2025 was a year of genuine ideological divergence. Hollywood released its most overtly progressive films since the 2019-2020 woke peak, while simultaneously a wave of traditionally coded blockbusters, faith films, and action franchises delivered some of the highest traditional values scores VirtueVigil has ever recorded. The SpongeBob Movie landed at +42 TRAD. Ne Zha 2 hit +39 TRAD. Zootopia 2 cratered at -38 WOKE. The gap between the most traditional and most woke films in a single year has never been wider in our database.
This is the complete VirtueVigil ranking of every 2025 film and series we have reviewed -- 127 titles total, ranked from most woke to most traditional using the VirtueVigil Woke Score methodology. Scores measure ideological density and directional messaging, not quality. Every entry links to the full review. Start at the top to know what to avoid. Scroll to the bottom to find what to watch.
#1: Zootopia 2 (2025) (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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Zootopia 2 (2025)
#2: Bugonia (2025)
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 Plemon...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Bugonia
#3: Clown in a Cornfield (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Clown in a Cornfield
#4: Eddington (2025)
Eddington is the film Ari Aster has been building to since Hereditary. His earlier work destroyed the family as a unit of safety.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Eddington
#5: The Wedding Banquet (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Wedding Banquet
#6: Now You See Me: Now You Don't (2025)
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 dres...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Now You See Me: Now You Don't
#7: Presence (2025)
Presence is the most technically inventive horror film of early 2025. It is also a quietly progressive film wearing an arthouse horror mask.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Presence
#8: Mother Mary (2025)
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 man...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Mother Mary
#9: Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)
James Cameron has now made three Avatar films. Each one is technically extraordinary and ideologically predictable.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Avatar: Fire and Ash
#10: KPop Demon Hunters (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of KPop Demon Hunters
#11: Adolescence (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Adolescence
#12: The White Lotus: Season 3 (2025)
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 th...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The White Lotus: Season 3
#13: The Ugly Stepsister (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Ugly Stepsister
#14: G20 (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of G20
#15: Wednesday: Season 2 (2025)
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 sh...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Wednesday: Season 2
#16: Mickey 17 (2025)
This review contains spoilers throughout. Let's dispense with the pretense: Mickey 17 is a Trump allegory.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Mickey 17
#17: Fallout - Season 2 (2025)
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, ...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Fallout - Season 2
#18: Tron: Ares (2025)
Tron: Ares cost Disney between $180 and $220 million to make and grossed $142 million worldwide. That is not a small disaster.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Tron: Ares
#19: Death of a Unicorn (2025)
Let's get the headline out of the way. Yes, Death of a Unicorn has a political lean.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Death of a Unicorn
#20: Andor - Season 2 (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Andor - Season 2
#21: Snow White (2025)
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?
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Snow White
#22: Stranger Things (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Stranger Things
#23: Smurfs (2025)
Let's be direct about what Smurfs (2025) is and is not. 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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Smurfs
#24: It Was Just an Accident (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of It Was Just an Accident
#25: If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025)
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 y...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
#26: The Electric State (2025)
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...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Electric State
#27: Captain America: Brave New World (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Captain America: Brave New World
#28: Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Jurassic World Rebirth
#29: One Battle After Another (2025)
Paul Thomas Anderson makes movies for people who love movies. That has always been true.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of One Battle After Another
#30: Predator: Badlands (2025)
Dan Trachtenberg clearly loves the Predator franchise. That much is obvious from three films in three years.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Predator: Badlands
#31: Wicked: For Good (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Wicked: For Good
#32: The Housemaid (2025)
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 desig...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Housemaid
#33: Opus (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Opus
#34: One of Them Days (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of One of Them Days
#35: Back in Action (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Back in Action
#36: Companion (2025)
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 effic...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Companion
#37: Yellowjackets (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Yellowjackets
#38: Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc
#39: Black Mirror - Season 7 (2025)
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 domina...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Black Mirror - Season 7
#40: The Running Man (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Running Man
#41: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
#42: The Secret Agent (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Secret Agent
#43: 28 Years Later (2025)
28 Years Later is two movies welded together, and the seam shows. The first 45 minutes are genuinely excellent.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of 28 Years Later
#44: Hurry Up Tomorrow (2025)
Let's get something out of the way. Hurry Up Tomorrow is a vanity project.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Hurry Up Tomorrow
#45: Bring Her Back (2025)
Sally Hawkins ruins you in Bring Her Back. There is no other honest way to start this review.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Bring Her Back
#46: Thunderbolts* (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Thunderbolts*
#47: M3GAN 2.0 (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of M3GAN 2.0
#48: Primate (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Primate
#49: Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Final Destination: Bloodlines
#50: Superman (2025)
⚠️ 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...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Superman
#51: Eternity (2025)
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 Cal...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Eternity
#52: The Naked Gun (2025)
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?
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Naked Gun
#53: Blue Moon (2025)
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 ...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Blue Moon
#54: Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (2025)
Den of Thieves 2 does not break any new ground. 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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
#55: Marty Supreme (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Marty Supreme
#56: The Woman in the Yard (2025)
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. The Woman standing in Ramona's yard is Ramona.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Woman in the Yard
#57: Materialists (2025)
Lucy Mason is a matchmaker in New York City. She is good at her job.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Materialists
#58: Drop (2025)
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 AirD...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Drop
#59: Novocaine (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Novocaine
#60: In the Lost Lands (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of In the Lost Lands
#61: The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
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 ple...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Phoenician Scheme
#62: Freakier Friday (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Freakier Friday
#63: Nobody 2 (2025)
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 crosse...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Nobody 2
#64: Elio (2025)
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-ye...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Elio
#65: The Shrouds (2025)
He couldn't let her go. So he invented a way to keep watching her.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Shrouds
#66: Heart Eyes (2025)
It's Valentine's Day in Seattle. A serial killer called the Heart Eyes Killer is hunting couples.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Heart Eyes
#67: Sentimental Value (2025)
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 l...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Sentimental Value
#68: From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina
#69: Warfare (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Warfare
#70: Love Hurts (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Love Hurts
#71: Lilo & Stitch (2025)
Here is something you don't say often about a Disney live-action remake: this one earns it. Not because it breaks new ground.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Lilo & Stitch
#72: A Minecraft Movie (2025)
A Minecraft Movie is an honest film. It is not pretending to be Citizen Kane.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of A Minecraft Movie
#73: The Black Phone 2 (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Black Phone 2
#74: The Gorge (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Gorge
#75: The Monkey (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Monkey
#76: Anaconda (2025)
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, Thandi...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Anaconda
#77: The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025)
The Conjuring: Last Rites is not the best film in the franchise. That distinction still belongs to James Wan's 2013 original.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Conjuring: Last Rites
#78: Heads of State (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Heads of State
#79: The Bad Guys 2 (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Bad Guys 2
#80: Together (2025)
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 be...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Together
#81: Flight Risk (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Flight Risk
#82: Frankenstein (2025)
Guillermo del Toro has been trying to make this movie since the mid-1990s. That is not a figure of speech.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Frankenstein
#83: Wolf Man (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Wolf Man
#84: Havoc (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Havoc
#85: The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)
Marvel needed a win, and they mostly got one. The Fantastic Four: First Steps is the best MCU film in years, which is admittedly a low bar after the studio's rough stretch.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Fantastic Four: First Steps
#86: Dracula: A Love Tale (2025)
Luc Besson's Dracula: A Love Tale is a strange, kitschy, deeply sincere movie. And that sincerity is precisely what saves it.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Dracula: A Love Tale
#87: Hamnet (2025)
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...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Hamnet
#88: Until Dawn (2025)
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...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Until Dawn
#89: The Amateur (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Amateur
#90: Fountain of Youth (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Fountain of Youth
#91: Invincible - Season 3 (2025)
Invincible remains the best superhero show currently in production. That verdict still holds in Season 3.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Invincible - Season 3
#92: Hamlet (2025)
Let's settle one question first. Is Riz Ahmed playing Hamlet a stunt?
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Hamlet
#93: The Alto Knights (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Alto Knights
#94: The Life of Chuck (2025)
The universe is ending. Billboards are appearing all over the world with the face of a man named Charles Krantz, an accountant, with the words: '39 Great Years.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Life of Chuck
#95: Is Pluribus Woke? | VirtueVigil Review (2025)
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 ...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Is Pluribus Woke? | VirtueVigil Review
#96: Black Bag (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Black Bag
#97: Fight or Flight (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Fight or Flight
#98: Paddington in Peru (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Paddington in Peru
#99: Caught Stealing (2025)
Darren Aronofsky makes a noir. That sentence should not work.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Caught Stealing
#100: Sinners (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Sinners
#101: Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
#102: Train Dreams (2025)
Train Dreams is the kind of film that doesn't get made very often anymore. It trusts its audience to sit with silence and find meaning in the accumulation of small moments across a long, hard, beautiful life.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Train Dreams
#103: EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2025)
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 product...
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#104: Nonnas (2025)
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 a reaction against woke.
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#105: A Working Man (2025)
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.
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#106: Weapons (2025)
Weapons is the rare horror film that conservatives do not need to apologize for enjoying. In fact, they may find themselves grinning through it.
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#107: Landman - Season 2 (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Landman - Season 2
#108: Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Five Nights at Freddy's 2
#109: F1 (2025)
F1 is the purest strain of old-school Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking released in 2025. It's a comeback story about a broken man who finds redemption through grit, self-sacrifice, and the refusal to quit.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of F1
#110: The Pitt (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Pitt
#111: Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025)
There is a scene in The Final Reckoning where Ethan Hunt floats 400 feet underwater in a destroyed Russian submarine, completely alone, knowing that surfacing will take four minutes and every intelligence agency on the planet is hunting him. He has no guarantee the mission will succeed.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
#112: Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Movie: Infinity Castle (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Movie: Infinity Castle
#113: Song Sung Blue (2025)
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. 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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Song Sung Blue
#114: Dog Man (2025)
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.
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#115: Reacher - Season 3 (2025)
Reacher Season 3 does something the third season of almost any television series struggles to do: it deepens without diluting. The premise is unchanged.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Reacher - Season 3
#116: The Blue Trail (2025)
There are films that earn their politics and films that perform them. The Blue Trail earns every frame.
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#117: The King of Kings (2025)
This is the film our audience has been waiting for. Not a film that tips its hat to faith.
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#118: Last Breath (2025)
Three hundred feet below the North Sea, the umbilical line connecting Chris Lemons to the diving bell snaps. His oxygen lasts approximately five minutes.
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#119: The Accountant 2 (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Accountant 2
#120: Karate Kid: Legends (2025)
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.
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#121: The Chosen: Last Supper (2025)
There are moments in The Chosen: Last Supper that feel genuinely sacred. That is a word I rarely apply to film.
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#122: Brave the Dark (2025)
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 livi...
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#123: David (2025)
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 h...
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#124: Happy Gilmore 2 (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Happy Gilmore 2
#125: How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
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.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of How to Train Your Dragon
#126: Ne Zha 2 (2025)
Ne Zha 2 is one of the most extraordinary animated films made anywhere in the world in the past decade. The first film was a surprise phenomenon.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Ne Zha 2
#127: The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants (2025)
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 Spong...
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants
The 2025 Verdict
127 films. The average score margin across the 2025 dataset is approximately +6 TRAD, placing 2025 as a modestly traditionally coded year overall. But the averages hide the real story: 2025 was the most polarized year in VirtueVigil history. The top 10 most traditional films average +30 TRAD. The top 10 most woke average -12 WOKE. The political sorting in Hollywood output has never been more visible or more stark.
Faith films and Asian animation dominated the traditional end: Ne Zha 2, The King of Kings, The Chosen: Last Supper, Brave the Dark, and David all scored STRONGLY TRADITIONAL. On the other end, Zootopia 2 delivered the most aggressively ideological animated film in Disney history at -38 WOKE, with Bugonia and Clown in a Cornfield rounding out the most progressive titles of the year.
Browse the full VirtueVigil review archive. For companion annual rankings, see Every 2024 Movie Ranked, Every 2023 Movie Ranked, Every 2022 Movie Ranked, and Most Woke Movies of 2026 So Far.
Methodology Note
All scores use the VirtueVigil Woke Score system. Scores do not measure quality or entertainment value. Full details at our Methodology page.