2024 was the year Hollywood's ideological machinery ran at full throttle while audiences increasingly voted with their wallets and their attention spans. It was the year an openly progressive film about papal succession (Conclave) became an awards-season juggernaut. It was the year a body-horror film about female aging (The Substance) became a cultural phenomenon. It was the year Deadpool & Wolverine -- proudly irreverent, proudly un-woke -- made $1.3 billion and embarrassed every pundit who predicted superhero fatigue would kill it. And it was the year Reagan, a $25 million biopic 14 years in the making, found its audience despite near-total critical hostility.
The VirtueVigil Woke Score (VVWS) measures progressive ideological content: identity politics, institutional distrust, progressive sexual framing, and systemic oppression narratives. The Traditional Score measures traditional values: courage, family, faith, sacrifice, moral clarity, and individual agency. The margin between them is what matters. A negative margin means the film pushes progressive ideology. A positive margin means it affirms traditional values. The size of the gap tells you how hard it pushes.
Of the 100 scored 2024 films in our database, 28 lean woke, 35 are roughly balanced, and 37 lean traditional. On raw numbers, that looks surprisingly even. But the distribution of cultural attention was anything but. Conclave, Anora, Emilia Perez, and The Substance dominated awards season. They received the marketing budgets, the magazine covers, the Oscar campaigns, and the cultural conversation. The traditional films -- with the notable exception of Deadpool & Wolverine, which succeeded despite the critical establishment, not because of it -- fought for scraps of attention. The 2024 pattern is the same as every recent year: progressive films get the megaphone; traditional films have to be undeniable just to be heard.
Here is every 2024 film in the VirtueVigil database, ranked from most woke to most traditional. Every entry links to the full review with content warnings for parents and complete category breakdowns.
STRONGLY WOKE and WOKE
These films push progressive ideology aggressively. Each carries a woke score significantly higher than its traditional counterpart, creating a large negative margin. The messaging is not subtle, and parents should review content warnings carefully before letting teens watch.
#1: Conclave
Woke Score: 42.6 • Traditional Score: 3.9 • Verdict: WOKE • Margin: -38.7
Genre: Thriller | Platform: Streaming
Edward Berger's Conclave is the most dangerous kind of progressive film: one that is genuinely excellent. This is not low-budget agitprop. It is not a ham-fisted lecture. It is a visually sumptuous, masterfully acted, compulsively watchable political thriller set inside the Vatican. Ralph Fiennes gives one of the performances of his career. The cinematography by Stéphane Fontaine is austere and magnificent.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Conclave
#2: Heretic
Woke Score: 41.2 • Traditional Score: 13.7 • Verdict: WOKE • Margin: -27.5
Genre: Horror | Platform: Streaming
Let's not dance around it. Heretic is not a horror film that happens to touch on religion. It is a theological assault on Christianity - and on all monotheistic faith - dressed in genre clothing and delivered via Hugh Grant's most charming, murderous performance. The film exists to make one argument: that religion is a con, an evolutionary "iteration" of ancient control systems, and that people who believe are either naive, manipulated, or both.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Heretic
#3: Anora
Woke Score: 35.8 • Traditional Score: 9.9 • Verdict: WOKE • Margin: -25.9
Genre: Drama | Platform: Streaming
Hollywood handed its highest honor - Best Picture at the 97th Academy Awards - to a film whose protagonist is a sex worker and exotic dancer, whose marriage to a Russian oligarch's failson disintegrates in real time, and whose director dedicated his Oscar to "all sex workers everywhere." The conservative reaction was predictable: Jason Whitlock of The Blaze called it a "porno"; columnists decried it as glorifying prostitution; social media erupted in disbelief that the Academy had gone this far.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Anora
#4: Emilia Pérez
Woke Score: 30.4 • Traditional Score: 5.0 • Verdict: WOKE • Margin: -25.4
Genre: Musical/Crime/Drama | Platform: Netflix
Jacques Audiard's Emilia Perez is a film that managed the rare feat of uniting both progressive and conservative critics against it while simultaneously earning 13 Oscar nominations - the most for any non-English-language film in Academy history. The transgender cartel musical won Best Supporting Actress for Zoe Saldana and Best Original Song at the 97th Academy Awards, but its cultural legacy may be defined less by its trophies than by its extraordinary capacity to offend nearly everyone.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Emilia Pérez
#5: The Substance
Woke Score: 37.3 • Traditional Score: 13.2 • Verdict: WOKE • Margin: -24.1
Genre: Horror | Platform: Streaming
Hollywood has always fed on its own. Stars rise, burn bright, and are discarded - usually on a schedule dictated by age, gender, and the appetite of an industry that treats women as decorative objects with expiration dates. Most films that address this fact do so through a tasteful drama, a quietly devastating performance, a knowing wink at the camera. Coralie Fargeat looked at that tradition and decided to use 21,000 liters of fake blood instead.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Substance
#6: Immaculate
Woke Score: 25.4 • Traditional Score: 3.5 • Verdict: WOKE • Margin: -21.9
Genre: Horror | Platform: Theatrical / Hulu
Sydney Sweeney spent years developing Immaculate as a vehicle that would let her operate in the horror genre while carrying a message she clearly believed in. The film that emerged - shot in Italy, dressed in Catholic iconography, structured as Rosemary's Baby filtered through contemporary reproductive politics - became one of 2024's most discussed horror films and one of its most precisely crafted woke traps. Classification: WOKE Woke Trap Assessment SIGNIFICANT WOKE TRAP.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Immaculate
WOKE LEAN
The progressive messaging in these films is pronounced but not all-consuming. They lean woke through character framing, narrative choices, or institutional critique, but stop short of being full ideological vehicles.
#7: Blitz
Woke Score: 33.0 • Traditional Score: 14.7 • Verdict: WOKE LEAN • Margin: -18.3
Genre: Drama | Platform: Apple TV+
Steve McQueen's "Blitz" arrives dressed in the clothing of a wartime survival story, the kind of tale that should celebrate British resilience, familial devotion, and the quiet heroism of ordinary people under extraordinary duress. And to be fair, those elements genuinely exist here, more than a first viewing might suggest. Saoirse Ronan delivers a deeply committed performance as Rita, a mother whose entire being is organized around recovering her evacuated son.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Blitz
#8: MaXXXine
Woke Score: 31.5 • Traditional Score: 13.6 • Verdict: WOKE LEAN • Margin: -17.9
Genre: Horror/Crime | Platform: Theatrical
Ti West's X trilogy ends the way it began - with a woman who refuses to apologize for wanting more. MaXXXine drops Mia Goth's Maxine Minx into 1985 Los Angeles, where the Night Stalker prowls the streets, the Moral Majority screams from every television, and a former porn star claws her way toward Hollywood legitimacy. The film made $22 million worldwide on a sub-$10 million budget - not a blockbuster, but profitable for A24 - and earned a 75% on Rotten Tomatoes alongside a 6.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of MaXXXine
#9: A Different Man
Woke Score: 17.6 • Traditional Score: 0.0 • Verdict: WOKE LEAN • Margin: -17.6
Genre: Thriller/Drama/Sci-Fi | Platform: Theatrical
A Different Man is a film about male entitlement, romantic rejection, and violent revenge disguised as an indie character study about self-acceptance and social anxiety. It is a woke trap in the most literal sense: the film presents one narrative (awkward man learns confidence, gains friendship, attempts romance) and pivots into a completely different narrative (rejected man psychologically terrorizes his neighbor) while asking the audience to celebrate his transformation from sympathetic outsider to gaslighting abuser.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of A Different Man
#10: Lisa Frankenstein
Woke Score: 21.0 • Traditional Score: 4.2 • Verdict: WOKE LEAN • Margin: -16.8
Genre: Horror | Platform: Theatrical (Focus Features)
Lisa Frankenstein is Diablo Cody's Jennifer's Body with worse reviews and a better aesthetic. That sentence is both a description and a verdict. Cody's Jennifer's Body (2009) was a horror film about a girl possessed by a demon who ate male victims. Critics dismissed it on release and it was later reclaimed as a feminist cult classic when its target audience grew up and recognized what it was.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Lisa Frankenstein
#11: Blink Twice
Woke Score: 22.2 • Traditional Score: 5.9 • Verdict: WOKE LEAN • Margin: -16.3
Genre: Psychological Thriller / Mystery | Platform: Theatrical / Amazon Prime Video
Let's be direct about what Blink Twice is doing and whether it succeeds at it. Zoe Kravitz made a #MeToo thriller. Specifically, she made a film about what it is like to be a woman in proximity to the kind of wealth and power that can make crimes disappear. The island. The perfume that wipes memories. The therapist who approves the setup. The men who treat systematic violation as a perk of success. Kravitz was not subtle about her intentions before, during, or after production.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Blink Twice
#12: Babygirl
Woke Score: 19.2 • Traditional Score: 4.4 • Verdict: WOKE LEAN • Margin: -14.8
Genre: Erotic Thriller/Drama | Platform: Theatrical / A24
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. Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman) runs a robotics company in New York. She is successful, powerful, and sexually unfulfilled. Her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) is a theater director she loves and cannot fully desire.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Babygirl
BALANCED WOKE
These films contain progressive elements that outweigh traditional ones, but the gap is modest. They are more interested in storytelling than messaging, though the messaging is present.
#13: The Apprentice
Woke Score: 21.0 • Traditional Score: 6.6 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -14.4
Genre: Biographical Drama | Platform: Theatrical (Briarcliff Entertainment)
There is something fascinating about The Apprentice, and it is not what its makers intended. Ali Abbasi and Gabriel Sherman set out to make a Trump origin story that explains the 45th and 47th president as a creation of Roy Cohn, the ruthless attorney who once served as Joseph McCarthy's attack dog. The thesis is that everything Trump became, the relentless aggression, the refusal to admit weakness, the attack-attack-attack posture, was downloaded from Cohn's three rules over years of mentorship in 1970s and 1980s Manhattan.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Apprentice
#14: Queer
Woke Score: 17.5 • Traditional Score: 4.2 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -13.3
Genre: Romantic Drama | Platform: Theatrical (A24)
Daniel Craig gives the best performance of his career in a film that probably should not work as well as it does. Queer is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs' autobiographical novella about his time in 1950s Mexico City, where he lived as an American expatriate, drank heavily, used heroin, and fell obsessively in love with a young GI named Allerton who did not love him back in the same way.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Queer
#15: Nickel Boys
Woke Score: 21.8 • Traditional Score: 8.7 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -13.1
Genre: Drama | Platform: Theatrical (Orion Pictures / Amazon MGM Studios)
RaMell Ross has made a film that does not want you to watch it. It wants you to live inside it. Nickel Boys adapts Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Elwood Curtis, an earnest, idealistic Black teenager in 1960s Tallahassee who is wrongfully sent to Nickel Academy, a fictional reform school based on the real Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, where more than 50 boys were buried in unmarked graves over the school's century of operation.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Nickel Boys
#16: Megalopolis
Woke Score: 20.8 • Traditional Score: 9.0 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -11.8
Genre: Epic / Science Fiction / Political Drama | Platform: Theatrical / VOD
Here is the thing about Megalopolis that most critics got wrong in both directions: it is not a failure of craft. Francis Ford Coppola knows how to direct. Adam Driver gives a genuinely magnetic performance. The production design by Beth Mickle is extraordinary. Osvaldo Golijov's score is ambitious and frequently beautiful. This is not the work of a filmmaker who has lost his abilities. It is the work of a filmmaker who has lost his audience. And that is a different problem entirely.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Megalopolis
#17: Wicked
Woke Score: 28.4 • Traditional Score: 17.4 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -11.0
Genre: Musical | Platform: Theatrical / Peacock
Somewhere between the 400 brand partnerships, the Limited Edition pink-and-green Stanley cups, and the church-group holiday matinees, something got lost in translation. Universal sold Wicked as the feel-good movie event of 2024. A splashy, joyful, family-safe musical spectacle perfect for Thanksgiving weekend. On a surface level, that is exactly what it is: two hours and forty minutes of lavish production design, powerhouse vocal performances, and enough glitter to fill a Macy's float.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Wicked
#18: Kinds of Kindness
Woke Score: 14.4 • Traditional Score: 4.2 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -10.2
Genre: Drama | Platform: Theatrical (Searchlight Pictures)
Kinds of Kindness is a nearly three-hour endurance test from Yorgos Lanthimos that systematically dismantles any structure that might give human life meaning. Family, authority, devotion, faith, community - each of the film's three stories constructs one of these structures and then destroys it. The experience is expertly made and deeply unpleasant. The film is an anthology of three loosely connected stories, each featuring the same actors in different roles.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Kinds of Kindness
#19: Love Lies Bleeding
Woke Score: 16.4 • Traditional Score: 7.1 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -9.3
Genre: Thriller | Platform: Theatrical / MGM+
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. Three years later she came back with Love Lies Bleeding and Kristen Stewart and a surrealist bodybuilder fantasy that nobody saw coming. The film premiered at Sundance 2024 to strong reviews and became one of the year's most discussed releases in the indie-critical world, even if it never crossed over into wide commercial awareness.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Love Lies Bleeding
#20: Borderlands
Woke Score: 17.5 • Traditional Score: 8.3 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -9.2
Genre: Sci-Fi/Action/Comedy | Platform: Theatrical
Borderlands is what happens when a studio spends $115 million trying to turn a beloved M-rated video game into a PG-13 Guardians of the Galaxy knockoff. The result is a film so creatively bankrupt that it debuted at 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, earned a D+ CinemaScore from opening-weekend audiences, grossed $33 million against a $115 million production budget (plus $30 million in marketing), and lost Lionsgate an estimated $80 million. It is, by every measurable standard, one of the worst major studio releases of 2024.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Borderlands
#21: Monkey Man
Woke Score: 18.6 • Traditional Score: 10.1 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -8.5
Genre: Action | Platform: Theatrical / Peacock
Dev Patel spent seven years developing Monkey Man, got a broken nose, multiple injuries, and a Netflix deal that then collapsed. Then Jordan Peele watched the film and made sure it got into theaters. The result was one of the more politically pointed action films of 2024, wrapped in the most effective possible commercial disguise: a John Wick-style revenge thriller about a man with a grudge and excellent fighting skills. Classification: WOKE Woke Trap Assessment PARTIAL WOKE TRAP.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Monkey Man
#22: The Brutalist
Woke Score: 20.7 • Traditional Score: 12.6 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -8.1
Genre: Drama | Platform: Theatrical (A24 / Focus Features UK)
Brady Corbet's The Brutalist is a serious, demanding, three-and-a-half-hour epic that positions itself as a meditation on the American Dream, artistic integrity, and the immigrant experience. It is the most ambitious American film of 2024 and also the most explicitly anti-capitalist. These two things are not unrelated. Corbet has made a film that treats the United States as a beautiful trap: a country that advertises freedom and delivers exploitation.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Brutalist
#23: Dune: Part Two
Woke Score: 19.4 • Traditional Score: 11.6 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -7.8
Genre: Sci-Fi & Fantasy | Platform: Theatrical / Max
Dune: Part Two is a cinematic achievement of genuine rarity. A sequel that expands the scale, deepens the craft, and improves on its predecessor at nearly every technical level. Denis Villeneuve has accomplished something Hollywood rarely manages: he has adapted one of science fiction's most complex novels with the seriousness it deserves, without dumbing it down for multiplex audiences. For the first two acts, the film is visually overwhelming in the best sense.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Dune: Part Two
#24: The First Omen
Woke Score: 15.3 • Traditional Score: 7.9 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -7.4
Genre: Horror / Supernatural Thriller | Platform: Theatrical
The 1976 Omen is one of the great supernatural horror films. Robert Thorn is an American diplomat who discovers his son may be the Antichrist. The film is about a father trying to protect his family from a truth too terrible to accept. The Church figures in it are warnings and helpers. The institution exists as context. The First Omen is not that film. Arkasha Stevenson's prequel is about where the Antichrist came from, and her answer to that question is specific: the Catholic Church made him. Not a rogue priest.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The First Omen
#25: Mean Girls
Woke Score: 15.9 • Traditional Score: 9.6 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -6.3
Genre: Musical/Comedy | Platform: Theatrical
Here's the thing about Mean Girls (2024): it's not the culture war flashpoint that either side wants it to be. The film is a musical adaptation of a Broadway musical that was itself adapted from a 2004 movie that was based on a nonfiction parenting book. It has been filtered through so many layers of adaptation that the result is less a bold creative statement and more like a photocopy of a photocopy, with some TikTok filters slapped on top. The plot is identical to the original.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Mean Girls
#26: Challengers
Woke Score: 13.2 • Traditional Score: 7.2 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -6.0
Genre: Drama | Platform: Theatrical (Amazon MGM Studios)
Challengers is a technically brilliant film and a moral void. Luca Guadagnino is one of the most gifted visual stylists working today, and he brings his full arsenal to this story of a love triangle set across thirteen years of competitive tennis. The electronic score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is propulsive and hypnotic. The cinematography is gorgeous. Zendaya delivers the best performance of her career.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Challengers
#27: The Crow
Woke Score: 13.9 • Traditional Score: 8.4 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -5.5
Genre: Action / Horror / Romance | Platform: Theatrical
The original Crow is one of those films that should not work as well as it does. Brandon Lee plays a murdered rock musician who comes back from the dead to kill the people who murdered him and his fiancee, guided by a literal crow. It is gothic melodrama with no pretensions to realism. It works because Alex Proyas holds Eric's grief and love as the emotional center of every scene, because Lee's performance is genuinely magnetic, and because the film understands its own register and commits to it completely.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Crow
#28: Civil War
Woke Score: 20.6 • Traditional Score: 15.2 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -5.4
Genre: Action | Platform: Theatrical / Amazon Prime Video
Alex Garland spent years watching political tribalism eat the American conversation, and his response was to make a movie that would give everyone something to hate and something to love. Civil War arrived in April 2024 as one of A24's highest-grossing films ever, and it set off a culture-war fight about what it was actually saying. That fight, it turns out, was the whole point. Classification: MIXED Confidence: MEDIUM Woke Trap Assessment SIGNIFICANT WOKE TRAP.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Civil War
BALANCED
These films land in the middle of the VirtueVigil scale. Woke and traditional elements are roughly equal, and neither side dominates the viewing experience. The ideological content is present but not the point.
#29: The Room Next Door
Woke Score: 15.1 • Traditional Score: 10.9 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: -4.2
Genre: Drama | Platform: Theatrical
Pedro Almodovar's first English-language film is a meditation on death, friendship, and the right to choose when and how one's life ends. It is also, in Almodovar's distinctive way, a love letter to the act of living - rendered in his signature saturated colors, meticulous production design, and emotionally honest performances that refuse sentimentality. Martha (Tilda Swinton) is a war correspondent and journalist who has been diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer. The disease has metastasized; treatment has failed.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Room Next Door
#30: Kung Fu Panda 4
Woke Score: 9.9 • Traditional Score: 5.9 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: -4.0
Genre: Animated / Family / Action | Platform: Theatrical / Peacock
Kung Fu Panda 4 is the franchise equivalent of a talented athlete playing a slightly lesser sport: the fundamental skills are on display, the performance is creditable, but something of the original intensity has been traded for management comfort. The film opens with Po (Jack Black) having fully become the Dragon Warrior, which means the franchise's foundational question - can the fat, clumsy, unqualified panda become a hero? - has been definitively answered for three films.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Kung Fu Panda 4
#31: The Last Showgirl
Woke Score: 13.2 • Traditional Score: 10.2 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: -3.0
Genre: Drama | Platform: Theatrical
Here is what Pamela Anderson knew when she agreed to play Shelly: nobody was expecting this from her. That gap between expectation and reality is the film's engine. Anderson has spent thirty years being treated as a cultural object. Her body was the subject of global tabloid attention in ways that she did not choose and could not fully control. The character of Shelly has spent thirty years in Las Vegas being treated as a performance object.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Last Showgirl
#32: Joker: Folie a Deux
Woke Score: 24.5 • Traditional Score: 22.1 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: -2.4
Genre: Musical/Drama/Thriller | Platform: Theatrical
Joker: Folie a Deux is a $200 million act of cinematic self-immolation. Todd Phillips took one of the most commercially successful and culturally resonant character studies of the 2010s and produced a sequel that exists primarily to punish its predecessor's audience for caring about Arthur Fleck.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Joker: Folie a Deux
#33: Speak No Evil
Woke Score: 9.2 • Traditional Score: 6.8 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: -2.4
Genre: Horror/Thriller | Platform: Theatrical / Peacock
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. Deeply unpleasant. Worth watching once if you can stomach the first two acts.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Speak No Evil
#34: Atlas
Woke Score: 12.2 • Traditional Score: 10.8 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: -1.4
Genre: Science Fiction Action | Platform: Netflix
Atlas is the kind of movie you watch on a Sunday afternoon with no expectations and find yourself mildly entertained. That is not a ringing endorsement, but in an era of Netflix originals that routinely waste their budgets on miserable ideology, mild entertainment is worth something. Jennifer Lopez plays Atlas Shepherd, a data analyst for the military who has spent her life deeply suspicious of artificial intelligence after the AI known as Harlan went rogue and massacred thousands of people.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Atlas
#35: Hit Man
Woke Score: 7.2 • Traditional Score: 6.3 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: -0.9
Genre: Comedy | Platform: Netflix
Hit Man is the most pleasant surprise of 2024's theatrical calendar. Richard Linklater and Glen Powell teamed up to make a romantic crime comedy that is so relentlessly charming, so well-paced, and so smartly cast that it's easy to overlook the fact that its moral center is... somewhat missing. Glen Powell plays Gary Johnson, a mild philosophy professor who moonlights as a technical consultant for New Orleans police sting operations.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Hit Man
#36: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
Woke Score: 0.0 • Traditional Score: 0.0 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: 0.0
Genre: Comedy/Fantasy | Platform: Theatrical
Tim Burton made a sequel to Beetlejuice 36 years after the original, and the result is exactly what you'd expect from a director who has been coasting on his own aesthetic for at least a decade: a film that looks like a Tim Burton movie, sounds like a Tim Burton movie, and delivers about 60% of the joy of a Tim Burton movie. The Beetlejuice scenes work. Everything around them is a mixed bag of nostalgia, generational comedy, and progressive family dynamics that never quite gel.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
#37: A Complete Unknown (2024)
Woke Score: 0.0 • Traditional Score: 0.0 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: 0.0
Genre: Drama/Biopic | Platform: Theatrical
James Mangold made a Bob Dylan biopic that is secretly a film about the dangers of ideological conformity. That might sound like a stretch for a movie about a folk singer in Greenwich Village, but hear it out. A Complete Unknown covers the four years between Dylan's arrival in New York City in 1961 and his infamous electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. The folk purists wanted Dylan to stay acoustic, stay political, stay in their lane. Dylan refused. The film treats that refusal as heroic.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of A Complete Unknown (2024)
#38: Moana 2 (2024)
Woke Score: 0.0 • Traditional Score: 0.0 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: 0.0
Genre: Animation | Platform: Theatrical
The short version: Moana 2 is fine. Better than fine for fans of the original. Not as good as the original. Disney's animated sequel machine has produced worse, and the Pacific Islander cultural authenticity that made the first film special is preserved here -- baked in by filmmakers who genuinely know what they're honoring. Parents wondering whether to bring the kids can relax. This is not a Trojan horse. What you see is what you get.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Moana 2 (2024)
#39: Madame Web
Woke Score: 9.0 • Traditional Score: 9.2 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: 0.2
Genre: Action/Thriller/Superhero | Platform: Theatrical
Madame Web is one of the most comprehensively terrible superhero films ever produced by a major studio. It earned an 11% on Rotten Tomatoes, grossed $100.5 million worldwide against a budget of $80-100 million (a catastrophic loss after marketing costs), and won three Golden Raspberry Awards: Worst Picture, Worst Actress, and Worst Screenplay. These accolades are all deserved. The premise is this: Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) is a New York City paramedic who, after a near-death experience, begins having visions of the future.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Madame Web
#40: Trap
Woke Score: 13.5 • Traditional Score: 14.2 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: 0.7
Genre: Thriller | Platform: Theatrical
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. The film places us inside the perspective of Cooper Abbott (Josh Hartnett), a firefighter, devoted father, and the serial killer known as the Butcher, as he tries to escape the net while keeping his daughter Riley unaware and safe. Shyamalan's filmmaking is characteristically efficient.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Trap
#41: The Order
Woke Score: 10.1 • Traditional Score: 11.0 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: 0.9
Genre: Crime Thriller | Platform: Limited Theatrical / Amazon Prime Video
The Order is about as complicated as VirtueVigil gets, and I want to be honest about that before I score it. The film is based on true events. In the 1980s, a white supremacist group called The Order, founded by Robert Jay Mathews in the Pacific Northwest, conducted a campaign of bank robberies, armored car heists, and assassinations to fund what they believed would be a race war leading to a white separatist state. They murdered Denver talk radio host Alan Berg in his driveway. They robbed Brinks trucks for millions.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Order
#42: A Quiet Place: Day One
Woke Score: 10.8 • Traditional Score: 11.7 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: 0.9
Genre: Horror/Sci-Fi | Platform: Theatrical
A Quiet Place: Day One is a frustrating film to score because it's genuinely well-made and carries real emotional weight, right up until you look at what it's actually saying. The premise is strong: Sam, a terminally ill cancer patient living in a New York hospice, gets caught in the alien invasion on a day trip into Manhattan. She has nothing to lose, which makes her a more interesting protagonist than the survival-minded parents in the first two films. Lupita Nyong'o is excellent.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of A Quiet Place: Day One
#43: Abigail
Woke Score: 7.2 • Traditional Score: 8.4 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: 1.2
Genre: Horror | Platform: Theatrical (Universal Pictures)
Abigail does exactly what it promises and does it with more craft than the premise deserves. That is meant as a compliment. The Radio Silence directors, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, have made a career out of taking genre premises seriously. Ready or Not was a locked-room satire that worked because the directors committed to both the horror and the darkly funny class commentary. Their Scream reboots were uneven but always technically competent.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Abigail
#44: Argylle
Woke Score: 11.2 • Traditional Score: 13.0 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: 1.8
Genre: Action Spy Comedy | Platform: Theatrical / Apple TV+
Argylle wants to be the smartest spy film in the room. It ends up being the most exhausting. The premise is genuinely clever on paper: Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) writes bestselling spy novels starring Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill in her imagination). When a real spy named Aidan (Sam Rockwell) shows up and tells her that her fictional plots are somehow predicting real CIA operations, Elly gets pulled into the actual espionage world.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Argylle
#45: Terrifier 3
Woke Score: 8.2 • Traditional Score: 10.9 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: 2.7
Genre: Horror/Slasher | Platform: Theatrical
Art the Clown is back. He is dressed as Santa Claus. And he is going to ruin your Christmas in the most graphically violent way imaginable. Let's establish what Terrifier 3 is before we score it. This is extreme horror for extreme horror audiences. Damien Leone's micro-budget franchise has grown from a $35,000 cult oddity into a cultural phenomenon, earning $53 million worldwide against a $2 million budget and establishing Art the Clown as the first genuine new horror icon of the 2020s.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Terrifier 3
#46: Smile 2
Woke Score: 8.1 • Traditional Score: 10.9 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: 2.8
Genre: Horror, Mystery, Thriller | Platform: Theatrical
Parker Finn's Smile 2 is a bigger, louder, more technically ambitious horror film than its predecessor. It is also, paradoxically, a more traditionally structured morality tale. That combination makes it one of the more interesting entries in the modern horror cycle: a film that genuinely believes in consequences. The premise picks up from the first film's mythology. A demonic curse passes from person to person through witnessed trauma.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Smile 2
#47: Bad Boys: Ride or Die
Woke Score: 7.2 • Traditional Score: 10.5 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: 3.3
Genre: Action | Platform: Theatrical / Netflix (Columbia Pictures / Sony)
Bad Boys: Ride or Die is a franchise that knows exactly what it is and has stopped pretending otherwise. The fourth installment in the 30-year saga of Miami detectives Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett delivers action, comedy, and the particular chemistry of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence with enough energy to justify its $405 million box office. The story this time centers on a genuine loyalty test. When their late captain Conrad Howard is posthumously implicated in cartel corruption, Mike and Marcus refuse to accept the verdict.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Bad Boys: Ride or Die
#48: A Real Pain
Woke Score: 11.4 • Traditional Score: 14.7 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: 3.3
Genre: Drama | Platform: Theatrical (Searchlight Pictures)
Jesse Eisenberg's A Real Pain is a small, honest, and unexpectedly moving film about two cousins who travel to Poland to honor their recently deceased grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. It is 90 minutes long. It does not waste a minute. The performances are extraordinary, the emotional register is genuine, and the film's respect for what happened to Jewish Europeans in the 1940s is consistent and unforced. David (Eisenberg) is organized, corporate, married, and manages his anxiety through routine and control.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of A Real Pain
#49: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Woke Score: 6.1 • Traditional Score: 10.2 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: 4.1
Genre: Action / Comedy / Supernatural | Platform: Theatrical / Max
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is the best argument against itself: a film that demonstrates exactly what franchise resurrection done right looks like, while also demonstrating the limits of what nostalgia can accomplish on its own. The plot involves the Spengler family relocating to New York City and the Ghostbusters headquarters at the firehouse.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
BALANCED TRADITIONAL
Traditional values carry a slight edge in these films. They may contain progressive elements, but the dominant framing favors courage, family, faith, sacrifice, and individual agency.
#50: The Fall Guy
Woke Score: 8.1 • Traditional Score: 12.6 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 4.5
Genre: Action | Platform: Theatrical (Universal Pictures)
The Fall Guy is one of the most genuinely enjoyable action movies in recent memory, and it achieves that by doing something remarkably simple: it actually likes its protagonist. Ryan Gosling plays Colt Seavers, a Hollywood stuntman who breaks his back doubling for action star Tom Ryder and disappears from the industry for eighteen months. He surfaces working as a valet at a Mexican restaurant, hiding from the career he loved.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Fall Guy
#51: IF (Imaginary Friends)
Woke Score: 6.0 • Traditional Score: 10.5 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 4.5
Genre: Animation | Platform: Theatrical / Paramount+ (Paramount Pictures)
IF is John Krasinski's most emotionally ambitious film and his most uneven one. But when it works, which is more often than its mixed reviews suggest, it works because Krasinski trusts the audience to feel something genuine. The film follows 12-year-old Bea, played with mature restraint by Cailey Fleming, who moves into her grandmother's apartment while her father undergoes heart surgery in the same hospital where her mother died years earlier.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of IF (Imaginary Friends)
#52: We Live in Time
Woke Score: 8.8 • Traditional Score: 13.4 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 4.6
Genre: Romance/Drama | Platform: Theatrical / A24
We Live in Time is a weepie. An exceptionally well-made one, built on two of the finest performances in recent romantic cinema. It will make you cry. Whether it should is a more interesting question. The film tells the story of Almut (Florence Pugh), a Bavarian-fusion chef climbing toward the top of her profession, and Tobias (Andrew Garfield), an IT worker for a cereal company who is in the process of getting divorced when she literally hits him with her car. They fall in love.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of We Live in Time
#53: The Piano Lesson
Woke Score: 3.9 • Traditional Score: 8.7 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 4.8
Genre: Drama | Platform: Netflix
August Wilson is underrated in contemporary culture. Not by academics or theater people, who treat him with the respect he deserves. But by the broader culture that increasingly equates Black American storytelling with contemporary progressive politics. Wilson's work does not fit that mold. His plays are about property, ancestry, obligation, masculine purpose, and the cost of forgetting where you came from. Those are not progressive themes. They are ancient themes.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Piano Lesson
#54: Flow
Woke Score: 5.8 • Traditional Score: 10.6 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 4.8
Genre: Animated Adventure | Platform: Theatrical (limited US release) / Streaming
Here is the thing about Flow: it should not be this good. A Latvian animated film made by one person over five years, using free software, with no dialogue, no human characters, and a $3.5 million budget going up against Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks at the Academy Awards. It won. Latvia's first Oscar ever. And it earned it. Gints Zilbalodis made Flow the way a craftsman makes a chair: alone, slowly, paying attention to every joint. The director wrote it, animated it, shot it, edited it, and composed its score.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Flow
#55: Bob Marley: One Love
Woke Score: 11.0 • Traditional Score: 16.2 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 5.2
Genre: Biography, Drama, Music | Platform: Theatrical (Paramount) / Streaming (Paramount+)
Bob Marley: One Love earned $150 million worldwide against mixed critical reviews, which tells you something important: the audience for a reverential Bob Marley biopic that centers his faith and his music is enormous. Critics complained about the film's hagiographic approach. Those critics missed the point entirely. The film focuses primarily on the period between 1976 and 1978.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Bob Marley: One Love
#56: It Ends with Us
Woke Score: 12.2 • Traditional Score: 17.6 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 5.4
Genre: Romance/Drama | Platform: Theatrical
It Ends with Us arrives as two films at war with each other, and the battle behind the camera turned out to be far more interesting than what ended up on screen. The story is straightforward. Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) is a florist in Boston who falls for Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni), a charismatic neurosurgeon. Their romance accelerates quickly. Then Ryle hits her. Then he apologizes. Then it happens again.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of It Ends with Us
#57: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Woke Score: 8.6 • Traditional Score: 14.2 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 5.6
Genre: Sci-Fi Action Adventure | Platform: Theatrical / Disney+
Wes Ball's reboot arrives many generations after Caesar's legacy, and it works hard to honor that lineage without being enslaved by it. The result is a competent, sometimes compelling sci-fi adventure that sidesteps the worst progressive pitfalls while delivering the franchise's traditional strength: using apes to hold a mirror up to human nature. The premise is clean. Young chimpanzee Noa lives in a peaceful eagle-taming clan.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
#58: Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver
Woke Score: 18.0 • Traditional Score: 23.8 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 5.8
Genre: Sci-Fi/Action/Adventure | Platform: Netflix
Zack Snyder is the most misunderstood filmmaker in the culture war. His fans think he is their guy - the anti-Disney, anti-woke auteur who makes movies for men. His critics think he is a crypto-fascist who wraps reactionary ideology in slow-motion violence.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver
#59: Kraven the Hunter
Woke Score: 5.4 • Traditional Score: 11.2 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 5.8
Genre: Action/Superhero | Platform: Theatrical / Netflix
Kraven the Hunter had a simple job: make a cool vigilante film about a man who uses superhuman hunting skills to kill criminals instead of animals. It mostly fails at this simple job. Not because the concept is wrong, but because Sony's Spider-Man Universe machine ground the film's potentially distinctive elements into franchise-compatible paste. The good news: Russell Crowe. His Nikolai Kravinoff is a masterclass in confident villainy.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Kraven the Hunter
#60: Longlegs
Woke Score: 6.3 • Traditional Score: 12.6 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 6.3
Genre: Horror | Platform: Theatrical / Shudder / Peacock
Longlegs is the most unnerving American horror film of 2024 and one of the few in recent memory that takes Satanism seriously as a moral force rather than as ironic aesthetic. Osgood Perkins - son of Norman Bates himself - has made a deeply strange, deliberately disorienting film about an FBI agent who is psychically connected to a Satanic serial killer, and the result is not for everyone.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Longlegs
#61: Alien: Romulus
Woke Score: 10.5 • Traditional Score: 16.8 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 6.3
Genre: Horror | Platform: Theatrical (20th Century Studios)
Alien: Romulus is the best Alien film since James Cameron's Aliens (1986). That is not faint praise. It is a direct, unambiguous statement about what Fede Álvarez accomplished by stripping the franchise back to its essential elements: a group of desperate people in a confined space being hunted by creatures that cannot be reasoned with, bargained with, or appealed to. After the philosophical diversions of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, Romulus remembers that the Alien franchise is, at its core, a horror franchise.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Alien: Romulus
#62: Despicable Me 4
Woke Score: 6.0 • Traditional Score: 12.6 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 6.6
Genre: Animation | Platform: Theatrical / Peacock (Universal Pictures / Illumination)
Despicable Me 4 is the franchise at its most comfortable and its most predictable. That is not entirely a bad thing. Chris Renaud, who directed the original Despicable Me and has shaped Illumination's aesthetic since the beginning, brings the fourth installment home with the same visual energy and gag-per-minute pace that made the franchise a billion-dollar machine. The film is not going to surprise anyone who has seen the previous entries. It does not try to.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Despicable Me 4
#63: I'm Still Here
Woke Score: 10.5 • Traditional Score: 17.2 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 6.7
Genre: Drama/Biography | Platform: Theatrical (Sony Pictures Classics)
Walter Salles has made the most restrained political film of the decade. I'm Still Here tells the true story of Eunice Paiva, whose husband Rubens, a former left-wing congressman, was taken from their Rio de Janeiro home by agents of Brazil's military dictatorship in 1971 and never seen again. What makes the film remarkable is what it refuses to do: it refuses to show the torture, refuses to melodramatize the grief, refuses to turn Eunice into a symbol.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of I'm Still Here
#64: September 5
Woke Score: 5.4 • Traditional Score: 12.6 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 7.2
Genre: Historical Thriller | Platform: Theatrical (Paramount Pictures)
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. In 1972, the ABC Sports team covering the Munich Olympics improvised their way into carrying the Israeli hostage crisis live as it happened, becoming the first American broadcast to do so. The film stays entirely inside the control room for its 94 minutes and the result is one of the year's genuinely tense pieces of filmmaking.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of September 5
#65: Sing Sing
Woke Score: 8.8 • Traditional Score: 16.2 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 7.4
Genre: Drama | Platform: Theatrical / Digital / A24
Here is my honest admission before this review begins: Sing Sing is a film made by progressive filmmakers, distributed by A24, featuring a Black actor nominated for an Oscar, about a rehabilitation program in a maximum-security prison. Everything about its cultural packaging signals 'not for you' to VirtueVigil's core audience. I'm asking you to look past the packaging.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Sing Sing
#66: Hard Truths
Woke Score: 3.9 • Traditional Score: 11.8 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 7.9
Genre: Drama | Platform: Theatrical / Bleecker Street
There is a woman in this film who will make you deeply uncomfortable. That is the point. Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is, in the words of filmmaker John Waters, 'the most unpleasant sourpuss woman in the history of cinema.' She rages at strangers in garden centers. She berates checkout clerks. She picks fights with people walking their dogs. She terrorizes her husband Curtley into a state of permanent emotional absence and chastises her son Moses for every decision he has ever made.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Hard Truths
#67: Better Man
Woke Score: 4.9 • Traditional Score: 12.9 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 8.0
Genre: Musical/Biography/Drama | Platform: Theatrical
Better Man is the most creatively audacious biopic in recent memory and also one of the most commercially disastrous. Michael Gracey's decision to portray Robbie Williams as a CGI chimpanzee throughout the entire film is either a stroke of genius or a fatal miscalculation depending on whether you're measuring artistic ambition or box office returns. The film earned just $11 million against a reported $110 million budget, making it one of the biggest flops of 2024.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Better Man
#68: Mufasa: The Lion King
Woke Score: 15.2 • Traditional Score: 23.4 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 8.2
Genre: Animation | Platform: Streaming
The name alone carries enough weight to sell tickets. Mufasa. The great king. The father James Earl Jones voiced into immortality. The ghost in the clouds. Disney knew what it was doing when it built an entire prequel around a character who died in the first act of the 1994 original, and it knew the name would work whether the movie deserved it or not. Here's the honest answer: the movie mostly deserves it. Not fully. Not in the way the 1994 film deserved it.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Mufasa: The Lion King
#69: Fly Me to the Moon
Woke Score: 5.8 • Traditional Score: 14.3 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 8.5
Genre: Romantic Comedy / Drama / Historical | Platform: Theatrical
Fly Me to the Moon is an entertaining romantic comedy that does more things reasonably well than it does anything brilliantly. The premise is the best thing about it. 1969. Kelly Jones is a marketing consultant with a talent for reinvention and a gift for making organizations look better than they are. She's recruited by NASA to improve public support for the space program. She's also, secretly, recruited by a government operative (Jim Rash) to film a backup fake moon landing on a soundstage, just in case the real thing fails.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Fly Me to the Moon
#70: Your Letter
Woke Score: 0.4 • Traditional Score: 9.2 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 8.8
Genre: Animated Drama / Coming-of-Age | Platform: Theatrical (Crunchyroll, North America)
Your Letter is a small, gentle film with a big heart, and it arrives like a reminder that not everything made today carries an agenda. It is a hand-drawn coming-of-age story about a bullied girl and the stranger whose letters pull her back from the edge, and that is all it is trying to be. There is no lecture, no identity politics, no score to settle, just a quiet argument that kindness matters and that a single act of care can change the course of a life.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Your Letter
#71: Maria
Woke Score: 4.9 • Traditional Score: 14.3 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 9.4
Genre: Biographical Drama | Platform: Netflix
Maria (2024) is the third film in Pablo Larrain's unofficial biographical trilogy of iconic women who lived under the weight of impossible public expectation. Jackie examined the widow. Spencer examined the princess. Maria examines the diva. And by diva I mean the original meaning of the word: a goddess. Someone whose gift was so total, so overwhelming in its claims on her life, that ordinary human existence became almost impossible to sustain alongside it. Maria Callas died in Paris on September 16, 1977. She was 53.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Maria
#72: Juror #2
Woke Score: 5.9 • Traditional Score: 15.5 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 9.6
Genre: Crime / Drama / Mystery | Platform: Theatrical / Max
Clint Eastwood made Juror #2 at 94 years old. Warner Bros. gave it 50 theaters. Critics gave it 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. That tension tells you almost everything you need to know about where Hollywood is and where Eastwood has always been. Justin Kemp is a recovering alcoholic with a pregnant wife, a carefully managed life, and a secret. While driving drunk one rainy night, he struck and killed a woman on a bridge. He didn't know it. He kept going.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Juror #2
#73: Thelma
Woke Score: 3.0 • Traditional Score: 12.6 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 9.6
Genre: Action | Platform: Theatrical / VOD (Magnolia Pictures)
Thelma is based on something that actually happened to director Josh Margolin's grandmother. A scammer called her, pretending to be Josh, and told her he had been arrested. She sent $10,000 to an address he gave her. She was 93. And then, when she found out she had been deceived, she decided to go get her money back. Margolin turned that story into something genuinely wonderful. Thelma, played by June Squibb in a career-defining performance at 94 years old, is not a film about a helpless old woman.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Thelma
#74: The Watchers
Woke Score: 3.8 • Traditional Score: 13.6 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 9.8
Genre: Supernatural Horror / Fantasy | Platform: Theatrical
Ishana Night Shyamalan's directorial debut is a better film than its 27% Rotten Tomatoes score suggests and a less complete film than its atmospheric first act promises. The gap between critical reception and audience response (27% critics vs. 68% audience) tells you something: this is a film that delivers genuine mood and competent craft but does not satisfy the critics who wanted something more formally ambitious. The setup is legitimately strong.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Watchers
#75: Inside Out 2
Woke Score: 10.1 • Traditional Score: 20.2 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 10.1
Genre: Animation/Comedy/Drama | Platform: Theatrical
Inside Out 2 is the movie Disney desperately needed. After a string of underperformers and culture war disasters (Lightyear's same-sex kiss controversy, Strange World's commercial implosion, Elemental's slow start), Pixar went back to basics. They made a movie about feelings. And audiences responded with $1.699 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing animated film of all time until Ne Zha 2 overtook it in 2025. The premise is elegant. Two years after the events of the original, 13-year-old Riley Andersen is entering high school.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Inside Out 2
#76: Nosferatu
Woke Score: 8.4 • Traditional Score: 18.9 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 10.5
Genre: Horror | Platform: Theatrical (Focus Features / Universal Pictures)
Robert Eggers' Nosferatu is one of the most uncompromisingly traditional horror films made by a major director in the past decade. It takes the Gothic source material, Murnau's 1922 silent masterpiece and Bram Stoker's novel behind it, and treats it with a reverence that refuses any contemporary update to the moral architecture. Evil is absolute. Love is sacrificial. Virtue costs everything. These are not progressive values. They are ancient ones.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Nosferatu
#77: Rebel Ridge
Woke Score: 8.2 • Traditional Score: 18.9 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 10.7
Genre: Action Thriller | Platform: Netflix
The first thing you need to know about Rebel Ridge is that it is not about race. It's about property rights. Jeremy Saulnier's Netflix thriller stars Aaron Pierre as Terry Richmond, a Marine veteran who cycles into the small Louisiana town of Shelby Springs carrying $36,000 in cash to post bail for his cousin. Local cops ram his bike, seize the money under civil asset forfeiture, and refuse to give it back. Terry is not going to leave. That's the film.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Rebel Ridge
#78: Red One
Woke Score: 5.4 • Traditional Score: 16.4 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 11.0
Genre: Action/Adventure/Christmas Comedy | Platform: Theatrical / Prime Video
Critics destroyed this movie. 31% on Rotten Tomatoes. 'Dopey,' 'formulaic,' 'overstuffed.' The usual verdict when professional critics encounter a movie built entirely for an audience they don't belong to. Audiences gave it 92%. It was Amazon's second-biggest theatrical release ever. Over 50 million households watched it on Prime in its first month. That gap between critic contempt and audience enthusiasm is a reliable signal in 2024: the movie is doing something critics don't like. What Red One does is simple.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Red One
#79: Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
Woke Score: 4.0 • Traditional Score: 15.2 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 11.2
Genre: Action, Comedy | Platform: Netflix
The thing you need to know going in: Axel F is nostalgia delivery mechanism first and movie second. It knows this. It's comfortable with this. Whether that's satisfying or frustrating depends entirely on what you're bringing to it. Thirty years after Beverly Hills Cop III, Axel Foley is still working Detroit homicide, still a chaos agent, still the smartest man in any room he enters.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
#80: Cabrini
Woke Score: 2.7 • Traditional Score: 14.8 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 12.1
Genre: Biographical Drama / Faith / History | Platform: Theatrical / Angel Studios
Cabrini tells a story that mainstream Hollywood would never make, featuring a protagonist that contemporary progressive culture cannot quite process: a 19th-century Catholic nun who built hospitals, orphanages, and schools through sheer force of prayer-powered will, who asked no one's permission to serve God, and who was canonized as a saint by the Church she served.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Cabrini
#81: The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
Woke Score: 7.6 • Traditional Score: 19.9 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 12.3
Genre: Animated / Fantasy / Epic | Platform: Theatrical
Tolkien spent decades building a mythology. Peter Jackson spent a decade turning it into cinema. The War of the Rohirrim spends two hours and fourteen minutes telling a story that Tolkien summarized in a few pages of appendix and Jackson left on the shelf. The result is more impressive than it has any right to be. Helm Hammerhand is Rohan's most legendary king, the man for whom Helm's Deep is named. The story of how he earned that name is one of those background Tolkien narratives that devoted readers have always wanted to see dramatized.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
#82: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
Woke Score: 2.1 • Traditional Score: 15.7 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 13.6
Genre: Action/Sci-Fi/Monster | Platform: Theatrical
Let's get this out of the way: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is not a film you watch for the story. It's a film where a radioactive dinosaur and a giant ape team up to beat the tar out of an evil orangutan overlord while a tiny moth helps coordinate the assault. If that sentence makes you smile, you're the target audience. If it doesn't, nothing else in this review will convince you. The plot, such as it is, picks up three years after the events of Godzilla vs. Kong. Kong has settled into the Hollow Earth and is feeling lonely.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
#83: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Woke Score: 5.1 • Traditional Score: 18.9 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 13.8
Genre: Action | Platform: Theatrical (Lionsgate)
Guy Ritchie has spent thirty years making films about men who are very good at dangerous things, and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is the logical culmination of that career. It is a WWII action-comedy that celebrates masculine competence, British patriotism, and the willingness to fight dirty for civilization without a moment of second-guessing itself. In 2024, that is a genuinely unusual thing to see from a studio release.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
#84: Road House
Woke Score: 3.5 • Traditional Score: 17.6 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: 14.1
Genre: Action | Platform: Amazon Prime Video
Everybody knew the Road House remake was going to either be a disaster or a surprise. What nobody expected was that it would land so firmly in entertaining, masculinity-affirming territory while generating almost zero ideological controversy. For an Amazon production in 2024, that's genuinely remarkable. The setup: Elwood Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal), a former UFC fighter with a dark past, takes a job as a bouncer at a rundown roadhouse in the Florida Keys after years of drifting on the underground fighting circuit. He's broken. He's dangerous.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Road House
TRADITIONAL LEAN
These films clearly favor traditional values but do so with a light touch. The positive margin is real but not overwhelming. They are safe bets for families looking for entertainment that does not undermine their values.
#85: Twisters
Woke Score: 10.1 • Traditional Score: 24.6 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL LEAN • Margin: 14.5
Genre: Action/Disaster | Platform: Theatrical
Twisters is that rare modern blockbuster that feels like it was made for the entire country, not just the coasts. In a Hollywood landscape where every other franchise film seems engineered to deliver a message, Lee Isaac Chung directed a movie about tornadoes that is actually about tornadoes. And communities. And courage. And a cowboy scientist with a YouTube channel who drives into storms and then donates his merch money to rebuild the town that just got flattened. Let's get the plot out of the way.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Twisters
#86: Cuckoo
Woke Score: 1.4 • Traditional Score: 16.7 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL LEAN • Margin: 15.3
Genre: Horror, Thriller, Mystery | Platform: Streaming
Tilman Singer's Cuckoo arrives with the kind of premise that horror fans dream about: a remote Alpine resort, a mysterious half-sister who cannot speak, a father who is clearly hiding something, and a creature that mimics the young to replace them. The film opens with seventeen-year-old Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) moving to the Bavarian Alps with her father Luis and his new family after her mother's death.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Cuckoo
#87: Venom: The Last Dance
Woke Score: 2.8 • Traditional Score: 18.3 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL LEAN • Margin: 15.5
Genre: Action/Superhero | Platform: Theatrical
This franchise was never supposed to work. A Venom movie without Spider-Man, built around Tom Hardy doing a two-man improv show with a CGI alien living in his chest. It worked twice already. The Last Dance gets one thing exactly right: it knows what it is and finishes what it started. Eddie Brock and Venom are on the run. They've been running since 2018. The film gives them a cosmic threat in Knull, a primordial alien god who created the symbiotes and wants them back, and sends them through Nevada on a road trip toward a reckoning.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Venom: The Last Dance
#88: Gladiator II (2024)
Woke Score: 7.0 • Traditional Score: 22.8 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL LEAN • Margin: 15.8
Genre: Action | Platform: Theatrical
Ridley Scott made Gladiator II because he wanted to make another Gladiator. That is essentially the whole story behind this sequel, and it explains both its strengths and its limits. The original Gladiator (2000) was a film about personal honor, sacrifice, and the dignity of a man who chose death over compromise. Gladiator II is a film about a young man trying to become the kind of man the original was about. It is less mythic. It is also genuinely entertaining.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Gladiator II (2024)
#89: Sonic the Hedgehog 3
Woke Score: 2.1 • Traditional Score: 18.3 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL LEAN • Margin: 16.2
Genre: Action/Adventure/Comedy | Platform: Theatrical
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is the best film in this franchise and, honestly, one of the most enjoyable family action movies of 2024. It does something Hollywood rarely manages: it gets darker in its third installment without losing its soul. The premise draws from Sonic Adventure 2, the beloved 2001 Sega game, and respects the source material enough to follow its emotional logic. Shadow the Hedgehog is not a villain for the sake of having a villain. He's a character with a genuine backstory of loss, betrayal, and grief.
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#90: Transformers One
Woke Score: 2.0 • Traditional Score: 18.5 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL LEAN • Margin: 16.5
Genre: Animation/Action/Adventure | Platform: Theatrical / Paramount+
Transformers One is the best Transformers film since the original 1986 animated movie. It does what no live-action entry ever managed: it makes you genuinely care about Optimus Prime and Megatron as characters before they become myths. Smart, emotional, and visually inventive, this is franchise filmmaking with real heart.
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#91: The Bikeriders
Woke Score: 5.5 • Traditional Score: 23.1 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL LEAN • Margin: 17.6
Genre: Crime Drama | Platform: Theatrical
Jeff Nichols's The Bikeriders is a quietly magnificent film about what happens to institutions built on brotherhood when the culture around them changes. Based on Danny Lyon's documentary photo book, it follows the Vandals Motorcycle Club from its founding in 1965 through its corruption and destruction by 1973, told through the remembrances of Kathy (Jodie Comer), the sharp-tongued, devoted wife of club member Benny (Austin Butler). The film is a genuine artifact of American masculinity examined with love and clear eyes.
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TRADITIONAL and STRONGLY TRADITIONAL
These are the films that affirm traditional values most clearly. Whether through faith, family, sacrifice, or simple heroic storytelling, they stand as counter-programming to Hollywood’s default progressive posture. The positive margins are substantial, and the messaging aligns with traditional worldviews.
#92: Deadpool & Wolverine
Woke Score: 4.7 • Traditional Score: 24.4 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL • Margin: 19.7
Genre: Action / Comedy / Superhero | Platform: Theaters / Disney+
Deadpool and Wolverine is the third Deadpool film and the character's official entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe following Disney's acquisition of Fox. It earned $1.338 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time. The film arrived at a moment when the MCU was widely perceived to be in decline, and it addressed that perception directly through Deadpool's fourth-wall-breaking meta commentary.
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#93: The Wild Robot (2024)
Woke Score: 7.1 • Traditional Score: 27.9 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL • Margin: 20.8
Genre: Animation | Platform: Theatrical / Peacock
The Wild Robot might be the most subversive film of 2024, and not in the way Hollywood usually means that word. In a year where animated films competed to see who could pack the most progressive messaging into ninety minutes, Chris Sanders made a movie about a robot who accidentally becomes a mother and discovers that parenthood is the most important thing she will ever do. That is the subversion. Roz, a service robot designated ROZZUM unit 7134, washes ashore on a remote island after a cargo ship accident.
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#94: The Beekeeper
Woke Score: 4.2 • Traditional Score: 25.5 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL • Margin: 21.3
Genre: Action/Thriller | Platform: Theatrical
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. The setup is simple. Adam Clay (Statham) is a retired operative from a shadowy government organization called the Beekeepers. He lives quietly in the barn of Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad), a kind retired schoolteacher. He tends her bees. She brings him lemonade.
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#95: Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1
Woke Score: 6.4 • Traditional Score: 29.0 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL • Margin: 22.6
Genre: Epic Western | Platform: Theatrical
Kevin Costner's Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 is an old-fashioned American epic Western of a kind that Hollywood has largely abandoned - sweeping, unhurried, deeply patriotic, and unapologetically romantic about the American frontier. Conceived over 35 years and personally funded to the tune of $38 million by Costner himself, it is an act of filmmaking conviction that deserves to be seen on those terms before it is judged on conventional commercial metrics.
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#96: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Woke Score: 6.0 • Traditional Score: 29.7 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL • Margin: 23.7
Genre: Action/Adventure/Sci-Fi | Platform: Theatrical
Let's address the elephant in the Wasteland right up front: Furiosa is not woke. It's not even close. And the fact that a vocal slice of the internet spent months insisting otherwise tells you more about the state of online culture discourse than it does about anything George Miller put on screen. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the origin story of the character Charlize Theron made iconic in 2015's Fury Road.
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#97: Solo Leveling: ReAwakening
Woke Score: 1.3 • Traditional Score: 28.4 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL • Margin: 27.1
Genre: Animation/Action/Fantasy | Platform: Theatrical
Solo Leveling: ReAwakening is two things stitched together: a rushed 80-minute recap of Season 1 and a spectacular 40-minute preview of Season 2. The first part is mediocre. The second part is genuinely thrilling. For conservative parents wondering whether to let their teenager see the anime film that is tearing up the box office - here is what you need to know. The recap compresses twelve episodes of television into a highlight reel. If you have not watched the show, you will be lost.
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#98: Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot
Woke Score: 2.0 • Traditional Score: 29.8 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL • Margin: 27.8
Genre: Biography / Drama | Platform: Theatrical
The story of Possum Trot, Texas, is one of the most extraordinary stories in American religious life in the last thirty years. A small church. A community that most people in most coastal cities couldn't find on a map. And over twenty years, 22 families in that church adopted 77 children from the state foster system, most of them children with trauma histories so severe that the professional system had given up on placing them. That is the real story. The film does it justice. Donna Martin heard the call first. Her husband W.C.
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#99: Am I Racist?
Woke Score: 3.7 • Traditional Score: 33.8 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL • Margin: 30.1
Genre: Documentary/Comedy | Platform: Theatrical / DailyWire+
Am I Racist? is Matt Walsh doing his best Borat impression, and it works more often than it doesn't. The premise is simple. Walsh, a Daily Wire podcast host and professional conservative provocateur, goes undercover as a bumbling white man named 'Steven' who desperately wants to confront his own racism. He gets a DEI certification online, prints himself a laminated card, and starts paying real money for access to the biggest names in the anti-racism industry.
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#100: Reagan
Woke Score: 2.4 • Traditional Score: 44.3 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL • Margin: 41.9
Genre: Biography/Drama/History | Platform: Theatrical
Reagan is not a biopic. It's a monument. Sean McNamara's film, 14 years in the making and shot on a $25 million budget, does not attempt to understand Ronald Reagan. It does not wrestle with his contradictions, interrogate his failures, or explore the human complexity behind the myth. It worships him. Every frame, every musical cue, every narrative choice is designed to reinforce a single thesis: Ronald Reagan was a great man, chosen by God, who saved the world from communism. If you already believe that, you will love this movie.
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