The 18 Most Woke Movies of 2023, Ranked by VirtueVigil

VERY WOKE (Margin -36 and Below)

#1 (Most Woke): Poor Things (2023)

Woke Score: 46.5 • Traditional Score: 9.4 • Verdict: VERY WOKE • Margin: -37.1

Genre: Sci-Fi & Fantasy | Platform: Streaming | Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Hollywood has always loved a metaphor. But rarely has the industry deployed one this nakedly, or this aggressively, and then handed it four Oscars. Poor Things is a film about a woman brought back to life with a baby's brain installed in her adult skull -- and the film's central argument is that this is what female liberation looks like. Bella Baxter does not know the rules of society because she literally cannot remember them. Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara treat this amnesia as a gift: she can discover sexuality, philosophy, and self-determination entirely unconstrained by the repressive Victorian world around her. The baby brain premise is a metaphor for the idea that women have been infantilized by patriarchal society and need to rediscover themselves from scratch. Emma Stone won Best Actress. The film won Best Production Design, Best Makeup, and Best Costume Design. The Academy did not just honor the film -- it endorsed its framework. At 46.5 woke and just 9.4 traditional, Poor Things is the most ideologically one-sided film of 2023.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Poor Things

STRONGLY WOKE (Margin -20 to -35.99)

#2: Barbie (2023)

Woke Score: 48.4 • Traditional Score: 16.3 • Verdict: STRONGLY WOKE • Margin: -32.1

Genre: Comedy | Platform: Streaming | Director: Greta Gerwig

Nobody took their kids to a $1.44 billion feminist manifesto. They bought the pink tickets, grabbed the popcorn, and settled in for what the trailers promised was a breezy, nostalgic romp through a world of plastic perfection. What they got was something considerably more deliberate: a two-hour argument, wrapped in Barbie pink and Kenergy, about the crushing weight of the patriarchy and the impossibility of being a woman in the modern world. Greta Gerwig is a gifted filmmaker and an ideologically committed one. Barbie is both things at once. In Barbieland, the women run everything and the Kens are accessories. When Barbie and Ken enter the real world, Ken discovers patriarchy and brings it home as a souvenir. The film frames his conversion as absurd while treating Barbie's feminist awakening as profound. America Ferrera's now-famous monologue about the contradictions of modern womanhood is the film's thesis statement, delivered directly to camera. At 48.4 woke -- the highest raw woke score of any 2023 film -- Barbie is the year's most successful ideological delivery vehicle. The pink is the sugar. The message is the medicine. Whether you want it or not, you are swallowing both.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Barbie

#3: Saltburn (2023)

Woke Score: 35.4 • Traditional Score: 3.4 • Verdict: STRONGLY WOKE • Margin: -32.0

Genre: Thriller | Platform: Streaming (Amazon Prime Video) | Director: Emerald Fennell

They sold you a gothic aesthetic. They delivered a manifesto wrapped in designer lighting. Saltburn arrived draped in the visual language of prestige British cinema -- lush Northamptonshire countryside, Jacob Elordi's jawline catching golden-hour light, Barry Keoghan radiating wolfish hunger. The trailers suggested a stylish psychological thriller in the Talented Mr. Ripley tradition. What arrived was something else: a film whose thesis is that the English aristocracy is a hollowed-out, parasitic institution that deserves to be dismantled from within. Oliver Quick spends two hours systematically destroying the Catton family -- not through wealth or power, which he has none of, but through the careful application of desire and deception. The film wants you to root for this. The Cattons are presented as so vacant, so aesthetically obsessed, so indifferent to the real world that their destruction becomes a kind of justice. The famous final scene -- Keoghan dancing naked through the empty estate to "Murder on the Dancefloor" -- is the victory lap. The interloper won. Saltburn's 3.4 traditional score, the second-lowest in the entire 2023 database, tells you exactly how much this film values anything that came before it.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Saltburn

#4: The Creator (2023)

Woke Score: 35.9 • Traditional Score: 4.9 • Verdict: STRONGLY WOKE • Margin: -31.0

Genre: Action / Sci-Fi | Platform: Theatrical (20th Century Studios) | Director: Gareth Edwards

The Creator is a genuinely beautiful film with a genuinely bad politics problem. Set in 2070, the United States blames artificial intelligence for detonating a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles and goes to war against AI, which has found sanctuary in "New Asia" -- a spiritual, Buddhist-coded civilization living peacefully with robots. The US military operates a giant orbital weapons platform called NOMAD that it uses to obliterate Asian cities from space. The hero, played by John David Washington, is sent to find and destroy the AI's ultimate weapon. He finds it. It is a little girl. From a craft perspective, this movie is stunning -- shot on location across Southeast Asia with a visual vocabulary that borrows from Apocalypse Now and Blade Runner. But the politics are not subtle. America is the aggressor, Asia is the victim, robots are the oppressed minority, and the little girl with AI powers is the innocent whose destruction would be a war crime. The film's traditional score of 4.9 -- third-lowest of the 2023 season -- reflects a worldview in which American military power is an unambiguous evil and the Global South is a repository of spiritual wisdom under siege. The Creator is the most expensive anti-American propaganda film ever made, and it looks incredible doing it.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Creator

WOKE (Margin -6 to -19.99)

#5: The Marvels (2023)

Woke Score: 22.9 • Traditional Score: 8.9 • Verdict: WOKE • Margin: -14.0

Genre: Superhero / Action / Comedy | Platform: Theatrical | Director: Nia DaCosta

The Marvels is the film that broke the MCU's aura of commercial invincibility. Worldwide gross of $206 million against a production budget of $374 million. A loss of over $200 million. The lowest-grossing film in MCU history. The question is not whether The Marvels is bad -- the B CinemaScore, 62% RT critics score, and 5.5 IMDB rating have settled that. The question is whether it is woke, and the answer is yes, meaningfully so. An all-female superhero team-up directed by a progressive Black female filmmaker, starring Brie Larson (culture war lightning rod), featuring the MCU's first Muslim superhero, with no significant male heroes. Nick Fury is reduced to comic relief. The plot involves an alien civilization whose natural resources are being stolen by the Kree -- an environmental and colonial metaphor. The villain, Dar-Benn, is a woman seeking to restore her dying world by taking from others. The film cannot decide whether to condemn her or sympathize with her cause. Audiences could not decide whether to show up. At 22.9 woke and 8.9 traditional, The Marvels is the film that proved the ceiling on ideological-first filmmaking is real, and it is low.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Marvels

#6: Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023)

Woke Score: 30.7 • Traditional Score: 18.8 • Verdict: WOKE • Margin: -11.9

Genre: Action / Superhero / Fantasy | Platform: Theatrical | Director: James Wan

The DCEU died the way it lived: drowning in its own ambition. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom was supposed to be a triumphant send-off for DC's most commercially successful franchise. Instead, it became a $215 million climate change PSA that forgot to be a good movie first. The original Aquaman earned $1.15 billion by being exactly what audiences wanted -- a big, dumb, gorgeous undersea adventure with Jason Momoa punching things. The sequel decided audiences actually needed a lecture about greenhouse gas emissions, ocean acidification, and the importance of addressing the United Nations about the climate crisis. The box office responded: $440 million worldwide, barely breaking even after marketing costs, a catastrophic 62% drop from the original. The villain's motivation is environmental revenge against the surface world for destroying the oceans -- a motivation the film treats as fundamentally reasonable, requiring Aquaman to argue that maybe we should not destroy the entire surface world even though they kind of deserve it. The 30.7 woke score reflects the relentless climate messaging. The 18.8 traditional score reflects what is left of the action-adventure skeleton underneath. That gap tells the story.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom

#7: The Little Mermaid (2023)

Woke Score: 24.2 • Traditional Score: 12.9 • Verdict: WOKE • Margin: -11.3

Genre: Musical | Platform: Streaming | Director: Rob Marshall

The moment the first marketing image dropped, showing Halle Bailey as Ariel, the internet divided cleanly in two. One half celebrated. The other half complained. What got lost in that fight is the question VirtueVigil readers actually want answered: what is this film, what does it believe, and is it worth your family's two and a half hours? The Little Mermaid (2023) is a well-produced but ideologically heavy live-action remake. The color-conscious casting is only the most visible choice. The script makes deliberate alterations to the 1989 original: Ariel's motivation is less about Eric and more about a pre-existing fascination with the human world. Eric is given a backstory as an adopted prince from a different culture. The kiss subplot is downplayed. Prince Eric's mother, a new character, is the voice of xenophobic tradition. The sea witch's deception is framed as exploitation of a woman's insecurities. These are not accidental choices. At 24.2 woke and 12.9 traditional, the film is a progressive reimagining of a property that families have trusted for decades. That is what parents need to know.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Little Mermaid

#8: Priscilla (2023)

Woke Score: 11.6 • Traditional Score: 1.5 • Verdict: WOKE • Margin: -10.1

Genre: Biography / Drama | Platform: Theatrical | Director: Sofia Coppola | Rating: R

Sofia Coppola is one of the most consistent directors in American cinema -- consistent in craft, consistent in worldview. Priscilla adapts Priscilla Presley's memoir to tell the story from her point of view: a 14-year-old American girl meets Elvis Presley in Germany, falls under his spell, is brought to Graceland, and spends the next decade learning that being chosen by the most famous man in the world means being reshaped entirely to his specifications. She dyes her hair black. She keeps his hours. She waits. He tours. He is unfaithful. She endures. Eventually she leaves. Coppola's thesis is not subtle. Elvis is filmed from a slight distance throughout, the way Coppola shoots all her male protagonists -- as objects of desire whose interior lives remain opaque by design. Priscilla is the only person whose experience matters. The film's 1.5 traditional score -- the lowest of any 2023 film -- reflects a complete rejection of the traditional narratives surrounding this relationship. This is not a love story. It is a power analysis, and it is devastating on its own terms.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Priscilla

#9: The Color Purple (2023)

Woke Score: 18.3 • Traditional Score: 9.9 • Verdict: WOKE • Margin: -8.4

Genre: Musical / Drama / Historical | Platform: Theatrical | Director: Blitz Bazawule | Rating: PG-13

Alice Walker's 1982 novel is an explicitly feminist text. Its thesis, stated clearly and never qualified, is that patriarchal abuse of Black women by Black men is a systematic horror, that liberation comes through female solidarity and self-love, and that romantic love between women can be redemptive in ways that male-female love has not been. The 1985 Spielberg film adapted the novel. The 2005 Broadway musical adapted the film. The 2023 film adapts the musical. The ideology has been consistent across all four iterations. Blitz Bazawule directed a film that is genuinely well-made, with strong performances across the board. Fantasia Barrino brings a gravity to Celie that the musical format sometimes undermines. Danielle Brooks earned an Oscar nomination as Sofia. The song "I'm Here" lands. But the ideological framework remains intact across every version: men are predators, women are survivors, and the only reliable route to wholeness runs through female community. At 18.3 woke and 9.9 traditional, The Color Purple is a well-crafted delivery system for a worldview parents should understand before the opening number.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Color Purple

#10: Blue Beetle (2023)

Woke Score: 15.1 • Traditional Score: 8.8 • Verdict: WOKE • Margin: -6.3

Genre: Superhero / Action | Platform: Theaters / Max | Director: Angel Manuel Soto

Blue Beetle is the most politically opinionated DC film since Zack Snyder left the franchise, and it is probably the most fun one since Shazam. Those two facts are in constant tension throughout the runtime. The film's genuine achievement is the Reyes family. Xolo Mariduena as Jaime is likable, grounded, and funny. His father Alberto, played by Damian Alcazar, is the emotional center -- a man who worked hard all his life to give his kids opportunities, a character who believes in the American dream because he has not given up on it yet. Adriana Barraza as Nana steals several scenes. But the film also carries a heavy political payload. The villain, Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon), is a military contractor who weaponizes the alien scarab technology. The subtext is colonialism and exploitation. The Reyes family's economic precarity, their fear of displacement, their struggle against a system designed to extract from them -- these are not background details. They are the film's moral architecture. Blue Beetle earns its woke score honestly, but it earns its 8.8 traditional score too, mostly through the family dynamics. The Reyes family is the reason to watch this film. The messaging is the reason to watch it with your eyes open.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Blue Beetle

WOKE LEAN (Margin 0 to -5.99)

#11: Wish (2023)

Woke Score: 17.4 • Traditional Score: 11.9 • Verdict: WOKE LEAN • Margin: -5.5

Genre: Animation / Musical / Fantasy | Platform: Theatrical / Disney+

Disney's centennial celebration is a fitting monument to everything wrong with modern Disney. Wish is technically competent and thematically empty -- a film that cost nearly $200 million and made audiences feel absolutely nothing. Asha, a 17-year-old in the Mediterranean kingdom of Rosas, discovers that the benevolent King Magnifico hoards his subjects' wishes for power rather than granting them. She wishes upon a star, the star comes to life, and together they overthrow the king. The anti-authoritarian messaging is the film's strongest ideological current: Magnifico is a leader who takes something precious from his people in exchange for safety and never intends to return it. The metaphor is either about government overreach or corporate extraction or both, but the film lacks the courage to commit to either reading. The result is a movie that gestures at themes without exploring any of them. At 17.4 woke and 11.9 traditional, Wish is ideologically active but ideologically incoherent. It is the weakest woke film of 2023, which is fitting: even its ideology lacks conviction.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Wish

#12: Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Woke Score: 19.2 • Traditional Score: 14.8 • Verdict: WOKE LEAN • Margin: -4.4

Genre: Drama | Platform: Apple TV+ | Director: Martin Scorsese

The most disorienting thing about Killers of the Flower Moon is not the three-and-a-half-hour runtime, or the dozens of methodical murders, or the fact that the killers were husbands, doctors, and civic leaders who wore Sunday suits. The most disorienting thing is how long it took America to notice. David Grann's 2017 book excavated a wound that never fully healed. Martin Scorsese's film turns that wound into an unflinching 206-minute portrait of greed, genocide-by-increment, and the complicity of institutions that were supposed to protect. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart as a man too dim to be evil on his own but too weak to resist his uncle's evil. Robert De Niro's William Hale is the ur-American villain: charming, paternal, utterly remorseless. Lily Gladstone's Mollie Burkhart is the film's moral center, and her stillness is the most powerful force on screen. The film's woke score reflects its anti-colonial framework and its centering of the Osage experience. Its 14.8 traditional score reflects Scorsese's refusal to simplify: the FBI investigation that eventually broke the case was led by men who genuinely believed in justice. Killers of the Flower Moon is a great American film about a great American crime. It also arrives with an ideological framework audiences should recognize.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Killers of the Flower Moon

#13: American Fiction (2023)

Woke Score: 13.5 • Traditional Score: 9.3 • Verdict: WOKE LEAN • Margin: -4.2

Genre: Comedy / Drama | Platform: Streaming | Director: Cord Jefferson

American Fiction is the most interesting progressive film of the 2023 season because it is willing to bite the hand it feeds. Cord Jefferson's debut feature is a razor-sharp satire of the way progressive cultural institutions -- specifically the literary publishing industry -- exploit Black trauma narratives for profit while framing that exploitation as diversity and inclusion. Jeffrey Wright plays Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a Black novelist whose serious literary fiction keeps getting rejected by publishers who want "more Black." In frustration, he writes a pseudonymous parody filled with every stereotype the industry craves. It becomes a bestseller. The satire lands. Where the film's ideology asserts itself is in the family drama -- Monk's relationships with his mother, sister, and brother are rendered with the kind of emotional particularity that progressive racial storytelling usually resists. These are not symbols. They are people. The film's limitation is that it can only criticize the system from within. The parody that should destroy Monk's career instead enriches it, and the film does not quite know what to do with that irony. At 13.5 woke and 9.3 traditional, American Fiction is a progressive film with enough self-awareness to make its own framework uncomfortable. That is rarer than it should be.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of American Fiction

#14: The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023)

Woke Score: 13.2 • Traditional Score: 9.1 • Verdict: WOKE LEAN • Margin: -4.1

Genre: Action / Sci-Fi / Dystopian Drama | Platform: Theatrical | Director: Francis Lawrence | Rating: PG-13

This is the film the Hunger Games franchise needed to make and the one it was most afraid to make: a story where the villain wins, the hero leaves, and nobody is redeemed. The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes takes the franchise's most comfortable assumption -- that Coriolanus Snow was always a monster -- and asks a harder question. What if he was not? What if he was brilliant, proud, deeply in love, and capable of real loyalty, and still chose power when the choice was forced on him? Tom Blyth's Snow is the film's greatest achievement. He plays him as genuinely compelling rather than simply menacing. A Snow who was always evil explains nothing. A Snow who was capable of good and chose otherwise explains everything. The franchise's anti-authoritarian politics are baked in -- the Capitol is the villain, the districts are victims, the Games are atrocity -- but this prequel complicates the binary by showing how the system seduces rather than simply imposes. Rachel Zegler's Lucy Gray Baird is the moral counterweight who sees Snow clearly before anyone else does. The woke score reflects the dystopian framework. The 9.1 traditional score reflects a story that takes moral agency seriously. This is the franchise's most ideologically sophisticated entry.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes

#15: Oppenheimer (2023)

Woke Score: 29.5 • Traditional Score: 25.6 • Verdict: WOKE LEAN • Margin: -3.9

Genre: Drama | Platform: Streaming | Director: Christopher Nolan

There is a moment roughly two-thirds through Oppenheimer when J. Robert Oppenheimer -- fresh from watching the bomb he built vaporize 80,000 people -- stands before a cheering crowd in Los Alamos and tries to look triumphant. Nolan cuts between the adulation and Oppenheimer's vision: bodies burning, a woman's skin peeling away in nuclear flash, the hollow-eyed knowledge of what he has done. It is the most honest thing the film does, and it sets up the central question Christopher Nolan spends three hours refusing to fully answer: was it worth it? Oppenheimer is the most ideologically balanced film on this list, and its woke score of 29.5 reflects the weight given to the moral horror of the bomb, the Stalinist paranoia of the security clearance hearing, and the film's framing of Oppenheimer as a man destroyed by the very government he served. Its 25.6 traditional score -- the highest of any film on this list -- reflects Nolan's ambivalence: the film does not condemn the Manhattan Project, does not argue the bomb should not have been built, and treats Robert Downey Jr.'s Lewis Strauss not as a patriot but as a petty bureaucrat who weaponized security theater. The tension between these two scores is the tension in the film itself. Oppenheimer is torn between two moral frameworks and refuses to choose. At -3.9, it is the most traditional film on this list -- and still slightly woke. That is 2023 in a single data point.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Oppenheimer

#16: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

Woke Score: 12.6 • Traditional Score: 10.6 • Verdict: WOKE LEAN • Margin: -2.0

Genre: Animated / Superhero | Platform: Theatrical

Across the Spider-Verse is the most technically ambitious animated film ever made. That is not hyperbole. Six different animation styles running simultaneously in a single frame: Spider-Punk rendered in collage-cut anarchist zine art, Miles Morales in expressive watercolor, Miguel O'Hara in sleek future-noir, Pavitr Prabhakar in Bollywood-influenced Rajasthani miniature painting. It is genuinely unlike anything that has existed before. The ideology is present but mostly structural: Miles Morales, an Afro-Latino teenager, is positioned against Miguel O'Hara's Spider-Society, which insists that canon events must happen -- specific tragedies every Spider-person must endure -- and that interfering with them risks destroying the multiverse. Miles's rebellion against this deterministic framework is framed as heroic self-determination against an authoritarian system that demands suffering. It is less a political argument than a narrative one. At 12.6 woke and 10.6 traditional, Across the Spider-Verse is the most balanced superhero film on this list, and the only one where the craft argument alone justifies watching it regardless of ideology.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

#17: Scream VI (2023)

Woke Score: 7.4 • Traditional Score: 6.8 • Verdict: WOKE LEAN • Margin: -0.6

Genre: Horror / Slasher | Platform: Theatrical

Scream VI moves the franchise from Woodsboro to New York City, trades Sidney Prescott for the Carpenter sisters, and delivers exactly what a Scream sequel is supposed to deliver: a satisfying whodunit structure, escalating kill sequences, meta-commentary on the genre, and at least one legacy character return that earns its emotional weight. Sam (Melissa Barrera) and Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) have relocated to New York with fellow survivors. New Ghostface killers target survivors of previous attacks. Hayden Panettiere returns as Kirby Reed, now an FBI agent, and Courteney Cox's Gale Weathers remains the franchise's most reliable presence. The woke score of 7.4 is modest -- "elevated horror" snobbery, a "requel" meta-narrative that takes a swipe at fan entitlement, and the film's treatment of its female leads as trauma survivors rather than traditional final girls. The 6.8 traditional score reflects the franchise's core: the rules still matter, the whodunit still works, and the kills still land. Scream VI is the ghost of what most franchise horror used to be -- ideologically light, structurally sound, and fun. The slight woke lean is mostly noise from a franchise that cannot help commenting on itself.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Scream VI

#18 (Least Woke): Thanksgiving (2023)

Woke Score: 9.2 • Traditional Score: 8.7 • Verdict: WOKE LEAN • Margin: -0.5

Genre: Horror / Slasher / Thriller | Platform: Theatrical (TriStar Pictures / Sony) | Director: Eli Roth

Thanksgiving is exactly what it needs to be. That is not as easy as it sounds. A Black Friday riot at a Plymouth, Massachusetts big-box store ends in several deaths, including a woman crushed in a stampede. One year later, a killer in a Pilgrim costume starts working through the people responsible -- posting on Instagram, planning a Thanksgiving dinner, getting messy. Eli Roth has been trying to turn his 2007 fake Grindhouse trailer into a feature since 2007, and the result is a film that knows exactly what it is and delivers it without apology. The kills are inventive. The pacing is tight. The ensemble is likable enough that you feel something when they start disappearing. Patrick Dempsey shows up as the town sheriff and plays it completely straight. At 9.2 woke and 8.7 traditional, Thanksgiving is the most ideologically neutral film on this list, and the narrowest gap between scores. The consumerism satire could tilt either direction. Roth does not push it. He just kills people in increasingly creative holiday-themed ways. For a slasher film, that is a kind of integrity. For 2023, it is practically a political statement by omission -- the only film in the top 18 where nobody was trying to teach you anything.

Read the full VirtueVigil review of Thanksgiving

Methodological Note

Every score in this list uses the VirtueVigil Wake Score (VVWS) methodology: Severity x Authenticity x Centrality produces the Woke Score, and the same formula applied to traditional content produces the Traditional Score. The margin (Traditional minus Woke) determines the verdict. Scores are deterministic and consistent across the entire database. No film's score was adjusted for this listicle. For the complete trope-by-trope breakdown of any film above, follow the link to its full review.