestures. The filmmaking is beautiful. The thesis, that marriage to a powerful man is a prison and leaving is liberation, could not be more clear.
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9
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. The woke score of 15.14 comes from how the film deconstructs motherhood without offering a faith-based or redemptive framework. The trad score of 11.42 reflects the film's authentic treatment of parental sacrifice and its refusal to let Linda off the hook. One of the rawest performances in recent memory, and a film that earns its complexity rather than announcing it.
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10
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 woke score of 9 and trad score of 6 land it at -3 WOKE. 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. A demanding film made with enormous craft. Its thesis about America is not flattering.
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11
The Whale (2022)
MIXED 0 NEUTRALBrendan Fraser won the Oscar for Best Actor in Darren Aronofsky's devastating chamber piece about a 600-pound man trying to reconnect with his daughter before he dies. The woke score of 9.14 and trad score of 9.14 produce a perfect dead heat: 0 NEUTRAL. The traditional content is genuine: Charlie's entire project is parental redemption, and the film holds him fully responsible for what his absence cost his daughter. The woke content is equally real: Charlie's identity as a gay man, and the relationship that destroyed his marriage, are presented sympathetically and without moral judgment. This is what genuine moral complexity looks like in contemporary filmmaking: real virtue alongside real woke content, both honestly present.
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12
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 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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13
Eternity (2025)
MIXED +2 TRADA24 and Apple Original Films co-produced David Freyne's high-concept romantic comedy where newly deceased souls have one week to choose which themed paradise they will inhabit forever. The woke score of 3 and trad score of 5 land at +2 TRAD, making this one of A24's lighter ideological footprints. Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller, and Callum Turner form a love triangle that stretches across life and death. 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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14
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. The woke score of 4 and trad score of 7 land at +3 TRAD. Timothee Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a ping pong hustler in 1970s New York whose obsession is both his gift and his destruction. 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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15
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. The woke score of 9.18 and trad score of 13.7 land at +5 TRAD. Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal form a love triangle the film resolves with a sincere marriage proposal and a traditional ending. 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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16
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 John Crowley's 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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17
Sing Sing (2024)
TRADITIONAL LEAN +7 TRADGreg Kwedar's film about a prison theater program is made by progressive filmmakers, distributed by A24, and stars Colman Domingo in a performance of devastating precision. The woke score of 8.84 and trad score of 16.24 land at +7 TRAD. What the film is actually about, stripped of its progressive cultural signal, is a group of men in a brutal environment choosing to do hard, disciplined work. They do not demand that the system change before they will change. They change themselves, through discipline, through craft, through brotherhood. Clarence Maclin plays himself, a man who actually went through this. These are values that should resonate across political lines. They do resonate.
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18
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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19
Backrooms (2026)
TRADITIONAL +10 TRADA24's biggest box office success to date, grossing over $388 million worldwide against a sub-$10 million budget. Kane Parsons, at 20 years old, adapts his viral YouTube series into a feature that maintains strict continuity with the original shorts while expanding the mythology. The woke score of 0.7 and trad score of 11.14 land at +10 TRAD. The film contains no ideological agenda: this is pure atmospheric horror from a filmmaker who understands that liminal spaces are terrifying precisely because they mean nothing at all. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve anchor a genuinely unsettling experience.
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20
The Death of Robin Hood (2026)
STRONGLY TRADITIONAL +29 TRADMichael Sarnoski's medieval Christian film about a mass murderer who finds redemption through confession, forgiveness, and sacrificial death is one of the most traditionally moral films A24 has ever distributed. The woke score of 5.9 and trad score of 34.46 produce a +29 TRAD margin. Hugh Jackman plays an aged Robin Hood who has murdered so many people he can no longer remember who they all were. Jodie Comer's Sister Brigid, a nun whose family Robin killed, agrees to help him die because she has spent years learning to heal others. The film takes the Christian moral vocabulary of sin, guilt, confession, forgiveness, and sacrifice as a given rather than a subject for critique. In 2026, that is a genuinely countercultural choice.
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21
Exit 8 (2026)
STRONGLY TRADITIONAL +31 TRADGenki Kawamura's adaptation of the viral indie horror game is the most traditional film in A24's entire catalog. The woke score of 0.7 and trad score of 31.64 produce a +31 TRAD margin. The premise is a looping subway corridor, but the question is not "can you spot the anomaly?" It is "are you ready to be a father?" Kazunari Ninomiya carries the film as a man whose stillness is either strength or paralysis, and the entire 95-minute engine is dedicated to collapsing that ambiguity. The pregnancy is never framed as a political issue. It is framed as a test. Fatherhood is the highest stake. Masculine accountability is the engine. Redemption through earned action is the resolution. A 97% Rotten Tomatoes score and a Cannes standing ovation. This combination is rare. Do not miss it.
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What the Data Says About A24
Twenty-one films reviewed. Eleven lean traditional or stronger. Nine lean woke or stronger. One is a perfect dead heat. 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. Euphoria, Midsommar, Babygirl, Eddington, The Brutalist, Everything Everywhere All at Once: these are the films that define A24's cultural identity. Exit 8, The Death of Robin Hood, Backrooms, and Warfare exist in the same catalog, but they are not the films the studio markets as its identity.
The most interesting finding is temporal. The three most traditional A24 films in our database, Exit 8, The Death of Robin Hood, and Backrooms, are all 2026 releases. The 2026 A24 slate produced the studio's most conservative films ever, alongside some of its most progressive (The Drama, The Invite). The ideological range is not narrowing. It is widening. A24 is becoming harder to pin down, not easier.
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, but the data is starting to tell a more complicated story. Browse every A24 review and every film in our database at virtuevigil.com/reviews/.