Every 2022 Movie Ranked by Woke Score: 33 Films Tested

STRONGLY WOKE and WOKE (Margin -10.0 and Below)

#1: Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Woke Score: 24.3 • Traditional Score: 4.1 • Verdict: WOKE • Margin: -20.2

Genre: Mystery / Comedy | Platform: Netflix | Director: Rian Johnson

Rian Johnson's second Benoit Blanc mystery is a mechanical puzzle built on a political sermon. The film gathers a cast of broadly-drawn satirical targets (a men's rights streamer, a politician, a scientist, a fashion influencer) on a tech billionaire's private Greek island for a murder mystery weekend, and by the time the glass onion is peeled back, the message is clear: rich people are not just greedy, they are stupid, and the only moral response is collective action to tear them down. The mystery mechanics are genuinely clever. Johnson is very good at constructing a puzzle. But the 24.3 woke score reflects a film whose entire moral framework is built on progressive class resentment, identity-forward grievance, and the conviction that successful people got there by breaking rules the system was designed to let them break. The 4.1 traditional score reflects how little room the film leaves for any other way of seeing the world. If you agree with the politics, this is a satisfying romp. If you do not, it is two hours of being lectured at a dinner party you cannot leave.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Glass Onion

#2: Don't Worry Darling

Woke Score: 21.8 • Traditional Score: 2.7 • Verdict: WOKE LEAN • Margin: -19.1

Genre: Psychological Thriller | Platform: Theatrical | Director: Olivia Wilde

Olivia Wilde's second feature arrives packaged as a sexy, sun-drenched psychological thriller with Florence Pugh and Harry Styles, and underneath that packaging is a film-length argument that traditional domesticity is a prison designed by men to control women. The 1950s-styled Victory Project community, with its identical houses and obedient wives, is revealed as a simulation designed to trap women in a patriarchal fantasy while their husbands control their bodies in the real world. The 2.7 traditional score reflects a film that treats marriage, homemaking, and male breadwinning as inherently sinister. The 21.8 woke score reflects relentless feminist critique delivered without nuance or counter-argument. The most interesting thing about Don't Worry Darling is that the off-screen drama between Wilde, Pugh, and Styles generated more cultural conversation than anything in the script, which tells you everything about whether the sermon landed.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Don't Worry Darling

#3: Strange World

Woke Score: 27.5 • Traditional Score: 12.3 • Verdict: WOKE LEAN • Margin: -15.2

Genre: Animation / Sci-Fi / Adventure | Platform: Theatrical / Disney+

Strange World is the movie where Disney stopped pretending. This $180 million animated adventure centers a family of explorers led by Searcher Clade, a farmer who rejected his legendary adventurer father Jaeger's legacy to build a sustainable agricultural community. The twist, revealed past the midpoint, is that the world the characters live in sits on the back of a giant turtle-like creature, and the energy source they have been harvesting (Pando) is a parasite killing their world. The message is an explicit ecological allegory: extractive energy is killing the planet. But what generated the most pre-release discussion was the teenage son Ethan, who has a same-sex crush that is treated as entirely unremarkable by every character in the film. The 27.5 woke score combines progressive environmental messaging with LGBTQ+ normalization aimed at children. The 12.3 traditional score exists because the father-son reconciliation arc, between Searcher and Jaeger, is genuinely moving and built on traditional themes of legacy, forgiveness, and family loyalty. Disney lost an estimated $147 million on Strange World in one of the most spectacular box office failures in the studio's history. Audiences voted with their wallets.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Strange World

BALANCED WOKE (Margin -5.0 to -9.9)

#4: Turning Red

Woke Score: 17.9 • Traditional Score: 4.6 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -13.3

Genre: Animation / Comedy / Fantasy | Platform: Disney+

Turning Red is technically brilliant and ideologically loaded. Domee Shi's coming-of-age story about a 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl who transforms into a giant red panda when she experiences strong emotion is a Pixar film about puberty delivered with the subtlety of a foghorn. The red panda is a metaphor for menstruation. The conflict between Mei and her overprotective mother Ming is a metaphor for intergenerational trauma around female bodily autonomy. The resolution is that Mei must embrace her panda rather than suppress it, which is the film arguing that traditional parental restraint is the problem and unfiltered self-expression is the solution. The 4.6 traditional score reflects a film that treats parental authority as an obstacle to be overcome rather than guidance to be internalized. The 17.9 woke score reflects a film-length argument for progressive models of childhood development aimed squarely at preteen girls. Pixar can still do breathtaking animation. What they choose to do with it is a different question.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Turning Red

NEARLY BALANCED (Margin -5.0 to +5.0)

#5: All Quiet on the Western Front

Woke Score: 13.9 • Traditional Score: 9.0 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -4.9

Genre: War / Drama | Platform: Netflix | Director: Edward Berger

Edward Berger's German-language adaptation of Remarque's 1929 novel is a technically brilliant film with a clear ideological agenda, and those two things are inseparable. The film adds a parallel storyline, absent from the novel, in which German officials negotiate the armistice while the generals cynically order one final assault. That addition transforms the story from a soldier's-eye view of war's horror into an argument about the moral bankruptcy of military institutions and national pride. The 13.9 woke score reflects institutional distrust and anti-war messaging elevated to thesis. The 9.0 traditional score reflects the genuine comradeship and sacrifice among the soldiers themselves. The film won four Academy Awards including Best International Feature and Best Cinematography. It deserves every technical award it received. It is also, unmistakably, a film that argues that patriotism is a lie that old men tell young men to get them killed.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of All Quiet on the Western Front

#6: Thor: Love and Thunder

Woke Score: 16.4 • Traditional Score: 12.3 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: -4.2

Genre: Action / Adventure / Comedy | Platform: Theatrical

Thor: Love and Thunder is a film at war with itself. It contains the raw materials for a genuinely powerful story about grief, faith, and the failure of the gods, but it buries that story under Taika Waititi's relentless impulse to undercut every sincere moment with a joke. Christian Bale's Gorr the God Butcher is a magnificent villain whose daughter died because the gods ignored her suffering. Thor's journey is about finding purpose after catastrophic loss. These are traditional themes. The 16.4 woke score comes from the film's treatment of Jane Foster as the new Thor (a comics storyline retrofitted for the screen with a terminal cancer diagnosis that makes her self-sacrifice noble), its sidelining of Thor himself in his own movie, and the general sense that the male hero must be humbled before the female hero gets her moment. The result is a BALANCED verdict that no one found satisfying, neither audiences who wanted the epic Waititi promised nor critics who wanted the deconstruction to go further.

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#7: Lightyear

Woke Score: 10.2 • Traditional Score: 6.7 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: -3.6

Genre: Animation / Sci-Fi / Action | Platform: Theatrical

Lightyear became a cultural flashpoint for a same-sex kiss that was restored to the film after Disney employees protested the company's response to Florida's Parental Rights in Education law. The kiss itself is brief and incidental, but its inclusion was explicitly political, a public relations statement rather than a storytelling decision. The film around it is a mediocre Pixar effort about Buzz Lightyear stranded on an alien planet, trying to complete a mission that requires decades of time-dilation sacrifice. The 10.2 woke score is mostly the kiss's political context rather than the film's content. The 6.7 traditional score comes from Buzz's genuine commitment to mission, duty, and getting his crew home, which are traditional military values. The film underperformed at the box office and was widely seen as Pixar's first genuine creative misfire, a rare combination of mediocre craft and culture-war baggage that satisfied no constituency.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Lightyear

#8: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Woke Score: 13.6 • Traditional Score: 10.2 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: -3.4

Genre: Action / Adventure / Horror | Platform: Theatrical

The MCU's most interesting mess. Sam Raimi brings genuine horror filmmaking to a franchise that desperately needed it, Elizabeth Olsen delivers a villain performance for the ages as Wanda Maximoff, and the multiverse concept finally gets the unhinged treatment it deserves. The 13.6 woke score reflects Wanda's grief being framed as monstrous rather than sympathetic (a narrative choice that angered some progressive fans who wanted a redemption arc) and the film's introduction of America Chavez, a dimension-hopping teenager with two mothers whose backstory is delivered through a brief flashback. The 10.2 traditional score reflects Doctor Strange's arc: learning that holding the knife is sometimes the right call, that not every problem can be solved through negotiation, and that protecting reality itself requires making hard choices. The film is ideologically scrambled in a way that reflects its production chaos (extensive reshoots, director change) more than any coherent agenda.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

#9: Amsterdam

Woke Score: 10.5 • Traditional Score: 9.2 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: -1.3

Genre: Mystery / Comedy / Thriller | Platform: Theatrical / Disney+

David O. Russell assembled an obscenely talented cast (Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Robert De Niro, Rami Malek, Anya Taylor-Joy) and made a film about friendship, decency, and the courage it takes to defend democracy against people with money and no conscience. It is also a mess. The 10.5 woke score comes from the film's positioning of a fascist-adjacent plot by American business elites, a subject that could be treated as historical warning but is instead framed as contemporary allegory. The 9.2 traditional score comes from the central trio's bond, which is built on genuine loyalty, sacrifice, and the conviction that decent people must stand against tyranny. Amsterdam was one of 2022's biggest financial disasters, losing an estimated $97 million, but its ideological content is less aggressive than its box office failure might suggest. It is a film that wants to be Capra-esque and mostly just ends up confused.

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#10: The Whale

Woke Score: 9.1 • Traditional Score: 9.1 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: 0.0

Genre: Drama | Platform: Theatrical / A24 | Director: Darren Aronofsky

Brendan Fraser won the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing Charlie, a 600-pound online writing instructor who is eating himself to death in his apartment while trying to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter before it is too late. The film lands at exactly 0.0 margin, a dead-even split, because it is simultaneously a deeply traditional story about a father trying to do one good thing before he dies and a progressive story about a gay man abandoned by his religious community. Aronofsky does not pick a side. The 9.1 on both scales reflects a film that contains both perspectives without resolving them. Charlie's ex-wife, played by Hong Chau, is the voice of traditional values in the film, and the script gives her genuine arguments without mocking her. The result is a film that progressives and conservatives can both watch and each feel seen, which is either a genuine achievement or a strategic evasion, depending on your tolerance for ambiguity.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Whale

#11: The Menu

Woke Score: 9.3 • Traditional Score: 9.7 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: +0.4

Genre: Black Comedy / Horror | Platform: Theatrical / Disney+

The Menu is a slick, well-crafted class satire that will make you laugh and make you uneasy, sometimes at the same time. Ralph Fiennes plays a celebrity chef who has invited a select group of diners to his exclusive island restaurant for a meal they will not survive. The targets are broad: a food critic and her sycophantic editor, a washed-up movie star, finance bros, and a tech entrepreneur. The 9.3 woke score reflects the anti-capitalist, anti-elite messaging that animates the entire premise. The 9.7 traditional score reflects the film's genuine respect for craft, for the dignity of making something with your hands, and for the working-class perspective of Anya Taylor-Joy's Margot, who is the only guest smart enough to see what is happening and the only one who earns her escape. The result is a film whose ideology is more muddled than it appears, which is actually to its credit. It takes shots at everyone.

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#12: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Woke Score: 15.3 • Traditional Score: 16.3 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: +1.0

Genre: Action / Adventure / Comedy / Drama / Sci-Fi | Platform: Theatrical (A24)

The film that won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture is the most ideologically complex movie of 2022. On one hand, it is a deeply traditional story about a Chinese-American mother, Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), trying to save her family, reconnect with her daughter, and hold her marriage together. The multiverse gimmick is window dressing for a story about a wife and mother who realizes that the life she chose, with all its disappointments, was worth choosing. On the other hand, the film's treatment of Joy's relationship with her girlfriend, the omnipresent butt-plug humor, and the general chaos-as-virtue aesthetic all push in progressive directions. The 15.3 woke score and 16.3 traditional score are both substantial because the film contains multitudes, literally and figuratively. The slight traditional edge comes from the emotional resolution: Evelyn does not transcend her family, she recommits to it. The film's central argument is that kindness and connection matter more than nihilism, which is a traditional value dressed in the most anti-traditional clothing imaginable.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Everything Everywhere All at Once

#13: Avatar: The Way of Water

Woke Score: 14.5 • Traditional Score: 17.1 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: +2.6

Genre: Sci-Fi / Action / Adventure | Platform: Theatrical

Avatar: The Way of Water is a more conservative film than its politics suggest. Yes, the humans are the villains again. Yes, the RDA corporation is back to strip-mine Pandora for resources. The environmental messaging is as unsubtle as the first film. But the structure of the film is deeply traditional: Jake Sully is a father protecting his family. Every decision he makes, including the decision to flee his clan and seek refuge with the ocean Na'vi, is motivated by the safety of his children. The 14.5 woke score reflects the anti-corporate, anti-colonial, pro-environment messaging that James Cameron wears on his sleeve. The 17.1 traditional score reflects the pro-family, pro-sacrifice, pro-community values that run underneath the surface. Cameron is a filmmaker whose politics are progressive but whose storytelling instincts are fundamentally classical. The result is a $2.3 billion blockbuster that progressives could feel good about watching and traditional audiences could also genuinely enjoy, which is either the formula for mass-market success or the reason the film feels ideologically incoherent, depending on your perspective.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Avatar: The Way of Water

#14: Elvis

Woke Score: 7.9 • Traditional Score: 11.6 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: +3.7

Genre: Biography / Drama / Music | Platform: Theatrical | Director: Baz Luhrmann

Baz Luhrmann does not make subtle films. That is both the gift and the problem with Elvis. This is two hours and thirty-nine minutes of sensory overload: quick cuts, swirling camera moves, a soundtrack that remixes Presley's catalog with modern hip-hop, and Austin Butler's career-making performance as the King. The 7.9 woke score reflects the film's framing of Elvis's career through the lens of cultural appropriation (he got rich singing music that Black artists were not allowed to perform on white stages) and the Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) as a predatory capitalist who exploited Presley's talent until it killed him. The 11.6 traditional score reflects the film's genuine reverence for Elvis's relationship with his mother, his military service, and his love of gospel music. Luhrmann cannot resist spectacle, and the spectacle sometimes overwhelms the subject, but Butler's performance is so committed that the film earns its emotional weight despite its excesses.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Elvis

#15: Babylon

Woke Score: 10.5 • Traditional Score: 14.5 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: +4.0

Genre: Period Drama / Black Comedy | Platform: Theatrical

Damien Chazelle wanted to make a film about the magic of movies. He made it by putting that magic through a meat grinder for three hours and nine minutes to see if anything noble survived the processing. Babylon is about Hollywood's transition from silent films to talkies, and it opens with an elephant defecating on a man and proceeds through orgies, drug binges, and suicide before arriving at a montage sequence that argues it was all worth it because movies are transcendent. The 10.5 woke score reflects the film's treatment of Hollywood excess as simultaneously decadent and liberating, and its positioning of a Black jazz trumpeter (Jovan Adepo) and an Asian-American cabaret performer (Li Jun Li) as victims of an industry that used them and discarded them. The 14.5 traditional score reflects the film's genuine, almost religious love of cinema itself, its respect for the craft of performance, and its conviction that art matters. Babylon was a financial catastrophe, losing an estimated $87 million, but it is a fascinating mess that contains some of the year's best sequences alongside some of its most self-indulgent.

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BALANCED TRADITIONAL (Margin +5.0 to +14.9)

#16: Bullet Train

Woke Score: 2.4 • Traditional Score: 7.3 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: +4.9

Genre: Action / Comedy / Thriller | Platform: Theatrical | Director: David Leitch

David Leitch, the co-director of the original John Wick, made a candy-colored action comedy about a hitman named Ladybug (Brad Pitt) who just wants to do his job and get off a Japanese bullet train without killing anyone. This turns out to be impossible because the train is full of other assassins with their own agendas. The 2.4 woke score reflects an action film almost entirely uninterested in political messaging. The 7.3 traditional score reflects a film where luck, competence, and determination matter, and where the resolution involves the hero deciding to stop being a passive participant in his own life and start making choices. Bullet Train is not deep. It is not trying to be. It is a popcorn movie that delivers exactly what it promises, which in 2022 was getting harder to find.

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#17: Black Adam

Woke Score: 7.7 • Traditional Score: 13.0 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: +5.3

Genre: Superhero / Action | Platform: Theatrical (Warner Bros. / DC Films)

Dwayne Johnson spent over a decade trying to get Black Adam made, and the result has everything it needs to be a great comic book film and makes almost none of it work. The premise is genuinely interesting: Teth-Adam, an ancient champion granted the power of the gods, is awakened in the modern world and discovers that being a hero is more complicated than killing everyone who stands in your way. The 7.7 woke score is modest, reflecting the film's glancing treatment of Middle Eastern representation and anti-colonial themes in the fictional nation of Kahndaq. The 13.0 traditional score reflects a superhero film built around the question of what righteous violence looks like, with a protagonist who refuses to apologize for his methods. The Justice Society shows up to lecture him about restraint and due process, and the film is genuinely interested in that debate. It just cannot make it compelling enough to matter. Black Adam underperformed at the box office, and Johnson's grand plans for a DC Universe reboot died with it.

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#18: The Gray Man

Woke Score: 8.0 • Traditional Score: 14.5 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: +6.5

Genre: Action / Spy Thriller | Platform: Netflix | Director: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

The Russo brothers' first post-Marvel project is a frustrating film to assess because it contains the bones of something genuinely good but makes choices that undermine it at critical moments. Ryan Gosling plays Sierra Six, a CIA assassin who goes rogue after discovering that the agency's leadership is corrupt. The 8.0 woke score reflects the anti-institutional framework (the CIA is the villain, the hero is an individual acting against the system) that has become the default setting for spy thrillers. The 14.5 traditional score reflects the film's relentless commitment to action craft: practical stunts, real martial choreography, and a protagonist who solves problems through competence and determination rather than identity or grievance. Chris Evans chews scenery as the psychopathic antagonist Lloyd Hansen, and the film is at its best when Gosling and Evans are trying to kill each other. It is at its worst when it pretends to have something to say about the surveillance state. Netflix spent $200 million on this and got exactly the algorithm-friendly action content it paid for.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Gray Man

#19: Prey

Woke Score: 10.9 • Traditional Score: 18.3 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: +7.4

Genre: Action / Sci-Fi / Thriller | Platform: Hulu | Director: Dan Trachtenberg

Prey is the best Predator film since the 1987 original, and it is also a film that requires honest assessment of what it is doing ideologically. Set in the Comanche Nation in 1719, the film follows Naru (Amber Midthunder), a young woman who wants to be a hunter despite her tribe's expectation that she will be a gatherer and healer. The 10.9 woke score reflects the girl-boss framework: Naru must prove herself against the skepticism of the male hunters, and her victory over the Predator is framed as the triumph of intelligence and observation over brute force. The 18.3 traditional score reflects everything else: the film's deep respect for Comanche culture, its treatment of hunting as a sacred activity, the brother-sister bond between Naru and Taabe that drives the emotional stakes, and the Predator itself, which is a classic monster of pure predatory instinct. The fight scenes are brutal and practical. The period setting is meticulous. The result is a film that uses a progressive framework to tell a traditional story, which is the most effective kind of ideological delivery because it does not feel like delivery at all.

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#20: The Banshees of Inisherin

Woke Score: 8.7 • Traditional Score: 16.2 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: +7.5

Genre: Drama / Dark Comedy | Platform: Theatrical | Director: Martin McDonagh

Martin McDonagh made a film about a man ending a friendship and the destruction that follows, and it is one of the best films of 2022. Colin Farrell plays Padraic, a simple, kind farmer on a remote Irish island in 1923. Brendan Gleeson plays Colm, the fiddler who decides, without warning, that Padraic is too dull to spend time with and that he will cut off one of his own fingers every time Padraic speaks to him. The 8.7 woke score is negligible. This film has no interest in identity politics, institutional critique, or progressive messaging of any kind. The 16.2 traditional score reflects a film that is entirely about community, loyalty, legacy, and the question of what makes a life worth remembering. The island itself, with its church, its pub, its post office, and its shared understanding of how people should treat each other, is a traditional community under siege from the modern impulse toward self-actualization at any cost. This is a masterpiece that will outlast every superhero film on this list.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Banshees of Inisherin

#21: Till

Woke Score: 10.3 • Traditional Score: 18.0 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: +7.7

Genre: Biographical Drama | Platform: Theatrical / Peacock

Till is not a film about Emmett Till. It is a film about Mamie Till, and that distinction is what elevates it above the civil rights drama genre. Danielle Deadwyler plays Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother who insisted on an open-casket funeral for her murdered 14-year-old son so the world could see what was done to him, and the performance is one of the year's best. The 10.3 woke score reflects the subject matter and the institutional critique of Jim Crow justice. The 18.0 traditional score reflects the film's treatment of motherhood, faith, dignity, and the courage it takes to transform private grief into public action. Mamie Till is not an activist seeking systemic reform in the abstract. She is a mother demanding justice for her son. The film understands the difference, and that understanding is what gives it its power. This is a civil rights film that conservatives can watch without feeling like they are being lectured, which is rarer than it should be.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Till

#22: A Man Called Otto

Woke Score: 5.5 • Traditional Score: 14.0 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: +8.5

Genre: Drama / Comedy-Drama | Platform: Theatrical

Tom Hanks plays Otto Anderson, a recently retired widower who is ready to end his life when a young family moves in across the street and refuses to let him be miserable. The American remake of the Swedish film A Man Called Ove is one of the most gentle, humane films of 2022. The 5.5 woke score reflects a film with almost no ideological content at all. The 14.0 traditional score reflects the film's treatment of marriage (Otto's relationship with his late wife Sonya is the emotional anchor), community, neighborly obligation, and the dignity of being useful. Otto finds purpose not through self-actualization but through serving the people around him. That is a deeply traditional message delivered without an ounce of preachiness. The film was a modest commercial success, proving that audiences still want stories about decent people being decent to each other.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of A Man Called Otto

#23: Smile

Woke Score: 5.0 • Traditional Score: 14.8 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: +9.8

Genre: Horror / Psychological Thriller | Platform: Theatrical / Paramount+

Smile opened to $22 million on a $17 million budget and eventually grossed $217 million worldwide, becoming the rare horror film that critics and audiences agreed on. Sosie Bacon plays Dr. Rose Cotter, a psychiatrist who witnesses a patient's violent suicide and begins experiencing increasingly terrifying hallucinations of people smiling at her. The 5.0 woke score reflects a horror film with almost no political messaging. The 14.8 traditional score reflects a film about trauma, guilt, and the question of whether a person can outrun what they have done. The horror mechanics are disciplined and effective. The jump scares are earned. And the film's emotional core, Rose's relationship with her estranged family and her unresolved guilt over her mother's death, is more traditional than most prestige dramas released in 2022.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Smile

#24: Uncharted

Woke Score: 5.4 • Traditional Score: 16.0 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: +10.6

Genre: Action / Adventure | Platform: Theatrical

Uncharted spent fourteen years in development hell, and the result is exactly the kind of breezy, forgettable action-adventure that used to fill multiplexes during the summer. Tom Holland plays a young Nathan Drake, Mark Wahlberg plays his mentor Sully, and together they chase a lost fortune across the globe. The 5.4 woke score reflects a film that has approximately zero interest in progressive messaging. The 16.0 traditional score reflects an old-fashioned treasure hunt built on trust, competence, and the tension between greed and loyalty. The film is not great. It is a competent piece of IP mining that coasts on Holland's charisma and Wahlberg's gruff reliability. But in a year when even blockbusters could not resist the urge to lecture their audiences, a film that just wants to be fun is more valuable than it appears.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Uncharted

#25: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Woke Score: 18.4 • Traditional Score: 29.5 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: +11.0

Genre: Superhero / Action / Drama | Platform: Theatrical

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a film at war with itself, and the war is between the franchise's ideological architecture and the genuine human grief at its center. Chadwick Boseman's death hangs over every frame, and the film's best sequences are a meditation on loss, legacy, and the burden of leadership that Angela Bassett carries with a performance that earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination. The 18.4 woke score reflects the film's commitment to the same anti-colonial, Africa-first framework as the original, amplified by the introduction of Namor and the underwater kingdom of Talokan as indigenous resistors to colonial extraction. The 29.5 traditional score, one of the year's highest, reflects the film's treatment of Shuri's grief, her crisis of faith, and her eventual decision to choose mercy over vengeance. The two impulses do not sit easily together, and the film is overstuffed with plot and characters, but the parts that work are genuinely powerful.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

#26: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Woke Score: 2.4 • Traditional Score: 16.2 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: +13.8

Genre: Animated Adventure / Comedy | Platform: Theatrical / Peacock

Nobody expected an eleventh-year sequel to a DreamWorks spin-off about a talking cat from the Shrek franchise to be one of the best animated films of 2022. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is about mortality. Puss (Antonio Banderas) has burned through eight of his nine lives and is now being hunted by Death itself, personified as a terrifying wolf with red eyes who is one of the best animated villains in recent memory. The 2.4 woke score reflects a film that has no interest in political messaging. The 16.2 traditional score reflects a story about accepting limitations, valuing the one life you have, and recognizing that the people who love you are more important than the legend you are trying to build. The animation style is gorgeous, adopting a painterly, Into the Spider-Verse aesthetic. The script is witty without being snarky. This is the rare sequel that improves on the original.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

#27: The Batman

Woke Score: 8.0 • Traditional Score: 22.1 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: +14.1

Genre: Superhero / Crime / Neo-Noir | Platform: Theatrical / Max | Director: Matt Reeves

Matt Reeves made the rare superhero film where you forget you are watching a superhero film. The Batman is three hours of neo-noir crime filmmaking that happens to star a man in a rubber suit. It owes more to Seven and Zodiac than to the MCU. Robert Pattinson's Bruce Wayne is a broken man who has not yet figured out the difference between vengeance and justice, and the film's arc is about learning that distinction. The 8.0 woke score reflects Catwoman's backstory (her girlfriend disappeared, a plot point some critics read as bisexual coding) and the film's treatment of Gotham's institutional corruption. The 22.1 traditional score reflects the film's core argument: that justice requires more than punishment, that hope is worth building toward, and that a city cannot be saved by one man's violence. The Batman is a crime epic that takes its moral architecture seriously, and the result is the best DC film since The Dark Knight.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Batman

#28: Nope

Woke Score: 6.7 • Traditional Score: 20.8 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: +14.1

Genre: Horror / Sci-Fi | Platform: Theatrical | Director: Jordan Peele

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 did not. Nope is about a brother and sister, OJ and Emerald Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer), who run a horse-training ranch for Hollywood productions and discover that a UFO is eating their livestock. The 6.7 woke score is surprisingly low for a Peele film, reflecting a director who has moved past the explicit racial politics of Get Out and Us into something more universal. The 20.8 traditional score reflects a film about family business, the dignity of working with animals, the bond between siblings, and the conviction that some things are worth facing even when you are terrified. Nope is a Spielbergian spectacle filmed by someone who deeply understands spectacle. It is also, unmistakably, a film that treats its audience with respect rather than contempt, which in Peele's filmography is its own kind of political statement.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Nope

TRADITIONAL and STRONGLY TRADITIONAL (Margin +15.0 and Above)

#29: Violent Night

Woke Score: 2.5 • Traditional Score: 20.6 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL LEAN • Margin: +18.1

Genre: Action / Comedy / Thriller | Platform: Theatrical

The pitch is absurd and perfect: Santa Claus is actually an immortal Viking warrior named Nicomund the Red who became the Christmas figure after centuries of gift-giving penance, and when a team of mercenaries takes a wealthy family hostage on Christmas Eve, he reverts to his old ways. David Harbour plays Santa as a weary, disillusioned immortal who has lost faith in the holiday he created, and the arc of the film is his recovery of that faith through protecting a little girl who still believes. The 2.5 woke score reflects a film with zero political messaging. The 20.6 traditional score reflects a Christmas movie that takes Christmas seriously, treating faith, family, and the magic of childhood belief as things worth fighting for. Violent Night is not a great film, but it is a sincere one, and in a genre landscape that treats sincerity as weakness, that sincerity is its own kind of rebellion.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Violent Night

#30: Father Stu

Woke Score: 2.0 • Traditional Score: 21.8 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL • Margin: +19.8

Genre: Biography / Drama | Platform: Theatrical

Mark Wahlberg paid for this film himself. Sony looked at the premise, a Catholic boxing biopic about a man who embraces progressive muscle disease as participation in Christ's suffering, and declined to distribute it. Wahlberg financed it, starred in it, and released it through his own production company. The 2.0 woke score reflects a film with no progressive content whatsoever. The 21.8 traditional score reflects a film about conversion, suffering, vocation, and the conviction that physical decline can be a form of spiritual ascent. Father Stu is not subtle. It is a faith film made by a believer for believers, and it does not apologize for what it is. If you are not Catholic, or not religious at all, the film's theological framework may feel alien. But the craft is genuine, Wahlberg's performance is committed, and the film's refusal to sand down its Catholic edges is, in the context of 2022 Hollywood, genuinely radical.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Father Stu

#31: Top Gun: Maverick

Woke Score: 1.1 • Traditional Score: 21.3 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL • Margin: +20.2

Genre: Action / Drama | Platform: Theatrical

Top Gun: Maverick is the best American action film in at least a decade, and it achieved that by ignoring almost everything Hollywood has been doing for the last ten years. There is no deconstruction. No subversion. No lecture. Tom Cruise plays Captain Pete Mitchell, thirty years after the original, still a test pilot, still refusing to take a promotion that would ground him, and still carrying the weight of Goose's death. The 1.1 woke score is the lowest in the entire 2022 database, reflecting a film that has zero interest in identity politics, progressive messaging, or any ideological content whatsoever. The 21.3 traditional score reflects a film about excellence, sacrifice, mentorship, and the conviction that some things are worth dying for. The flight sequences are real. Cruise is in the cockpit. The actors trained to withstand G-forces. This is not CGI. It is craft. $1.5 billion at the global box office. The audience spoke.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Top Gun: Maverick

#32: The Northman

Woke Score: 4.4 • Traditional Score: 24.6 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL • Margin: +20.2

Genre: Action / Drama / Historical | Platform: Theatrical | Director: Robert Eggers

Robert Eggers made a $90 million Viking revenge epic that is essentially Hamlet with more throat-slitting and pagan ritual. Alexander Skarsgard plays Amleth, a Viking prince who watches his father murdered by his uncle, flees, and spends his entire adult life becoming strong enough to return and exact vengeance. The 4.4 woke score reflects a film set in a pre-Christian world where modern political categories simply do not apply. The 24.6 traditional score reflects a film built entirely on tradition: fate, blood, honor, vengeance, and the conviction that a man's life is defined by how he faces his death. The film is brutal, beautiful, and utterly sincere. It treats Norse mythology not as metaphor but as reality. The gods are real. Fate is real. Prophecy is real. And Amleth's journey is not about self-actualization. It is about fulfilling a destiny he did not choose but cannot escape. The Northman was a commercial disappointment, but it is one of the most ideologically traditional films of the decade.

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#33: Tar

Woke Score: 7.1 • Traditional Score: 28.3 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL • Margin: +21.2

Genre: Drama | Platform: Streaming

Tar is the most misunderstood film of 2022. Progressive film critics celebrated it as a sober portrait of a powerful woman brought down by her abuse of power, which is exactly the kind of reading the film is designed to invite and then complicate. Cate Blanchett plays Lydia Tar, the world's greatest living conductor, as she prepares for a career-defining performance of Mahler's Fifth Symphony while her personal and professional life unravels under the weight of canceled speaking engagements, viral videos, and accusations of sexual misconduct. The 7.1 woke score reflects a film whose subject matter is progressive (cancel culture, #MeToo, institutional power) but whose treatment of that subject is anything but. Tar is not a victim. She is guilty of the things she is accused of. The film does not ask you to feel sorry for her. It asks you to watch a great artist destroy herself and then ask whether the art survives the artist. The 28.3 traditional score reflects a film about excellence, discipline, the sacrifices required to achieve greatness, and the question of whether morality and genius can coexist. This is a conservative film wearing progressive clothing, which is why critics who wanted a simple parable about power and gender found it confusing and audiences who met it on its own terms found it devastating.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Tar