2025 was the year the box office fought back. After years of progressive messaging driving audiences away, the biggest hits were films that respected their audiences: The SpongeBob Movie ($1.2B), Ne Zha 2 ($2.1B), F1 ($780M), and Mission: Impossible -- The Final Reckoning ($1.1B). The flops were the films that treated audiences as vessels for ideology: Snow White cratered. Zootopia 2 underperformed. Now You See Me: Now You Don't spent $200M to deliver a climate lecture disguised as a heist film.
But 2025 also produced some of the most aggressive ideological content VirtueVigil has ever scored. Zootopia 2 racked up a 91.38 woke score, the highest ever recorded for an animated film. Predator: Badlands turned the franchise's iconic hunter into a progressive hero. Snow White became a cultural event for all the wrong reasons. And streaming platforms continued to produce prestige content -- Adolescence, Stranger Things, The White Lotus -- that pushed progressive framing with arthouse sophistication.
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.
Of the 135 scored 2025 films and TV seasons in our database, 26 lean woke, 35 are roughly balanced, and 74 lean traditional. On raw numbers, that looks like a traditional-heavy year. But the cultural distribution of attention was the mirror image of 2024: the woke films dominated the headlines while the traditional films quietly made the money. What follows is the definitive ranking -- every 2025 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.
Full Rankings: Most Woke to Most Traditional
#1: Now You See Me: Now You Don't
This transcript is a glossy, crowd-pleasing heist fantasy that repeatedly moralizes theft as “justice” and uses modern political talking points as applause lines. The movie’s core “feel-good” engine is not merely clever magic, it is redistribution, anti-elite resentment, and climate scolding dressed up as spectacle. What to watch out for: • Robin Hood theft is treated as virtuous rather than sin
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Now You See Me: Now You Don't
#2: Zootopia 2 (2025)
Zootopia 2 is exactly what it looks like. It is a Disney animated buddy cop sequel with gorgeous animation, sharp voice performances, a cracking mystery plot, and a progressive allegory that does not hide behind the fur. The franchise was never pretending to be neutral. The original Zootopia was described by its own directors as being about racism, sexism, and governing through fear. The sequel tu
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Zootopia 2 (2025)
#3: Snow White
Disney's live-action Snow White arrives carrying more baggage than a royal carriage. The question conservative viewers want answered is simple: is the finished product as aggressively ideological as the marketing suggested? The honest answer is yes, but it is more complicated than a simple thumbs-down. Rachel Zegler can sing. That much is beyond dispute. Gal Gadot is having a grand time as the Ev
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#4: Predator: Badlands
Dan Trachtenberg clearly loves the Predator franchise. That much is obvious from three films in three years. With Badlands, his most ambitious entry yet, he swings for the fences by making the Predator himself the protagonist for the first time in franchise history. It is a bold creative decision. It is also a decision that opens the door to every Disney instinct that conservative audiences have l
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#5: Bugonia
Yorgos Lanthimos's Bugonia is a skillfully made, darkly funny, and ultimately nihilistic black comedy thriller that wraps a radical anti-capitalist, environmentalist manifesto inside a genre-bending alien conspiracy kidnapping story. Two conspiracy-obsessed men, beekeeper Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), kidnap pharmaceutical CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone),
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#6: The Housemaid
Let's be honest about what The Housemaid is before we decide whether it's any good. This is a feminist revenge fantasy wrapped in an erotic thriller, adapted from Freida McFadden's bestselling novel, directed by the man who made the Ghostbusters reboot, and starring Sydney Sweeney in a role designed to weaponize her non-woke reputation for a film with a very specific woke thesis. That thesis is: t
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#7: Clown in a Cornfield
Clown in a Cornfield is a competently made slasher with a clear political agenda that it conceals until past the midpoint and then delivers with zero ambiguity. If you enjoy slasher genre mechanics, the first half delivers them. If you care about what the film is actually saying, the second half will tell you. The setup: Quinn Maybrook, a teenager from Philadelphia, moves to Kettle Springs, Misso
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#8: Stranger Things
There was a time when Stranger Things felt like a miracle. In the summer of 2016, Netflix dropped this weird little show about a missing kid in small-town Indiana, and it captured something audiences had been starving for. It was nostalgia for a kind of storytelling that Hollywood had largely abandoned. Kids solving problems. Fathers protecting families. Communities pulling together. Good and evil
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Stranger Things
#9: Mother Mary
Mother Mary is David Lowery's first major engagement with the machinery of celebrity and pop music, and it emerges as a film about power, intimacy, and the cost of being watched. Anne Hathaway plays Mother Mary, an iconic pop star whose career has been built on image, control, and the careful management of her persona. Michaela Coel plays Sam Anselm, a fashion designer and Mother Mary's estranged
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#10: Eddington
Eddington is the film Ari Aster has been building to since Hereditary. His earlier work destroyed the family as a unit of safety. Midsommar destroyed the romantic relationship. Beau Is Afraid destroyed the male self. Eddington destroys the conservative community. The target gets larger with each film, and the formal ambition keeps pace. Joaquin Phoenix plays Sheriff Joe Cross, a small New Mexico
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#11: The Wedding Banquet
The original 1993 Wedding Banquet was a film about a gay man living a double life, caught between the love he had chosen and the family expectations he had not been able to refuse. It was genuinely moving because it took the parents seriously. They were not villains. They loved their son and wanted grandchildren and did not know that their happiness depended on their son's silence about who he was
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#12: Mickey 17
This review contains spoilers throughout. Let's dispense with the pretense: Mickey 17 is a Trump allegory. Bong Joon-ho has confirmed it publicly. The villain, Kenneth Marshall, is a populist politician who delivers speeches about making the colony great, wears distinctive fashion that reads as a visual joke on Trump, plans genocide against indigenous alien creatures to prevent them from interfer
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#13: Presence
Presence is the most technically inventive horror film of early 2025. It is also a quietly progressive film wearing an arthouse horror mask. Steven Soderbergh's latest finds the director in full experiment mode. The film is shot entirely from the ghost's POV: the camera drifts through rooms, watches characters from doorways, hovers protectively over the family's neglected daughter Chloe. It is a
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#14: Avatar: Fire and Ash
James Cameron has now made three Avatar films. Each one is technically extraordinary and ideologically predictable. Fire and Ash is both the best-looking film of 2025 and an almost proud repetition of every idea the franchise put on the table in 2009. The anti-military messaging, the noble-indigenous-vs.-corporate-colonizers framework, the white protagonist who becomes the best version of the cult
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Avatar: Fire and Ash
#15: Companion
Companion is a sharper movie than you expect and a more ideologically loaded one than the marketing lets on. Drew Hancock's debut feature arrives fully formed, with tight craft, a killer performance from Sophie Thatcher, and a feminist thesis about AI relationships that it delivers with the efficiency of a well-designed genre machine. Whether the thesis lands as provocative truth or progressive se
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#16: Adolescence
Adolescence is the most important piece of television produced in 2025, and that's not the same thing as saying it's the best. The premise is devastatingly simple. Armed police raid a family home in South Yorkshire at dawn. They drag 13-year-old Jamie Miller out of bed. He's arrested on suspicion of murdering his classmate Katie Leonard, a girl who rejected his romantic advances and then cyberbul
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#17: The Ugly Stepsister
Emilie Blichfeldt looked at Cinderella and asked the question nobody wanted answered: what would the ugly stepsister's story actually feel like if you told it honestly? The answer, it turns out, involves tapeworms, butcher knives, and more blood than a Dario Argento retrospective. The Ugly Stepsister retells the Cinderella story from Elvira's perspective. Elvira is one of two daughters born to Re
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#18: Yellowjackets
Yellowjackets arrived with a pitch that practically dared you to watch: a girls' soccer team crashes in the Canadian wilderness, and over nineteen months they descend into tribal violence and cannibalism. Season one delivers on that promise, mostly. The dual timeline structure creates genuine tension. Melanie Lynskey is terrific as adult Shauna. Christina Ricci is genuinely unsettling as adult Mis
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#19: KPop Demon Hunters
KPop Demon Hunters is the kind of cultural event that forces you to evaluate it on two entirely separate tracks: as a piece of entertainment, and as a vehicle for ideas. On the first track, it is an unqualified triumph. On the second, it is more complicated than either its fans or its critics want to admit. The premise is deceptively simple. Three young women form Huntrix, a globally famous K-pop
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#20: Squid Game: Season 3
Squid Game Season 3 is the conclusion Hwang Dong-hyuk was always building toward. It is bleak, morally committed, and technically excellent. Whether you find it satisfying depends almost entirely on whether you share his politics. The season picks up immediately after the catastrophic end of Season 2. Gi-hun's rebellion has failed. His best friend Jung-bae is dead. The Front Man, Hwang In-ho, has
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Squid Game: Season 3
#21: Wednesday: Season 2
The first season of Wednesday was a cultural phenomenon by Netflix's own metrics, becoming the second-most watched English-language Netflix series ever. It succeeded because it understood its core asset: Jenna Ortega playing Wednesday Addams as a genuinely alien intelligence navigating a world she finds stupid, and finding that the world has things in it worth protecting despite herself. Season 2
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#22: Tron: Ares
Tron: Ares cost Disney between $180 and $220 million to make and grossed $142 million worldwide. That is not a small disaster. That is a creative and commercial failure significant enough to raise genuine questions about what Disney's franchise machine is producing and why. The tragedy is that somewhere inside Tron: Ares is a genuinely interesting movie. The premise is solid: a highly advanced AI
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#23: Wicked: For Good
Wicked: For Good picks up where Part One left off, and the question facing conservative viewers is essentially the same: are you willing to sit through two and a half hours of progressive allegory in exchange for genuinely spectacular filmmaking? Because the filmmaking is spectacular. And the allegory is relentless. Cynthia Erivo delivers the performance of her career. Her "No Good Deed" is a voc
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#24: One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson makes movies for people who love movies. That has always been true. And One Battle After Another might be his most entertaining work, period. It is also his most politically explicit, which creates a strange experience for conservative viewers who appreciate craft but bristle at being lectured. Leonardo DiCaprio is terrific as a washed-up revolutionary turned paranoid stoner
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#25: Hurry Up Tomorrow
Let's get something out of the way. Hurry Up Tomorrow is a vanity project. It may be the most unambiguous vanity project to receive a wide theatrical release in recent memory. Abel Tesfaye, known to the world as The Weeknd, plays a lightly fictionalized version of himself. He co-wrote the script. He co-produced the film. He co-composed the score. The movie exists as a companion piece to his album
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#26: The White Lotus: Season 3
Mike White's third season of his luxury-resort mortality play takes the show to Thailand, raises the body count's spiritual ambitions, and arrives at roughly the same place the previous two seasons arrived: the rich are hollow, the beautiful destroy each other, and nobody learns anything. That thesis is not without value. White Lotus at its best is genuinely satirical, and when it connects, the s
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#27: Fallout - Season 2
Fallout Season 2 is competent prestige television that can't quite escape its own contradictions. The show is built on the Fallout game franchise's genuinely brilliant premise: 200 years after nuclear war, every faction that survived is corrupt, every institution has betrayed its stated purpose, and the only moral clarity that exists comes from individuals who refuse to be subsumed by the systems
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Fallout - Season 2
#28: Jurassic World Rebirth
Jurassic World Rebirth is a $200 million movie that feels like it was written on a napkin during a studio lunch meeting. The pitch: 'What if we did Jurassic Park again, but with Scarlett Johansson and a new island?' The execution: exactly that, with nothing underneath. Set five years after Jurassic World Dominion, Rebirth takes place in a world where dinosaurs are going extinct in the wild, survi
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#29: Death of a Unicorn
Let's get the headline out of the way. Yes, Death of a Unicorn has a political lean. It is an anti-capitalist satire wrapped in a creature feature, and it does not try to hide it. The rich people are cartoonishly evil. The young progressive woman is the moral compass. The unicorns are nature's revenge on corporate greed. If you've seen Jurassic Park, Alien, or any movie where a corporation tries t
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#30: The Electric State
The Electric State is a $320 million argument that money cannot buy a soul. The Russo Brothers, riding the lingering fumes of their Avengers: Endgame triumph, took Simon Stalenhag's hauntingly beautiful illustrated novel about a girl and her robot wandering a decaying alternate America and turned it into a bloated, quip-heavy adventure film that has more in common with a theme park ride than the
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#31: If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is one of those films that dares you to look away and then punishes you for trying. Rose Byrne delivers a performance so raw, so physically committed, and so mercilessly honest that it stops being acting and starts feeling like surveillance footage of a person's worst year. Linda is a psychotherapist who cannot keep her own life from collapsing. Her daughter has a pedia
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#32: It Was Just an Accident
Jafar Panahi's It Was Just an Accident is a taut, morally complex thriller about former Iranian political prisoners who kidnap a man they believe tortured them in jail. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2025 and earned Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film. The film is exquisitely crafted, darkly funny, and unflinching in its depiction of how state violen
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#33: Opus
For audiences who agree with progressive critique of celebrity, capitalism, complicity: film works. For conservative audiences or those seeking entertainment: film is betrayal dressed in transgression. Woke trap real. Nihilistic conclusion alienates even progressive viewers expecting catharsis. Box office reflects audience rejection.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Opus
#34: Smurfs
Let's be direct about what Smurfs (2025) is and is not. It is not great. The animation is lively enough, the voice cast is overstuffed with celebrities to the point where nobody gets real screen time, and the four Rihanna songs are inserted with the grace of paid product placement rather than musical storytelling. The plot, Papa Smurf kidnapped by two wizards, Smurfette leads the rescue, is thin
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#35: G20
G20 wants to be Air Force One for the streaming era. The setup is solid: terrorists seize a G20 summit in Cape Town, take world leaders hostage, and the U.S. President -- a former Army combat veteran -- has to fight her way through the hotel to save her family and the hostages. Viola Davis is unimpeachable as a screen presence. The action is competent. The villain's cryptocurrency scheme is topica
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#36: One of Them Days
One of Them Days is genuinely funny. Keke Palmer and SZA have the kind of chemistry that cannot be manufactured by a casting director - the loose, improvisational, finishing-each-other's-sentences energy of a friendship that reads as real even when the script is obviously engineered. For a debut feature from director Lawrence Lamont and first-time feature screenwriter Syreeta Singleton, the comic
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#37: Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc
Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc is one of the best anime films in years and also one of the most conservative-unfriendly Pixar-alternative entertainment options of 2025. That tension is the whole point. Let's be direct: this is a hard-R animated film with graphic gore, a skinny-dipping scene, and a central villain who is a beautiful woman who controls and destroys the men around her. If you're looking for
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#38: Andor - Season 2
Andor Season 2 is probably the finest piece of television Disney has produced under the Star Wars banner - and it is, without reservation, the most explicitly political. These two facts are related. Tony Gilroy and his writers have made a show about the birth of a rebellion against an authoritarian empire, and they have made it with the kind of narrative rigor and moral seriousness that franchise
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#39: Back in Action
Back in Action is exactly what Netflix spent $200 million to make: a perfectly disposable action comedy that will perform huge numbers, entertain audiences for 114 minutes, and be forgotten inside a week. That is not entirely a criticism. Cameron Diaz returns from a decade away from acting and proves she still has effortless screen presence. Jamie Foxx, who survived a near-death experience in 202
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#40: Zero Day
Zero Day wants to be the definitive post-9/11 political thriller for the current moment: a catastrophic cyberattack on American infrastructure, a former president recalled to lead an investigation, and a Washington ecosystem so corroded by partisan warfare that finding the truth requires a figure from outside the current system. Robert De Niro plays George Mullen with the deliberate gravity of a
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#41: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
Here's the thing about Rian Johnson: he's good at this. That's the honest answer to the question VirtueVigil's readers are asking about Wake Up Dead Man. Is it woke? Yes. Is it good? Also yes. Are those two facts in tension? Less than you might expect. The third Benoit Blanc mystery sends Daniel Craig's Southern detective into a new setting with a new ensemble and a new crime at its center. The
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#42: The Running Man
This review discusses the full plot including the ending. Edgar Wright's The Running Man arrives in 2025 with the gleam of a great idea and the slight slippage of a film that is very good at being fun without quite delivering the classic it aims for. Glen Powell is a natural star in the mode of Tom Cruise and Cary Grant, a man for whom physical competence and easy charisma are the same quality ex
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#43: The Kidnapping of Arabella
The Kidnapping of Arabella is Italian director Carolina Cavalli's sophomore feature, a wry and visually deliberate character study that premiered at the 82nd Venice Film Festival, where star Benedetta Porcaroli won the Orizzonti Best Actress prize. The film follows Holly (Porcaroli), an affluent but unmoored woman whose chance encounter with a young girl named Arabella (Guglielmino) catalyzes a jo
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#44: 28 Years Later
28 Years Later is two movies welded together, and the seam shows. The first 45 minutes are genuinely excellent. Danny Boyle shoots a post-apocalyptic Britain that feels lived-in and dangerous. Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Jamie is a capable, charismatic father taking his 12-year-old son Spike on his first mainland hunt, a rite of passage in their isolated island community. The infected have evolved. Th
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#45: Black Mirror - Season 7
Black Mirror returns for its seventh season with six new episodes that collectively demonstrate both why the show has endured and why it has never been fully co-opted by any one ideological tendency. Charlie Brooker's anthological format is its own protection: no single thematic agenda can dominate when each episode is a discrete story, and Season 7 uses that flexibility to probe several distinct
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#46: The Secret Agent
This review contains detailed plot analysis and reveals key story elements including the film's ending. The most acclaimed film of 2025 is a 161-minute Portuguese-language thriller about a former professor on the run from hitmen during Brazil's military dictatorship. It won Best Director and Best Actor at Cannes. It swept two Golden Globes. It landed four Oscar nominations including Best Picture.
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#47: Thunderbolts*
Thunderbolts is the best Marvel film in several years, and the asterisk tells you something about what kind of film it wants to be. The studio insists the punctuation mark carries meaning. It does. It signals uncertainty, incompleteness, a team that does not quite know what it is yet. That uncertainty is the most honest thing in the movie. This is not a team of heroes. Yelena Belova is a former a
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#48: Superman
⚠️ SPOILER ALERT: This review contains detailed plot analysis and reveals key story elements. James Gunn handed America's oldest superhero symbol a progressive megaphone and pointed it at every culture-war flashpoint of the moment - immigration, media distrust, foreign intervention - and then had the audacity to make a movie with genuine emotional power underneath all of it. Superman (2025) is th
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#49: M3GAN 2.0
M3GAN 2.0 is a film at war with itself. The original M3GAN (2022) worked because Gerard Johnstone understood exactly what he was making: a Blumhouse horror-comedy about an AI doll whose protective programming lacked any ethical guardrails. It was funny, creepy, and efficient. It made $181 million on a $12 million budget. The sequel has more money, more ambition, and less of what made the first fi
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#50: Bring Her Back
Sally Hawkins ruins you in Bring Her Back. There is no other honest way to start this review. Hawkins plays Laura, a former counselor who has spent two years engineering a plan to bring her drowned daughter back from the dead using a demonic ritual involving a possessed boy and the body of a visually impaired girl. She is methodical, loving, and completely insane. And the performance is so grounde
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#51: Eternity
A24 and Apple Original Films team up for Eternity, a high-concept romantic comedy set in the afterlife where newly deceased souls have one week to decide which themed paradise they'll inhabit forever. The premise is whimsical and the execution polished, with Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller, and Callum Turner forming a love triangle that stretches across life and death. Director David Freyne works fr
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#52: Blue Moon
Richard Linklater's Blue Moon is a witty, melancholic chamber drama that unfolds over a single evening at Sardi's restaurant on March 31, 1943 - the opening night of Oklahoma! At its center is Lorenz Hart, the legendary lyricist behind 'My Funny Valentine,' 'The Lady Is a Tramp,' and the titular 'Blue Moon,' who watches from the bar as his former creative partner Richard Rodgers celebrates a trium
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#53: The Naked Gun
Thirty-seven years after the original and fourteen years after the death of Leslie Nielsen, Hollywood finally made another Naked Gun movie. The question was always going to be: could anyone replace Nielsen? The answer is no. Liam Neeson cannot replace Leslie Nielsen. Nobody can. But Neeson commits to the bit with an enthusiasm that makes the question irrelevant. He is not playing Frank Drebin. He
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#54: Alien: Earth
The Alien franchise has been waiting for someone to bring the xenomorph to Earth in a serious way since at least the 1990s. Two Alien vs. Predator films tried and largely failed. Noah Hawley's Alien: Earth actually pulls it off, which is both a significant creative achievement and something of a mixed bag from a values perspective. The setup is specific and smart: a Weyland-Yutani research vessel
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#55: Marty Supreme
A spoiler warning is necessary here: Marty Supreme is not the movie its marketing suggests it is. If you are expecting a conventional sports underdog triumph, a Rocky for ping pong, you will be blindsided by what Josh Safdie has actually made. This is a portrait of a man eating himself alive in pursuit of a dream that the world has decided does not matter. It is extraordinary cinema. It is also a
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#56: Captain America: Brave New World
Captain America: Brave New World is a deeply confused film that cannot decide whether it wants to be a political thriller, a superhero spectacle, or a meditation on race in America. It tries to be all three and succeeds fully at none of them. The result is a $180 million production that grossed $415 million worldwide - technically profitable, but a catastrophic underperformance for a Captain Ameri
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#57: The Woman in the Yard
Here is what you need to know about The Woman in the Yard before you buy a ticket: this is not a haunted house film. There is no monster. The Woman standing in Ramona's yard is Ramona. Specifically, she is the part of Ramona that went looking for a way out after she put her car into a tree and killed her husband David. Jaume Collet-Serra, who has made a career out of Liam Neeson action thrillers
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#58: Materialists
Lucy Mason is a matchmaker in New York City. She is good at her job. She has matched nine couples into marriage. She is the ninth couple's vendor at the wedding where the film begins, and she is working the room at the reception before the vows are dry. Lucy has a theory about romance: it is a market. People have criteria. Her job is to match criteria. Love is downstream of compatibility, which i
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#59: Final Destination: Bloodlines
Twenty-five years after the original Final Destination, the franchise delivers its best installment. That's not faint praise -- Final Destination (2000) was a genuinely clever horror film, and Bloodlines earns comparison to it. The sixth entry is the highest-grossing ($317.9M worldwide on a $50M budget), the best-reviewed (89% RT Critics, 87% RT Audience), and the first to meaningfully expand the
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#60: Drop
Drop is the best contained thriller since Searching (2018) and one of the most effectively constructed genre films in recent memory. The premise is deceptively simple: Violet, a domestic abuse survivor on her first date in years, begins receiving threatening text messages through her phone's AirDrop feature. The messages are specific. The sender knows where she is, who she is with, and exactly wha
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#61: Exterritorial
Exterritorial arrived on Netflix in April 2025 with minimal fanfare and quietly became one of the streaming platform's more competent action films of the year. It does not reinvent anything. But it knows what it is, and it executes it cleanly. The premise is stripped down: Sara Wulf (Jeanne Goursaud), a former German Special Forces soldier with PTSD, accompanies her young son Leon on a visit to t
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#62: In the Lost Lands
George R.R. Martin's short story 'In the Lost Lands' is not a story about epic battles or sprawling political intrigue. It's a contained moral fable about the cost of power, compressed into about twenty pages, and it works precisely because of that compression. Paul W.S. Anderson's film adaptation stretches that fable to 96 minutes and adds the creature sequences and action choreography that his
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#63: Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
Den of Thieves 2 does not break any new ground. It does not need to. The original Den of Thieves (2018) was a cult hit built around Gerard Butler being as aggressively unpleasant as possible while chasing professional thieves through Los Angeles. It worked because Butler committed fully to playing a dirty cop who was more interesting as a flawed human than any idealized action hero. The sequel se
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#64: The Shrouds
A man's wife died. He couldn't let her go. So he invented a way to keep watching her. That's the emotional core of David Cronenberg's The Shrouds, and it's the most human thing he's ever put at the center of a film. Cronenberg's wife Carolyn died in 2017. This film is about that. Not directly, not autobiographically, but in the way that all serious art about grief is direct: it's the real feeling
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#65: Elio
Elio is the most politically interesting Pixar film in years - not because of what is on screen, but because of the firestorm around what was taken off it. The film that reached theaters in June 2025 is a perfectly competent, visually stunning, emotionally safe sci-fi adventure about an eleven-year-old space fanatic named Elio Solis who gets accidentally beamed to an intergalactic congress of alie
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#66: Nobody 2
Nobody 2 is exactly the film its trailer promises and nothing more: 89 minutes of Bob Odenkirk getting beaten up, beaten down, and beating back. The sequel to the 2021 sleeper hit drops Hutch Mansell and his family into a small-town Wisconsin vacation that predictably goes sideways when he crosses a corrupt sheriff (Colin Hanks), a desperate theme park owner (John Ortiz), and a glamorous crime bos
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#67: Freakier Friday
Twenty-two years is a long time. Anna Coleman has grown up, built a career as a music producer, raised her teenage daughter Harper alone, and is about to marry a widowed father named Eric Reyes. Tess Coleman is still around, still sharp, still the anchor. The new problem is that Harper and Lily, Eric's daughter and Anna's soon-to-be stepdaughter, hate each other. Then everyone swaps bodies and has
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#68: The Phoenician Scheme
Wes Anderson's thirteenth feature is his most purely entertaining film since The Grand Budapest Hotel and his most emotionally direct film since Moonrise Kingdom. After the formal experiments of The French Dispatch and Asteroid City left audiences divided, The Phoenician Scheme returns to the pleasure of story: a man surviving the world's attempts to kill him and trying, badly, to reconcile with h
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#69: Heart Eyes
It's Valentine's Day in Seattle. A serial killer called the Heart Eyes Killer is hunting couples. Jay and Ally are coworkers pulling overtime who have made it professionally painful that they cannot stand each other. The killer spots them together and assumes they are a couple. Now they have to survive the night while figuring out who the killer is and, because the screenplay insists on it, fallin
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#70: Love Hurts
Love Hurts is kind of film dismissed by critics, enjoyed by audiences. Understands what it is: fun action-comedy about good man forced back into violence protecting loved ones. Does not pretend to be more. Does not attempt social commentary. Tells redemption story with strong lead and solid action. For audiences seeking entertainment treating traditional values seriously: delivers without preachin
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#71: Sentimental Value
Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value is that rarest of Oscar contenders - a deeply personal, genuinely humanistic film that resists easy ideological categorization. Set within a Norwegian family grappling with the return of their estranged patriarch, the film explores generational trauma, artistic legacy, and the aching difficulty of forgiveness with remarkable nuance. While the film employs modern t
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#72: From the World of John Wick: Ballerina
Not a woke trap. This is the most important thing conservative audiences need to hear: Ballerina is not a hostile takeover of the John Wick franchise. It's a spinoff built around a character who already existed in Chapter 3. Eve Macarro isn't replacing John Wick. She's operating in his world, with his help, and the film treats Keanu Reeves' character with complete deference. There's no feminist le
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#73: Heads of State
Heads of State wants to be two things at once: a politically sharp satire and a big dumb action comedy. It's better at the second than the first, which means audiences willing to meet it on its own terms will have a decent time. The premise: the US President is Will Derringer, a former action movie star elected on the strength of his screen persona. The UK Prime Minister is Sam Clarke, a serious
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#74: Anaconda
Anaconda (2025) is a film that sounds better as an elevator pitch than it plays as a ninety-nine-minute movie. The premise is irresistible: four middle-aged friends from Buffalo - a wedding videographer (Jack Black), a failed background actor (Paul Rudd), and two lifelong pals (Steve Zahn, Thandiwe Newton) - scrape together a loan and head to the Amazon to shoot a guerrilla remake of the gloriousl
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#75: Stranger Things Season 5
The final season of Stranger Things carries the weight of a cultural event. This is a show that built a genuine audience relationship over nearly a decade across five seasons. The finale has to be worth that investment. It mostly is. The Duffer Brothers understood one thing about their finale that many long-running series get wrong: the ending has to be about the characters, not the mythology. Ve
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#76: A Minecraft Movie
A Minecraft Movie is an honest film. It is not pretending to be Citizen Kane. It is not sneaking in a gender studies lecture. It is two hours of Jack Black yelling, Jason Momoa being absurdly charming, and a cubic world where everything explodes into tiny blocks when you hit it. Kids love it. The critics mostly don't. The $961 million box office suggests the critics are irrelevant. The plot is th
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#77: The Gorge
The Gorge is a high-concept premise executed with genuine craft. Two elite soldiers, one American and one Lithuanian, are posted to guard towers on opposite sides of a remote classified gorge for one year. No contact with each other. No communication with the outside world. No information about what lives in the gorge. They are told only that the world depends on them staying vigilant. That setup
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#78: The Black Phone 2
Scott Derrickson's The Black Phone 2 is a sequel that earns its existence by asking a genuinely good question: what happens to the kids who survive? Four years after Finney Blake (Mason Thames) killed the Grabber and escaped, he is 17 and not okay. He is angry, isolated, struggling. The trauma did not make him a hero. It left him cracked in ways that don't make good stories. Meanwhile his sister
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#79: Together
Together is a body horror film about codependency that takes its central metaphor more literally than any relationship drama has any right to. Tim and Millie are a couple in that particular long-term relationship state where they have been together long enough that the question of marriage has become an awkward unresolved thing between them. Tim, an aspiring musician still grieving his parents, ca
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#80: Novocaine
Spoiler warning: the twist at the end of the second act is worth preserving. If you plan to see Novocaine unspoiled, read only the first three paragraphs. Novocaine is the kind of movie Hollywood used to make regularly and now makes almost by accident. An original action comedy with a genuinely clever premise, a star-making lead performance, and a love story that actually earns its resolution. It
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#81: Havoc
Havoc is the closest thing to a Gareth Evans Raid film in English, and for a certain kind of audience, that is exactly enough. Walker is a homicide detective on the payroll of Lawrence Beaumont, a real estate tycoon running for mayor while keeping his son out of consequences. When a drug deal gone wrong drops the son into a war between corrupt cops and a Triad power struggle, Walker is sent to re
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#82: Flight Risk
Mel Gibson directs his first film in nearly a decade, and the result is exactly what you would expect from a director of his caliber working a contained genre script: competent, unpretentious, and functional. The premise is tight. Deputy U.S. Marshal Madolyn Harris (Michelle Dockery) charters a bush plane in Alaska to transport Winston (Topher Grace), a mob accountant turned informant, to Anchora
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#83: The Last Viking
The Last Viking opens with an animated fable that is worth describing in full because it announces the film's intentions more clearly than any plot synopsis could. A Viking chieftain rules a clan where everyone is equally valued and equally happy. His youngest son, born with one arm, grows up watching his peers do things he cannot. He falls into despair. The chieftain, seeing his son suffer the s
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#84: Frankenstein
Guillermo del Toro has been trying to make this movie since the mid-1990s. That is not a figure of speech. He first announced Frankenstein as a project at Universal in 2008. Before that, he had been sketching designs and taking script notes for years. He cast Doug Jones as the Creature. He wanted Bernie Wrightson to design the monster. Universal shelved it for their doomed Dark Universe franchise.
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#85: Lilo & Stitch
Here is something you don't say often about a Disney live-action remake: this one earns it. Not because it breaks new ground. It doesn't. Director Dean Fleischer Camp (Marcel the Shell with Shoes On) essentially recreates the 2002 animated original in live action, scene by scene, beat by beat, with enough small additions to feel like a creative choice rather than pure merchandise. But the origina
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#86: The Bad Guys 2
The original Bad Guys was a pleasant surprise: a DreamWorks animated film that used French New Wave aesthetics and a genuinely clever premise to deliver one of the more entertaining family films of 2022. The sequel is more of the same with one significant caveat. The Bad Guys 2 picks up where the first film ended. The reformed criminal gang led by Mr. Wolf is struggling to reintegrate into societ
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#87: Hamnet
Chloe Zhao's Hamnet is a beautifully crafted, emotionally devastating period drama that tells the story of Shakespeare's family through the eyes of his wife Agnes. Based on Maggie O'Farrell's acclaimed 2020 novel, the film follows Agnes and William from their courtship through their marriage, the birth of their children, and the shattering loss of their 11-year-old son Hamnet to plague in 1596. Th
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#88: Until Dawn
Until Dawn is the rarest thing in video game adaptations: it is honest about what the source material is and makes smart choices about what to translate. The original 2015 PlayStation game is an interactive horror film structured as a branching narrative where players' choices determine who lives and who dies. Adapting that mechanic to a linear film would be impossible. Instead, writers Gary Daube
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#89: The Monkey
This review contains detailed plot analysis and reveals key story elements including the film's ending. Osgood Perkins followed up the surprise smash Longlegs, one of 2024's most talked-about horror films, by doing the last thing anyone expected. He made a comedy. Well, sort of. The Monkey is technically a horror-comedy adapted from Stephen King's 1980 short story about a cursed cymbal-banging to
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#90: Fountain of Youth
The critics were unfair to Fountain of Youth. A 35% on Rotten Tomatoes for a Guy Ritchie adventure film starring John Krasinski and Natalie Portman on a $180 million budget tells you more about critical expectations than it does about the film. The expectations trap here is obvious: Apple spent $180 million and wanted a franchise starter. Critics wanted Indiana Jones or The Mummy, not a mid-tier
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#91: Hamlet
Let's settle one question first. Is Riz Ahmed playing Hamlet a stunt? No. Watch Sound of Metal and then ask that question again. Ahmed is one of the most technically precise actors working in British film, and critics who saw this at Telluride were not being polite when they called his performance electrifying. He earned 82% on Rotten Tomatoes in a country where Shakespeare is practically a state
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#92: Wolf Man
Wolf Man is a small, grim, effective horror film that works best when it stops trying to say something and just lets you watch a man fall apart. The premise is deceptively simple. Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) is a writer living in San Francisco with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and their young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). The marriage is strained. Blake has anger issues inherited fr
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#93: Invincible - Season 3
Invincible remains the best superhero show currently in production. That verdict still holds in Season 3. It also holds a few progressive elements that cost it points on this scorecard. Both things are true, and they're both worth understanding. Season 3 picks up the fallout from the Invincible War: a multiverse attack orchestrated by Angstrom Levy that leveled global cities and killed thousands.
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#94: The Alto Knights
The Alto Knights is a late-career gift from two of the most important figures in American crime cinema. Barry Levinson directing, Nicholas Pileggi writing, Robert De Niro starring: this is the lineage that gave us GoodFellas and Casino, and The Alto Knights wears that heritage without apology. It is not quite at that level. But it is serious, well-crafted adult filmmaking in a genre that Hollywood
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#95: Warfare
Spoiler context: Warfare is a real-time depiction of real events. The real Elliott Miller, to whom the film is dedicated, lost his leg and his ability to speak as a result of the events depicted. This is not entertainment in the conventional sense. It is testimony. November 19, 2006. Ramadi, Iraq, during one of the most violent periods of the post-invasion conflict. Navy SEAL Alpha One platoon ta
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#96: Pluribus
Pluribus is the rarest thing in modern prestige television - a show that genuinely refuses to tell you what to think. Vince Gilligan's first series after the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul era premiered on Apple TV+ on November 7, 2025, ran for 9 episodes, won Rhea Seehorn a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama Series, and earned a 98% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. It is also one of the mos
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#97: Primate
Take Cujo, replace the dog with a chimpanzee, move it to a gorgeous Hawaiian cliff house, and crank the gore to eleven. That is Primate in a sentence, and honestly, that sentence sells it better than any marketing campaign could. Johannes Roberts' creature feature is a lean, mean 89 minutes of escalating carnage built around a simple, terrifying premise: what happens when a family's adopted chimp
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#98: The Life of Chuck
The universe is ending. Nobody knows why. Billboards are appearing all over the world with the face of a man named Charles Krantz, an accountant, with the words: '39 Great Years. Thanks, Chuck.' A middle school teacher named Marty Anderson is trying to understand what this means as satellites fall out of orbit and the internet goes dark. That is Act Three of The Life of Chuck. The film works back
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#99: Fight or Flight
Fight or Flight is a film that knows exactly what it is and delivers that thing with efficiency and occasional flair. It is a contained action comedy set on a commercial airplane, built around one premise: one competent man protects one person against a plane full of trained killers. That premise runs 98 minutes and does not waste any of them. Josh Hartnett's return to genre leading-man territory
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#100: The Conjuring: Last Rites
The Conjuring: Last Rites is not the best film in the franchise. That distinction still belongs to James Wan's 2013 original. But Last Rites might be the most emotionally satisfying entry since that first film, because it does something very few Hollywood franchises attempt anymore: it tells a story about faith that takes faith seriously. Not as a metaphor. Not as a coping mechanism. Faith as real
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#101: Caught Stealing
Darren Aronofsky makes a noir. That sentence should not work. The man who made mother!, who cast his own mother-goddess metaphor as a victim of ecological capitalism, who spent his career using cinema as a vehicle for progressive political theology, making a pulpy crime comedy about a cat-sitting bartender in 1990s New York? It should not work. It mostly works. The credit belongs primarily to Ch
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#102: Black Bag
Black Bag is the kind of adult thriller Hollywood forgot how to make. Steven Soderbergh directs a 94-minute spy puzzle that treats its audience like grown-ups, trusts its actors to carry the material, and never once stops to explain itself for the cheap seats. It is not a perfect film. The plot leans more toward complication than genuine intrigue - David Koepp's script gives you the pieces but hol
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#103: Paddington in Peru
Paddington Bear has become one of the strangest cultural Rorschach tests in modern cinema. Progressives see him as an immigration parable: a brown-skinned refugee from a developing nation, taken in by a white British family, who proves his worth through politeness and hard work. Conservatives claimed him after Queen Elizabeth herself shared tea and marmalade sandwiches with the little bear in that
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#104: Sinners
Ryan Coogler made a vampire movie set in Jim Crow Mississippi and turned it into one of the best films of 2025. That sentence should not work. It does. And the reason it works is because beneath the horror genre machinery and the period racial politics, Sinners is structured on values that predate Hollywood: blood loyalty, earned redemption, the weight of sin, and the cost of transcendence. Sinne
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#105: Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy arrives fourteen years after Bridget Jones's Baby and over two decades after the original made Renee Zellweger's hapless diarist a global icon. It is, by any honest measure, the most emotionally ambitious entry in the franchise. Bridget is 51, a widow four years into life without Mark Darcy, and she is doing her imperfect, recognizable best. Director Michael Morri
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#106: Train Dreams
Train Dreams is the kind of film that doesn't get made very often anymore. It's quiet. It's patient. It trusts its audience to sit with silence and find meaning in the accumulation of small moments across a long, hard, beautiful life. The film follows Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) from his arrival as an orphaned boy on the Great Northern Railway to his death in a log cabin in northern Idaho in
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#107: Nonnas
Nonnas is the kind of film that gets made once a year if you are lucky, and usually goes unnoticed because it does not fit the culture war narratives that drive algorithm engagement. It is not woke. It is not a reaction against woke. It is simply good, and what it is good about is worth paying attention to. The story: Joe Scaravella (Vince Vaughn) is an MTA mechanic who loses his mother and canno
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#108: EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is a 97-minute love letter to the greatest live performer in American history, and it earns every minute of that devotion. Baz Luhrmann, who directed the 2022 Austin Butler biopic, discovered 68 boxes of lost concert footage in a Kansas salt mine during that production. Over two years, his team and Peter Jackson's Park Road Post facility restored this 50-year-old cel
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#109: Weapons
Weapons is the rare horror film that conservatives do not need to apologize for enjoying. In fact, they may find themselves grinning through it. Zach Cregger's follow-up to Barbarian is a sprawling, multi-narrative mystery-horror that operates like Magnolia crossed with The Shining. When seventeen third-graders run out of their homes at exactly 2:17 AM and vanish, the small Pennsylvania town of M
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#110: Landman - Season 2
Landman Season 2 picks up where the first season left it: Tommy Norris is still the man between the world that produces energy and the world that consumes it without acknowledging what that production costs. He fixes what the oil company cannot officially acknowledge needs fixing. He negotiates what the lawyers cannot settle. He understands that the gap between corporate policy and field reality i
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#111: The Amateur
The Amateur is a revenge thriller about a man who is not supposed to be in the revenge business. Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) is a CIA cryptographer, basement-dweller, a code-breaker who restores old Cessnas on weekends. He's not a killer. He's never fired a weapon in anger. When terrorists murder his wife Sarah in London and his supervisors refuse to act, Charlie does something unexpected: he blac
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#112: A Working Man
Jason Statham has spent 25 years building a brand around one specific promise: a good man, pushed too far, will do what needs to be done. A Working Man is the purest distillation of that promise he has ever put on screen. Directed by David Ayer and co-written by Sylvester Stallone, the film follows Levon Cade - an ex-Royal Marine working construction in Chicago - who tears apart a Russian traffick
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#113: Reacher - Season 3
Reacher Season 3 does something the third season of almost any television series struggles to do: it deepens without diluting. The premise is unchanged. Jack Reacher wanders into a problem, identifies who is responsible, and makes them regret it. What changes in 'Persuader' is the personal stake. Someone died on Reacher's watch years ago, and Season 3 builds its entire architecture around what tha
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#114: The Pitt
The Pitt is the best network-style medical procedural in years, possibly since ER was at its height. It is not accidental that Noah Wyle, who spent years on ER, is the lead. Creator R. Scott Gemmill also came up through that show's writer's room. The Pitt is a conscious revival of a form of television storytelling that the streaming era largely abandoned: the episodic procedural built around compe
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#115: Daredevil: Born Again
Daredevil: Born Again arrives with a question hanging over it: can Disney make something as raw as what Netflix made? The answer, after a creative overhaul that scrapped the original legal-procedural vision in favor of a proper continuation, is a qualified yes. This is not quite the Netflix series. It is a little shinier, a little more connected to the broader MCU machinery. But it is also the mos
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#116: Five Nights at Freddy's 2
Sequels to successful horror films face a specific structural problem: the first film worked because you did not know what was coming. The second film's audience does. The Marionette, the returning franchise, the mythology you established in Act One - the sequel must find a way to justify its existence to an audience that already survived the original. Five Nights at Freddy's 2 earns that justifi
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#117: Dracula: A Love Tale
Luc Besson's Dracula: A Love Tale is a strange, kitschy, deeply sincere movie. And that sincerity is precisely what saves it. The French director, best known for stylish action fare like Leon: The Professional and La Femme Nikita, has made a Dracula film that is barely a horror film at all. He has said openly that he is not a fan of horror and has no particular affinity for vampire mythology. Wha
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#118: Song Sung Blue
Craig Brewer found a true story so improbable, so heartbreaking, and so genuinely joyful that all he had to do was get out of its way. Mostly, he does. Song Sung Blue tells the real story of Mike and Claire Sardina, a Milwaukee couple who formed a Neil Diamond tribute act called Lightning & Thunder. Mike was an alcoholic musician who could not catch a break. Claire was a hairdresser by day and a
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#119: Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Movie: Infinity Castle
Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle is the most technically ambitious traditionally animated film since The Lion King, and it earns every frame of the $778.9 million it grossed worldwide. This is not hyperbole. The Ufotable studio has been building toward this moment for nine years, and what they have delivered is a 155-minute demonstration of what hand-crafted animation can do when backed by genuine a
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#120: The King of Kings
This is the film our audience has been waiting for. Not a film that tips its hat to faith. Not a film that includes one scene of quiet prayer before getting back to the agenda. Not a film with a Christian protagonist whose beliefs are treated as a quirky personality trait. The King of Kings is a two-hour animated retelling of the life of Jesus Christ, distributed by Angel Studios, framed through
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#121: Dog Man
Take the kids. Seriously, this one is fine. Dog Man is a 2025 DreamWorks animated film based on Dav Pilkey's best-selling graphic novel series, and it is exactly what parents need: 89 minutes of enthusiastic, clean chaos that kids will love and adults will survive without wanting to leave the theater. The premise is pure Pilkey: a policeman and his dog are mortally wounded in an explosion, so su
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#122: The Blue Trail
There are films that earn their politics and films that perform them. The Blue Trail earns every frame. Gabriel Mascaro's fourth feature opens in near-future Brazil, where the government has solved the problem of aging with characteristic bureaucratic efficiency: anyone who reaches a certain age is relocated to 'The Colonies,' a destination nobody returns from and nobody discusses directly. The s
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#123: Last Breath
Three hundred feet below the North Sea, the umbilical line connecting Chris Lemons to the diving bell snaps. His oxygen lasts approximately five minutes. The surface crew has maybe thirty. What happens next is the reason this film exists. Last Breath is a true story adapted from Alex Parkinson's own 2019 documentary. The facts are documented: Chris Lemons, a professional saturation diver working
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#124: The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Marvel Studios delivers its most family-forward film in years with The Fantastic Four: First Steps, a retro-futuristic origin story that skips the origins in favor of a story about what family actually means. Set in a gleaming 1960s alternate Earth, the film follows Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) as establish
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#125: The Accountant 2
The Accountant 2 does something rare: it delivers a sequel that is as good as the original without flinching from what made the first film work. Christian Wolff is one of the most quietly compelling protagonists in contemporary action cinema. He's a forensic accountant with autism who has spent his adult life serving the morally defensible rather than the legally sanctioned. He moves through the
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#126: The Chosen: Last Supper
There are moments in The Chosen: Last Supper that feel genuinely sacred. That is a word I rarely apply to film. But when Jonathan Roumie's Jesus lowers himself to wash the feet of his disciples, and you watch Shahar Isaac's Simon Peter resist and then submit, the scene lands with a weight that most Christian media never approaches. It is not sentimental. It is not safe. It is the Incarnation rende
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#127: Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
Tom Cruise's final turn as Ethan Hunt is, by any reasonable measure, a triumph of old-school filmmaking values. The Final Reckoning is a film about a man who refuses to let the world be destroyed and who rallies a loyal team of friends to help him do it. No lectures. No subtext about Western institutions being rotten. Just a guy hanging off things, making impossible choices, and saving humanity be
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#128: Karate Kid: Legends
Not a woke trap. Not even close. Karate Kid: Legends is the most traditionally coded major studio release of 2025. It's a movie about older men teaching a young man to be brave, disciplined, and honorable. The trailer shows exactly what you get. The only reason to hesitate before buying a ticket is quality, not ideology. - Jonathan Entwistle (The End of the F* This is one of the safest watches o
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#129: Brave the Dark
This is the kind of film that almost doesn't get made anymore. Brave the Dark is a 2025 Angel Studios release directed by Damian Harris and starring his brother Jared Harris as Stan Deen, a high school drama teacher in 1980s New Holland, Pennsylvania who discovers that one of his students is living out of a car. Stan bails Nate out of jail, offers him a bed, and over the course of the next months
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#130: How to Train Your Dragon
Dean DeBlois is a rarity in Hollywood. He directed all three animated How to Train Your Dragon films and insisted on full creative control for the live-action remake. That condition shows in the finished product. This is clearly the work of a filmmaker who loves the material, understands what made it work, and wanted to protect it. Mason Thames plays Hiccup, the scrawny inventive son of Stoick th
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#131: Happy Gilmore 2
Twenty-nine years is a long time between sequels. Most of those films fail because the audience has grown up and the comedy has not. Happy Gilmore 2 does something most follow-ups cannot manage: it finds a reason to revisit the character that is emotionally honest rather than merely nostalgic. Happy Gilmore is not who he was. He is a widower, an alcoholic, a man living in a supermarket job while
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#132: F1
F1 is the purest strain of old-school Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking released in 2025. It is a comeback story about a broken man who finds redemption through grit, self-sacrifice, and the refusal to quit. No lectures. No deconstruction of masculinity. No identity politics. Just Brad Pitt driving very, very fast. Joseph Kosinski, the director who turned Top Gun: Maverick into the biggest crowd-p
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#133: David
Angel Studios just proved that faith-based cinema can compete with the big boys, and they did it with a 3,000-year-old story about a shepherd kid with a sling. David is an animated biblical musical that tells the first half of King David's story, from his anointing by the prophet Samuel through his defeat of Goliath, his tumultuous relationship with King Saul, and his eventual rise as Israel's ri
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#134: Ne Zha 2
Ne Zha 2 is one of the most extraordinary animated films made anywhere in the world in the past decade. Full stop. The first film was a surprise phenomenon. The sequel is a masterpiece of scale and emotion that makes the original look like a rehearsal. Yang Yu has created something that Western animation studios spent the last five years failing to produce: a film about destiny, sacrifice, and lov
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#135: The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants
The fourth SpongeBob theatrical outing arrives with the kind of refreshing simplicity that has become almost exotic in modern animated filmmaking: it tells a straightforward story about friendship and courage, delivers its moral without a lecture, and doesn't try to be anything other than a SpongeBob movie. SpongeBob wants to be a "big guy." Mr. Krabs, his boss and surrogate father figure, tells
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What 2025 Taught Us
The data from 2025 tells a story the industry does not want to hear: traditional films made the money. The SpongeBob Movie ($1.2B), Ne Zha 2 ($2.1B), F1 ($780M), Mission: Impossible ($1.1B), and How to Train Your Dragon ($930M) were the biggest hits of the year, and every single one scores TRADITIONAL or STRONGLY TRADITIONAL. The woke films -- Snow White, Zootopia 2, Now You See Me: Now You Don't -- underperformed, cratered, or both.
But the cultural machinery that manufactures prestige and awards attention did not adjust. Adolescence was hailed as the year's most important television. The White Lotus continued to dominate the conversation. Eddington and Bugonia earned critical raves. The progressive content pipeline is not slowing down because the box office sends a signal. It is doubling down.
Every film on this list links to its full VirtueVigil review with complete category breakdowns, parental guidance warnings, and detailed scoring. The work continues.