249 reviews in this category.
We Were Soldiers is the Vietnam War film that Hollywood would not make today. It honors the American soldiers who fought at Ia Drang without apologizing for them, while still showing the enemy as a competent military force led by a commander who is n…...
Man on Fire is one of the purest traditional value systems in American cinema, delivered at 146 minutes of operatic vengeance. The whole film runs on a single premise: protecting the innocent is not just a job.…...
The Last Samurai is a film about what honor actually costs, and it doesn't flinch at the answer. Katsumoto and his men know they're going to lose. They know the rifles and cannons and conscript armies of the new Japan will eventually overwhelm them.…...
Taylor Sheridan has built a career on making shows that the cultural left finds ideologically inconvenient and the cultural right finds surprisingly watchable despite their progressive casting choices. Lioness Season 3 continues that balancing act.…...
Casino Royale is not just the best Bond film; it is a document of what the franchise looked like before ideological capture set in.…...
Warrior (2011) is the best sports film of the decade and it isn't close. Gavin O'Connor's MMA drama about two estranged brothers competing in the same tournament is built on the oldest dramatic engine there is: a broken family trying to find its way …...
The Equalizer (2014) is a film about a man who knows the right thing to do and does it, at considerable personal cost, with extraordinary precision. That's the whole movie. It sounds simple.…...
Reacher Season 4 is the most unapologetically traditional show on streaming television, and it knows exactly what it is. It does not apologize. It does not equivocate. It does not pause to let a character explain that violence is actually problematic.…...
First Blood is not what the franchise became. The sequels are muscular fantasies about a one-man army tearing through jungles with increasingly absurd firepower.…...
John Wick: Chapter 2 is a better film than it has any business being. The first John Wick was a stripped-down revenge story that worked on pure execution.…...
Mission: Impossible - Fallout is the sixth film in the franchise, the best, and one of the few blockbusters in recent memory that treats physical danger as a genuine moral matter rather than a spectacle....
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the best film in the franchise because it understands something the others only gestured at: the real treasure was never gold or glory. It was a father and son finding each other....
The second chapter of a trilogy is the hardest to get right. It must deepen the stakes, expand the world, and darken the tone without resolution. It must make the audience feel the weight of the journey.…...
Deadpool and Wolverine is the third Deadpool film and the character's official entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe following Disney's acquisition of Fox. It earned $1.338 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time.…...
Sam Raimi's Spider-Man hit theaters on May 3, 2002, cleared $114 million in its opening weekend, which was a box office record at the time, and grossed $821 million worldwide against a $139 million budget.…...
Kenneth Branagh's Thor (2011) is the MCU film that established Marvel could do mythology at scale and not embarrass itself.…...
The Rock is the film that defined the Michael Bay template before it became a cliche. It cost $75 million and grossed $335 million worldwide in 1996, which was significant.…...
Batman: Caped Crusader Season 2 arrives on Prime Video with ten episodes that deepen the show's commitment to 1940s noir.…...
Motor City arrives as a stripped-down revenge thriller that wears its 1970s grindhouse influences proudly.…...
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.…...
Amazon's Fallout adaptation arrives as a rare thing: a video game adaptation that does not just respect its source material but enriches it.…...
The Debt Collector is a Thai action thriller that arrives on Netflix with a premise so archetypal it could have been written on a napkin: a dying man with a violent past seeks redemption by protecting the powerless. That is not a criticism.…...
The Terminator is a film that should not work. Its budget was a fraction of what the premise demanded. Its star was a bodybuilder with a thick Austrian accent cast as a killing machine from the future. Its director had exactly one feature credit.…...
Before Bourne, the action thriller was in a strange place. The Matrix had raised the bar for wire-fu spectacle, but the espionage genre was still doing Bond cosplay with gadgets and one-liners.…...
Ride or Die is Amazon Prime Video's glossy new action-comedy series that pairs Octavia Spencer and Hannah Waddingham as best friends on the run through Europe after one of them is revealed to be an elite international assassin.…...
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 qua…...
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.…...
The Western is the most traditional American film genre, and The Isolate Thief appears to know exactly what that means....
The Mandalorian and Grogu is the first Star Wars theatrical film to come from the television wing of the franchise, and the result is a modest, heartfelt adventure that knows exactly what it is: a story about a father and his son.…...
Citizen Vigilante is exactly the kind of film that mainstream critics despise and a specific audience genuinely wants.…...
Stop! That! Train! is exactly what it says on the box. A disaster parody featuring drag queens, built for the RuPaul's Drag Race fan base, directed by a filmmaker who has spent his career in that cultural space....
Peter Parker has been in every version of Spider-Man's origin story. Uncle Ben dies, Peter learns the lesson, Peter becomes the hero. Spider-Man: Homecoming skips that story entirely. You have already seen it twice.…...
The critical consensus on Venom (2018) is well-established: thirty percent on Rotten Tomatoes, a thirty-five on Metacritic, reviews that use words like 'incoherent' and 'generic.' The audience consensus is different: eighty percent audience score, $8…...
Ant-Man has one of the stranger production histories in the MCU. Edgar Wright developed the screenplay for nearly a decade, left the project weeks before principal photography over creative differences with Marvel, and was replaced by Peyton Reed wit…...
Drive is one of the best films made in the last two decades. That's a strong claim. Here's why it holds up....
Extraction is a very good action film that got dismissed by critics and embraced by audiences, which is probably the more accurate verdict....
Star Wars didn't arrive quietly. On May 25, 1977, George Lucas released a film that redefined what movies could be, and nearly fifty years on, it still holds up as one of the most purely traditional pieces of popular entertainment ever made....
The Empire Strikes Back is the rare sequel that improves on everything the original established. It does this not by escalating spectacle but by deepening everything else: character, theme, moral complexity, and emotional cost....
Rogue One is the best Disney-era Star Wars film. It's also the most honest one. It ends with every hero dead, and it earns that ending completely....
The Battle of the Bulge lasted six weeks in the winter of 1944 and 1945, and it killed, wounded, or captured more than 75,000 Americans. It was the worst defeat of the U.S. Army in the European theater. The Germans nearly broke through to Antwerp.…...
The Kraken is real. That is the only premise Kraken (2026) needs, and to the film's credit, it commits to that premise without reservation....
On September 11, 2012, Islamic militants attacked the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith were killed in the initial attack.…...
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 original Crow is one of those films that should not work as well as it does. Brandon Lee plays a murdered rock musician who comes back from the dead to kill the people who murdered him and his fiancee, guided by a literal crow.…...
Barry Seal is the perfect subject for a certain kind of American movie. A former TWA pilot who got bored, got recruited by the CIA to fly reconnaissance missions over Central America, got further recruited by the Medellin Cartel to fly cocaine into t…...
Here's what's remarkable about Captain America: The First Avenger. It came out in 2011, before the MCU became a machine, and it is still the most traditionally American film the franchise has ever produced.…...
Predator is 107 minutes of genre filmmaking executed at an extremely high level. It is also, quietly, a film that has gotten more interesting over the decades as the culture around it has shifted....
Deadpool 2 is a film that works emotionally harder than it has any right to, and that effort is what makes the MIXED verdict appropriate rather than simply WOKE LEAN....
Nobody expected Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl to be good. It was a theme park ride. An amusement park attraction turned into a two-and-a-half-hour blockbuster. The genre had produced very few memorable films.…...
Every superhero origin story made after Batman Begins owes it a debt it will never fully repay....
There is a version of this review that starts with the film's feminist credentials and works backward. That version is not this review.…...
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....
Cobra Kai is the most unexpectedly traditional piece of entertainment American television produced in the 2020s. That is not a qualified statement. It is a simple observation that requires no asterisk and no apology....
Twenty-two years after the original Jurassic Park opened in theaters, Universal and Spielberg managed something genuinely difficult: they made a sequel to an iconic film that understood why the original worked and built on it rather than dismantling …...
John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum opens exactly where Chapter 2 ended: John Wick is running. He has one hour before excommunicado takes effect, before every assassin in the Continental network has a $14 million bounty and legal license to kill him.…...
Ready Player One is a Spielberg film pretending to be a nostalgia delivery mechanism. The pop-culture references, the Iron Giant, the DeLorean, Chucky, Buckaroo Banzai, the Shining, are the surface.…...
The Furious delivers precisely the film its pre-release materials promised: a relentless Hong Kong-style martial arts rescue thriller with zero ideological baggage.…...
There is a moment in Man of Steel where Clark Kent, maybe 12 years old, is overwhelmed in school by his newly awakening X-ray vision and super-hearing. The walls dissolve.…...
Batman v Superman begins with the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne, as every Batman story must. But it does not begin at Crime Alley.…...
Four hours. That is what Zack Snyder needed to tell this story properly, and for once in the history of the superhero blockbuster, a studio let a director find out if he was right....
Thirty years ago, Brian De Palma introduced Ethan Hunt in a film that made everyone who saw it lean forward in their seats. Tom Cruise was not playing a superhero. He was playing a man under pressure who refused to break.…...
The first Mortal Kombat (2021) was one of the franchise's best adaptations. Simon McQuoid understood that the game's appeal is not ironic. The tournament is genuinely meaningful within its mythology.…...
Let's start where the film earns its credibility....
There's a scene about forty-five minutes into Ghostbusters where the mayor of New York calls Peter Venkman into his office.…...
David Leitch is the co-director of the original John Wick, still the best action film of the 2010s. Bullet Train is not John Wick.…...
The opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark lasts about six minutes and contains no dialogue worth remembering.…...
Prey is the best Predator film since the 1987 original. That's not a low bar at this point.…...
Robert Eggers spent years trying to make The Northman. He had to secure a $90 million budget, assemble a cast of heavy European actors, shoot in Ireland and Iceland, and convince a studio that audiences would follow a Viking revenge epic told with th…...
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.…...
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, …...
The Battle of Mogadishu took 18 American lives, wounded 73, and lasted 18 hours. Black Hawk Down puts you inside those 18 hours and doesn't let you out until it's done....
The Battle of Midway is one of the most improbable military victories in American history. Four Japanese fleet carriers sunk in a single day.…...
Fight or Flight is a film that knows exactly what it is and delivers that thing with efficiency and occasional flair.…...
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 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....
Ten years into the MCU's run, Captain America: The Winter Soldier still holds up as the franchise's best individual film. It knows what it is: a 1970s political thriller wearing a superhero costume.…...
The gap between the critics and the audience on The Accountant tells you most of what you need to know. Critics gave it 52 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences gave it 86 percent.…...
George R.R. Martin's short story 'In the Lost Lands' is not a story about epic battles or sprawling political intrigue.…...
Peter Berg made Lone Survivor because Marcus Luttrell asked him to. That origin matters. This is not a Hollywood producer's decision to exploit military sacrifice for box office returns.…...
Jack Ryan: Ghost War arrives on Prime Video May 20 as something Hollywood has forgotten how to make at consistent quality: a serious American patriotism film.…...
Tom King wrote Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow in 2021 and 2022, and it won Eisner Awards and generated exactly two kinds of response: progressive critics calling it a feminist masterpiece and traditional fans asking why their character had been replace…...
Terminator 2 is not a film that needs defending. It is one of the most successful action films ever made, technically brilliant, emotionally devastating, and built on a moral framework that is, at its core, about the most traditional value there is: …...
Die Hard is one of the few action films where the traditional values aren't incidental decoration. They are the engine....
Extraction 2 does something rare in action sequels: it actually justifies its existence....
Red Notice is comfortable with being exactly what it is: a glossy, star-driven heist comedy with three A-listers in expensive locations doing expensive things. On those terms, it mostly works. The problem is the ideology underneath....
The Gray Man is a frustrating film to assess because it contains the bones of something genuinely good but makes choices that undermine it at critical moments....
There is a scene near the end of Logan where Laura cradles the dying Wolverine, turns the cross marking his grave sideways to make an X, and cries for the first time in the film.…...
In the Grey has not released at the time of this review. What we know comes from the trailer, production information, and Guy Ritchie's filmographic track record. That is enough to work with....
Heat asks a simple question: what does it cost a man to be truly excellent at what he does? The answer, in nearly three hours of Michael Mann's finest filmmaking, is: everything else....
The Last Jedi is a technically accomplished, cinematically confident film that is also one of the most ideologically aggressive studio blockbusters ever made....
1917 is the rare war film that makes you feel, rather than observe, the cost of duty....
Three years ago, almost nobody in the West had heard of the Battle of Dhu Qar. If you ask a Saudi, they know it the way Americans know the Alamo. The first time Arabian tribes defeated the Persian Sassanid Empire in open battle.…...
Kiefer Sutherland has been playing certain characters his entire career. The most famous is Jack Bauer, who spent nine seasons demonstrating what a man trained to do impossible things looks like when he has no choice but to do them.…...
300 is not a subtle film. It has never claimed to be. It is 117 minutes of men choosing death over submission, shot in slow motion, set to Tyler Bates' driving metal-and-orchestra score, and delivered with the conviction of a director who genuinely b…...
The phone call that made Liam Neeson a different kind of movie star....
Mad Max: Fury Road is the best action filmmaking of the past twenty-five years, built on a feminist framework that George Miller imported deliberately and Eve Ensler helped construct on location. These two facts are inseparable.…...
Top Gun is 1986 in a bottle. It is a film that does not apologize for what it is, does not hedge, and does not flinch.…...
Over Your Dead Body opens with a marriage already in free fall. Dan (Jason Segel), a formerly successful advertising creative, has been reduced to directing pop-up ads. His ambitions are dead.…...
Interceptor Protocol is a military action thriller starring Charlize Theron as Commander Sarah Cross leading an elite special operations unit to intercept a catastrophic threat. Our verdict: TRADITIONAL with a +11 TRAD margin....
Deadpool 3 teams the Merc with a Mouth with Wolverine in a film that satirizes superhero narratives from every direction. Our verdict: MIXED with a +1 TRAD margin barely favoring traditional values....
Tom Holland's Spider-Man films have maintained something crucial that much contemporary superhero cinema has lost: a genuine moral framework. Peter Parker is not a tortured antihero questioning whether he should use his power.…...
Normal is exactly the kind of film its title ironically promises it is not: a small-town sheriff thriller that starts quiet and escalates into organized crime warfare, with Bob Odenkirk doing what he now does better than almost anyone in Hollywood....
Deep Water is Renny Harlin's return to the shark-thriller genre that made Deep Blue Sea a classic. The film centers on a ship in open water where a shark encounter forces the crew into a desperate survival situation.…...
The Mandalorian and Grogu is Jon Favreau's theatrical expansion of the Mandalorian universe, continuing the story of Din Djarin and the Child (Grogu).…...
There is a version of Cliffhanger (2026) that nobody would want to see. It features a woman who is better than everyone around her because she is a woman, a villain who represents patriarchal power, and a father who needs to be rescued because compet…...
The Boys is one of the most technically accomplished shows on streaming television. It is also one of the most nakedly ideological. Season 4 drops whatever pretense remained....
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....
Beast is the kind of film that used to be a Hollywood staple and is now almost extinct: a gritty, no-apologies MMA story about a man who gave up fighting to live a quiet life, only to be dragged back into the cage when the people he loves are threate…...
Hollywood has been making apology films for a decade. Every American action movie now comes loaded with a second-act speech about institutional corruption, military-industrial complex guilt, or the hero's own problematic violence.…...
They Will Kill You has exactly one thesis and it commits to it with admirable single-mindedness: put Zazie Beetz in a building full of immortal Satanists and watch what happens.…...
PRE-RELEASE ANALYSIS: Spider-Man: Brand New Day releases July 31, 2026. This review is based on trailers, cast and crew confirmations, and the film's premise as described by Marvel and the production team....
PRE-RELEASE ANALYSIS: Masters of the Universe releases June 5, 2026. This review is based on trailers, production information, cast confirmations, and the franchise's established character values....
Netflix does not often deliver a film that feels this old-fashioned in the best sense.…...
Deadpool is many things: Marvel's first successful R-rated superhero film, Ryan Reynolds's career resurrection, the movie that proved you didn't have to be family-friendly to print money at the box office ($780 million worldwide on an $58 million bud…...
The Avengers arrived in 2012 as the culmination of a four-year Marvel experiment: could you build a cinematic universe, seed individual characters across separate films, and then bring them together for a shared story without everything collapsing? T…...
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....
Critics destroyed this movie. 31% on Rotten Tomatoes. 'Dopey,' 'formulaic,' 'overstuffed.' The usual verdict when professional critics encounter a movie built entirely for an audience they don't belong to....
Godzilla Minus One is the best Godzilla film made in decades, and also one of the most traditionally coded action films of recent memory. It's worth understanding why....
Guy Ritchie's The Covenant is one of the most traditionally coded war films of the 2020s, and it got criminally overlooked at the box office. That's worth talking about....
The Creator is a genuinely beautiful film with a genuinely bad politics problem....
Kill Bill: Volume 1 is a film that defies easy ideological scoring, which is exactly the kind of challenge VirtueVigil exists to tackle.…...
Django Unchained is the most misread film in Quentin Tarantino's filmography. Critics on the left called it a radical racial fantasy. Critics on the right called it exploitation with a woke message. Spike Lee refused to watch it.…...
John Wick is the purest action film of the 21st century. Not because it is the most complex, or the most emotionally ambitious, but because it has total clarity of purpose and executes that purpose with absolute technical excellence.…...
There is a moment in Wonder Woman where Diana strides into No Man's Land, deflecting bullets with her bracers while Allied soldiers watch in disbelief, and charges toward the German lines alone.…...
The first thing you need to know about Rebel Ridge is that it is not about race. It's about property rights....
No Time to Die is a film at war with itself, and the miracle is that it almost wins....
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.…...
Free Guy arrived in August 2021 during a summer of pandemic-delayed blockbusters, and it did something almost no one expected: it worked. Really worked.…...
The Matrix Resurrections is a fascinating failure. By which I mean: it fails as a blockbuster sequel, it fails as an action film, it partially fails as a story, and yet it succeeds as a piece of cinema that forces genuine engagement.…...
Space Jam: A New Legacy is a mess. A watchable, occasionally charming, utterly cynical mess. It is the clearest example of a studio film that exists to serve an IP portfolio rather than tell a story, and it did not even bother to hide that fact....
Mortal Kombat 2021 delivers exactly what the franchise's fanbase wanted and exactly what its critics expected: hyper-violent martial arts action, faithful adaptations of the game's iconic moves and fatalities, and a story shallow enough not to get in…...
Wonder Woman 1984 had the hardest job in superhero cinema: follow up one of the genre's most beloved entries while navigating a global pandemic release. It did not pull it off.…...
Birds of Prey is an interesting film to analyze from a conservative perspective because it makes no pretense of being anything other than what it is: a feminist action comedy designed to feel like a girls' night out at a punk rock concert.…...
The Old Guard surprised a lot of people when it became one of Netflix's biggest hits of 2020.…...
Spider-Man: Far From Home has one job. It has to be the first movie after Avengers: Endgame, and it has to make you feel okay about moving forward without Tony Stark. That's a brutal assignment. The film mostly pulls it off....
Wes Ball's reboot arrives many generations after Caesar's legacy, and it works hard to honor that lineage without being enslaved by it.…...
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 Terminal List has a 40% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and a 94% audience score. That gap tells you everything you need to know about where the show sits culturally....
This is the review nobody else is writing yet. Avengers: Doomsday does not release until December 18, 2026. The trailers are out. The cast list is longer than a CVS receipt. Robert Downey Jr. is back, not as Tony Stark but as Doctor Doom.…...
Haymitch Abernathy has been one of cinema's great unexplained characters since Woody Harrelson stumbled through the original Hunger Games films as the perpetually drunk, permanently haunted mentor from District 12.…...
The Matrix is the most politically contested movie in VirtueVigil history, not because it is propaganda but because everybody wants to own it....
Maximus is a general. He commands the armies of Rome, wins battles for a dying emperor, and wants nothing more than to go home to his farm in Spain, to his wife, to his son, to the smell of wheat and horses in the morning.…...
Thirty years on, Braveheart remains one of the most unapologetically traditional epics in the Hollywood canon. It is not a subtle film. It does not want to be.…...
The Patriot is the kind of film Hollywood stopped making around the time it started worrying about how America looked to foreign markets. It is unabashedly pro-American, pro-family, and pro-violent-resistance-to-tyranny.…...
Tombstone is one of the best Westerns ever made, and it is great for reasons that are entirely traditional. The friendship between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday is the most compelling male friendship in American film of the 1990s.…...
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.…...
Black Adam is a movie that has everything it needs to be a great comic book film and makes almost none of it work....
The pitch is perfect and absurd: what if Santa Claus is actually an immortal Viking warrior named Nicomund the Red who became the familiar Christmas figure after centuries of gift-giving penance, and what if he is forced to fight his way through a ho…...
Uncharted spent fourteen years in development hell for a reason. The Naughty Dog game series is critically beloved and commercially enormous specifically because it transcended the video-game-adaptation trap by borrowing from Indiana Jones and creati…...
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....
Tron: Ares cost Disney between $180 and $220 million to make and grossed $142 million worldwide. That is not a small disaster.…...
In the year of Barbie and Oppenheimer, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was the best pure adventure film Hollywood released and the one most people forgot to include in that conversation....
Argylle wants to be the smartest spy film in the room. It ends up being the most exhausting....
Atlas is the kind of movie you watch on a Sunday afternoon with no expectations and find yourself mildly entertained.…...
Gran Turismo is the kind of film Hollywood used to make with confidence: a true story about a young man who works harder than anyone else, earns the respect of skeptics, and achieves something that had never been done before. It is not complicated.…...
Chris Kyle is from Texas. He grows up hunting with his father, absorbing lessons about wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs. His father teaches him that there are three kinds of people in this world, and that the Kyles are sheepdogs. This is not complicated.…...
Everybody knew the Road House remake was going to either be a disaster or a surprise. What nobody expected was that it would land so firmly in entertaining, masculinity-affirming territory while generating almost zero ideological controversy.…...
The thing you need to know going in: Axel F is nostalgia delivery mechanism first and movie second. It knows this. It's comfortable with this. Whether that's satisfying or frustrating depends entirely on what you're bringing to it....
Let me say something that will surprise you: Avatar: The Way of Water is a more conservative film than its politics suggest....
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.…...
When Occupy Wall Street's David Graeber, one of the movement's most prominent intellectual voices, publicly called The Dark Knight Rises 'a piece of anti-Occupy propaganda,' he handed Nolan the most accurate review the film ever received.…...
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.…...
Everything Everywhere All at Once won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actor and Actress. It earned $77 million on a $14.3 million budget. Critics called it a generational masterpiece.…...
The Equalizer 3 is the rare third entry in an action franchise that improves on what came before. It is also the cleanest, most traditionally grounded film in a franchise that has always skewed traditional.…...
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the best animated TMNT film since the 2007 theatrical entry, and one of the most visually distinctive studio animated films in years.…...
Seven films in, Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible franchise remains the gold standard for Hollywood action filmmaking. Dead Reckoning Part One is not just the best entry in the series; it is one of the best action films of the decade.…...
Fast X is exactly what the Fast and Furious franchise has always been: a maximalist action spectacle built around the unironic belief that family is the most powerful force in the universe.…...
Kung Fu Panda 4 is the franchise equivalent of a talented athlete playing a slightly lesser sport: the fundamental skills are on display, the performance is creditable, but something of the original intensity has been traded for management comfort....
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is the best argument against itself: a film that demonstrates exactly what franchise resurrection done right looks like, while also demonstrating the limits of what nostalgia can accomplish on its own....
Thor: Ragnarok is the MCU doing something it rarely does well: laughing at itself with genuine wit instead of nervous deflection.…...
Captain America: Civil War is the MCU at the height of its powers, and it makes an argument that cuts against the progressive grain of the studio that produced it: sometimes the individual conscience is right and collective authority is wrong.…...
Avengers: Infinity War is the best argument that the Marvel Cinematic Universe ever made for its own existence. Ten years of narrative groundwork paid off in a film that is, almost in spite of itself, genuinely tragic. The heroes lose.…...
Avatar is the highest-grossing film in the history of cinema. It made $2.9 billion in its original 2009 release and over $2.3 billion more in its 2022 re-release. More human beings have paid to watch Avatar than any other movie ever made.…...
The Hunger Games arrived in 2012 with a premise that seemed designed to alienate half its potential audience: a female protagonist, a dystopian critique of entertainment culture and government control, and a story where children kill each other as st…...
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is a much better film than its critics want to admit, and a more thoughtful one than its marketing suggests. Director Steven Caple Jr.…...
Shazam! Fury of the Gods is a film critics abandoned and audiences found charming. The 50% critic score tells you about industry politics and franchise fatigue.…...
Iron Man is the movie that started it all. Not just the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though that is the historical fact. It started the era of the franchise superhero film as the dominant mode of big-budget Hollywood storytelling.…...
Avengers: Endgame is the highest-grossing film of all time (adjusted for inflation).…...
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.…...
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....
Spider-Man: No Way Home is not just the best Spider-Man film ever made. It is one of the most emotionally devastating blockbusters of the decade, and it earned every tear....
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.…...
War Machine is a glorious throwback to the testosterone-fueled sci-fi action films of the 1980s and 1990s, and it does not apologize for it.…...
The Electric State is a $320 million argument that money cannot buy a soul....
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.…...
Zack Snyder is the most misunderstood filmmaker in the culture war. His fans think he is their guy - the anti-Disney, anti-woke auteur who makes movies for men.…...
Kraven the Hunter had a simple job: make a cool vigilante film about a man who uses superhuman hunting skills to kill criminals instead of animals. It mostly fails at this simple job.…...
Not a woke trap. The Night Agent is one of Netflix's most reliable action properties precisely because it delivers exactly what it promises: a good-looking guy with a badge chasing bad guys through exotic locations.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Twisters is that rare modern blockbuster that feels like it was made for the entire country, not just the coasts.…...
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.…...
Let's address the elephant in the Wasteland right up front: Furiosa is not woke. It's not even close.…...
Let's get this out of the way: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is not a film you watch for the story.…...
Madame Web is one of the most comprehensively terrible superhero films ever produced by a major studio.…...
The Beekeeper is the best Jason Statham movie in years, and it got there by doing something Hollywood has mostly forgotten how to do: make a straightforward action film for adults with a moral compass that actually points somewhere....
Borderlands is what happens when a studio spends $115 million trying to turn a beloved M-rated video game into a PG-13 Guardians of the Galaxy knockoff.…...
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.…...
Disney's 2020 Mulan is a visually gorgeous but narratively confused film that manages to simultaneously offend fans of the 1998 animated original, Chinese audiences, Western feminists, and human rights advocates.…...
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the rarest thing in Phase Five of the MCU: a movie that earns its emotions without lecturing its audience.…...
Thor: Love and Thunder is a film at war with itself. It contains the raw materials for a genuinely powerful story about grief, faith, and the failure of the gods, but it buries that story under a relentless avalanche of jokes, self-aware comedy, and …...
John Wick: Chapter 4 is the rare action sequel that earns the word epic. Chad Stahelski's nearly three-hour opus scales everything that made the first film work to operatic proportions without losing the personal stakes at its core.…...
Transformers One is the best Transformers film since the original 1986 animated movie. It does what no live-action entry ever managed: it makes you genuinely care about Optimus Prime and Megatron as characters before they become myths.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Solo Leveling: ReAwakening is two things stitched together: a rushed 80-minute recap of Season 1 and a spectacular 40-minute preview of Season 2. The first part is mediocre. The second part is genuinely thrilling.…...
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is the MCU's most interesting mess. Sam Raimi brings genuine horror filmmaking to a franchise that desperately needed it, Elizabeth Olsen delivers a villain performance for the ages, and the multiverse conc…...
Anaconda (2025) is a film that sounds better as an elevator pitch than it plays as a ninety-nine-minute movie.…...
Top Gun: Maverick is the best American action film in at least a decade. That is not hyperbole. It is a film that remembered something most of Hollywood has forgotten: audiences want to feel something, not be taught something....
Lightyear is a mediocre Pixar film that became a cultural flashpoint for reasons that have almost nothing to do with its quality.…...
Eternals is the most ambitious and the most divisive film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.…...
Black Panther is the most culturally significant MCU film ever made, and scoring it requires separating the cultural event from the actual film. The movie tells a surprisingly traditional story wrapped in progressive packaging....
Black Widow arrives as Natasha Romanoff's belated solo film and the first entry in MCU Phase Four.…...
Shang-Chi is the most pleasant surprise in the MCU's representation era. Where many expected Marvel's first Asian-led film to be a diversity lecture, what we got is a deeply traditional family drama with spectacular fight choreography that draws from…...
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a film at war with itself. At its best, it's a genuinely moving meditation on grief, loss, and the burden of legacy - anchored by Angela Bassett's towering performance as Queen Ramonda and boosted by Ludwig Goransson…...
The Marvels is the film that broke the MCU's aura of commercial invincibility. With a worldwide gross of $206 million against a production budget of $374 million, it represents a loss of over $200 million for Disney and stands as the lowest-grossing …...
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania had one job: introduce Kang the Conqueror as the next Thanos-level threat. It failed at everything except the Kang part, and then Jonathan Majors' conviction destroyed even that....
Greenland 2: Migration is a deeply traditional film wearing the clothes of a post-apocalyptic thriller.…...
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....
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....
Havoc is the closest thing to a Gareth Evans Raid film in English, and for a certain kind of audience, that is exactly enough....
Director Kathryn Bigelow returns with Silent Storm, a Cold War submarine thriller that represents American military cinema at its finest.…...
Tom Cruise's final turn as Ethan Hunt is, by any reasonable measure, a triumph of old-school filmmaking values.…...
Den of Thieves 2 does not break any new ground. It does not need to....
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is the best film in this franchise and, honestly, one of the most enjoyable family action movies of 2024. It does something Hollywood rarely manages: it gets darker in its third installment without losing its soul....
This franchise was never supposed to work. A Venom movie without Spider-Man, built around Tom Hardy doing a two-man improv show with a CGI alien living in his chest. It worked twice already.…...
Harrison Ford is 80 years old. Indiana Jones is a few years younger on screen, but the arithmetic of time is the same.…...
Jurassic World Rebirth is a $200 million movie that feels like it was written on a napkin during a studio lunch meeting.…...
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.…...
This review discusses the full plot including the ending....
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.…...
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....
Dan Trachtenberg clearly loves the Predator franchise. That much is obvious from three films in three years.…...
Ridley Scott made Gladiator II because he wanted to make another Gladiator. That is essentially the whole story behind this sequel, and it explains both its strengths and its limits.…...
The Penguin is the best argument that prestige superhero television doesn't have to be ideologically captured to be excellent.…...
The Fall Guy is one of the most genuinely enjoyable action movies in recent memory, and it achieves that by doing something remarkably simple: it actually likes its protagonist....
Bad Boys: Ride or Die is a franchise that knows exactly what it is and has stopped pretending otherwise.…...
Thelma is based on something that actually happened to director Josh Margolin's grandmother. A scammer called her, pretending to be Josh, and told her he had been arrested. She sent $10,000 to an address he gave her. She was 93.…...
Alex Garland spent years watching political tribalism eat the American conversation, and his response was to make a movie that would give everyone something to hate and something to love.…...
Dev Patel spent seven years developing Monkey Man, got a broken nose, multiple injuries, and a Netflix deal that then collapsed. Then Jordan Peele watched the film and made sure it got into theaters.…...
Guy Ritchie has spent thirty years making films about men who are very good at dangerous things, and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is the logical culmination of that career.…...
This preview is based on available trailers, creative team history, and pre-release information. Scores and verdict reflect our prediction only and will be updated upon release....
There is a line of conservative cinema that barely announces itself: the masculine protector story, dressed in action-genre clothes, that has always been one of Hollywood's most durable formulas.…...
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 emot…...
Here is what you need to know about Sound of Freedom before anything else: studios sat on this film for five years. Fox (which became Disney after the acquisition) shelved it. Not because it was bad - test screenings were strong.…...
Independence Day is built on a traditional moral structure centered on individual courage, earned leadership, and collective survival through merit and sacrifice.…...
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.…...
