760 reviews in this category.
Animals is Ben Affleck's sixth directorial feature, a Netflix crime thriller that places a wealthy Los Angeles mayoral candidate in the worst position imaginable: his son has been kidnapped for a ransom he cannot pay because he has already bet everyt…...
The Godfather Part III is Francis Ford Coppola's 1990 conclusion to the Corleone family saga, completing the story of Michael Corleone's attempt to legitimize his criminal empire through a deal with the Vatican Bank.…...
Princess Mononoke is Hayao Miyazaki's 1997 animated epic set in the late Muromachi period of Japan, where a young prince named Ashitaka is cursed by a demon boar god and must journey west to find a cure for a wound that grants him supernatural streng…...
Once Upon a Time in the Middle East is Wen Muye's Chinese box-office phenomenon about a chef who transforms his restaurant into a sanctuary for orphans when war breaks out in a fictional Middle Eastern city.…...
Spirited Away is Hayao Miyazaki's Oscar-winning masterpiece about a ten-year-old girl who must work in a spirit-world bathhouse to save her parents from being served as the main course.…...
Aaron Sorkin returns to the world he made famous with The Social Network, and this time, he is not asking whether Mark Zuckerberg is a genius or a sociopath. He has decided.…...
Clayface is Mike Flanagan doing what Mike Flanagan does best: taking a supernatural premise and digging into the human horror underneath.…...
Bonnie and Clyde is one of those films that time has misremembered. When it premiered in 1967, critics called it everything from revolutionary to degenerate. Pauline Kael celebrated it. Bosley Crowther denounced it. The violence was unprecedented.…...
The Mummy is Stephen Sommers's 1999 reimagining of Universal's 1932 horror classic, and it arrived at exactly the right cultural moment -- the last gasp of the pre-9/11 action-adventure blockbuster, when a movie could be scary, funny, romantic, and s…...
Yellow Eyes is a 2026 independent supernatural horror film from director Jesse Korman that arrived on Screambox in August 2026 with little fanfare but a clear sense of what kind of movie it wants to be: an old-fashioned possession-and-curse story sho…...
Charlie Harper is a sincere, modestly scaled romance that earns its emotional beats through committed performances rather than ideological posturing. Mac Eldridge and Tom Dean's film premiered at TIFF in 2025 and finally reached U.S.…...
District 9 is Neill Blomkamp's debut feature, expanded from his short film Alive in Joburg, and it remains one of the most distinctive science fiction films of the 21st century.…...
Apartment 7A is a fascinating ideological artifact: a film that uses feminist horror language to tell a story whose moral conclusions are more at home in a church than a gender studies seminar. The satanic cult is evil. Christianity is truth.…...
Nightcrawler is a film that earns its verdict through honesty rather than balance. It critiques predatory capitalism unsparingly but refuses to use that critique as an excuse to let its protagonist off the moral hook.…...
The Trial of Alec Baldwin arrives at a moment when the Rust shooting has already been exhaustively litigated in the court of public opinion.…...
Children of Men is one of the most politically complicated films ever made, and that is precisely what makes it a great movie.…...
Friday the 13th is the purest example of a horror film that runs on traditional moral logic. This is not a film about a man in a mask.…...
Take Me Home is an American drama written and directed by Liz Sargent, expanding her 2023 short film into a feature that premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.…...
Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments is the grandest biblical epic Hollywood ever produced and one of the most culturally significant films in American history.…...
Brian De Palma's The Untouchables is one of the great crime films of the 1980s, a Prohibition-era gangster drama that pits Treasury agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) against Chicago bootlegging kingpin Al Capone (Robert De Niro) in a battle for the so…...
Primetime walks a tightrope between two competing truths, and it walks it with considerable nerve. On one side is the unmistakable moral good of the predator stings: real men who arrived to sexually assault children, real arrests, real justice.…...
Christine is a movie about a boy and his car, and if that sounds like a joke, the film is smart enough to know it is not.…...
The Weight is a reminder that not everything needs to be complicated. A father is taken from his child, put in a brutal work camp, and offered a near-impossible path back to her through wilderness and betrayal. That is the story.…...
Gangs of New York is a great, flawed, essential American film. It is too long, its central love triangle between DiCaprio, Diaz, and Day-Lewis never quite ignites, and Cameron Diaz is visibly out of her depth in a cast of heavyweights.…...
Aardman Animations remains one of the last studios in the world making films for everyone, not for a demographic, not for an algorithm, and certainly not for a political checklist.…...
The Graduate is a great film that resists the ideological scorekeeping it invites. It earns its MIXED verdict not because it is a muddled work but because it is an honest one.…...
The French Connection is not merely a great film. It is a time capsule from an era before Hollywood decided its job was to lecture the audience.…...
The Love Hypothesis arrives with a built-in audience: the millions of readers who made Ali Hazelwood's debut novel a TikTok phenomenon.…...
Hope is what happens when a filmmaker who spent 20 years studying spiritual darkness turns his camera toward the light.…...
The Apartment won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay in 1961, and 65 years later it plays like a rebuke to almost everything Hollywood now produces.…...
The Fix is a movie that critics have dismissed and audiences have embraced, and that split tells you most of what you need to know. At 19% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics versus 79% from audiences, the gap is not just about taste.…...
There is a moment in Stand by Me, about two-thirds of the way through, when Gordie tells a campfire story about a fat kid who gets his revenge.…...
Practical Magic 2 pulls off something genuinely difficult: a legacy sequel that honors what came before while building something that stands on its own.…...
American Beauty won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography at the 2000 Academy Awards. It was the critical darling of its moment.…...
Idiots is a film that knows exactly what it is: a crude, pugnacious dark comedy about two working-class guys stuck transporting a sociopathic rich kid to rehab.…...
The Conjuring is one of the most traditionally conservative horror films ever made by a major studio, and its $319 million global box office on a $20 million budget suggests audiences were hungry for exactly that.…...
By Any Means is a solid historical crime thriller that uses its 1960s Mississippi setting to tell a story about justice pursued through unconventional means.…...
Dr. Strangelove is one of the greatest films ever made, and it is also one of the most thoroughly anti-establishment.…...
Fall 2: Deadpoint proves that sometimes the simplest premise still delivers the strongest punch.…...
Star Wars is not just a film; it is the proof that a story built on the oldest moral architecture in human civilization can conquer the world.…...
The Uprising is Paul Greengrass doing what Paul Greengrass does best: taking a historical event, stripping it of romance, and filming it like a documentary that happens to have Andrew Garfield in the lead.…...
Dead Poets Society is the rare film that has been claimed by both conservatives and progressives for thirty-seven years, and the reason is that it contains enough ammunition for both sides.…...
Brokeback Mountain is the rare film that is both a landmark of progressive culture and a deeply traditional tragedy.…...
Adam Wingard's Onslaught is a lean, mean, 92-minute action-horror movie that knows exactly what it is and refuses to apologize for it.…...
Airplane! is the funniest movie ever made, and nearly half a century later, it still hasn't been topped.…...
Mayday is the kind of movie Hollywood used to make without apology: a buddy action comedy set against a Cold War backdrop, with genuine stakes, real chemistry between its leads, and no interest whatsoever in lecturing the audience about anything.…...
American Psycho is a film that has been misunderstood by almost everyone at some point. It has been claimed by men's rights activists as a celebration of masculine aggression. It has been claimed by feminists as a condemnation of male violence.…...
The Empire Strikes Back is not merely the best Star Wars film; it is arguably the greatest blockbuster sequel ever made, and it achieves this by rejecting every impulse that drives modern Hollywood storytelling. It makes its heroes lose -- badly.…...
Christopher Nolan's Memento is a film that should not work. A story told in reverse chronology about a man who cannot form new memories, hunting his wife's killer using tattoos and Polaroids -- on paper it sounds like a film school exercise.…...
Joe Swanberg's The Sun Never Sets is a quiet, patient film about a young woman who retreats to a remote Alaskan town to escape a life that collapsed under its own weight.…...
Don Siegel's Dirty Harry did not invent the rogue cop genre; it did something more interesting.…...
Matt Johnson's Tony is the rare biopic that earns its subject's legacy instead of coasting on it.…...
John Hughes's Ferris Bueller's Day Off is not just one of the funniest teen comedies ever made - it is a near-perfect time capsule of an America that believed individuals could outwit systems and that a single perfect day with a best friend was worth…...
Buddy is the kind of movie that parents will feel in their gut. It takes a cherished artifact of childhood, the brightly colored, relentlessly cheerful children's television show, and peels back the felt skin to reveal something with teeth.…...
Halloween is fifty years old and still nobody has done it better. John Carpenter's 1978 masterpiece did not invent the slasher genre, Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre came first, but it wrote the rules that everyone else has been following, ba…...
Enid Blyton's The Faraway Tree books have delighted British children since 1939, and this long-awaited film adaptation arrives at a moment when parents are hungry for family entertainment that does not lecture or indoctrinate.…...
I Can Only Imagine is one of the most straightforwardly traditional Christian films ever to receive wide theatrical distribution, and it earned every dollar of its $86 million box office haul honestly.…...
To Kill a Mockingbird occupies a singular place in American culture, celebrated by progressives for its anti-racist message and by traditionalists for its portrait of fatherhood, moral courage, and the rule of law.…...
Fireproof is not a good film in the conventional cinematic sense. The acting is uneven, the dialog is didactic, and the structure is functionally a sermon with characters. But grading Fireproof on cinematic merits misses the point entirely.…...
Jane Schoenbrun has made a film that knows exactly what it is and cares more about being celebrated at Cannes than about telling a story anyone outside a film festival would want to watch.…...
Apocalypto is the purest expression of what Mel Gibson does better than almost any living filmmaker: he stages primal, physical cinema in service of a moral that is impossible to mistake. The film is not subtle.…...
Ridley Scott's adaptation of Peter Heller's 2012 novel is the kind of movie Hollywood used to make routinely before it forgot how: a quiet, sun-bleached survival story about a man, his dog, and the question of whether compassion can survive the end o…...
Twilight is one of the most ideologically misunderstood films of the 21st century. It was mocked by cultural conservatives as vampire drivel for teenage girls and condemned by feminists as a regressive fantasy of female submission.…...
Reading Lolita in Tehran is a film that could only exist in the space between two ideological worlds, and it is better for that tension.…...
Return of the Jedi completes the original Star Wars trilogy with an ending that is both emotionally satisfying and, in ways that are hard to appreciate until you have watched a lot of modern franchise cinema, ethically audacious.…...
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo is a masterpiece of psychological suspense that operates entirely outside modern ideological frameworks.…...
The Breakfast Club remains one of the most honest portrayals of teenage life ever filmed, precisely because it refuses ideology in favor of humanity.…...
Spa Weekend is the kind of comedy that feels like it was made for a long plane ride: it passes the time without asking much of you, and you will have forgotten most of it by baggage claim.…...
Amadeus opens with an old man screaming a confession he has carried for decades: 'Mozart! I killed you!' The man is Antonio Salieri (F.…...
It Ends cost $80,000 and was shot largely inside a parked Jeep Cherokee. On paper, that sounds like a student film stretched to feature length.…...
Stanley Francis Rother was an Oklahoma farm boy who barely passed Latin in seminary and was told he might never be ordained. He became a priest anyway.…...
Cool Hand Luke opens with a parking meter. Luke Jackson, a decorated war veteran, is drunk in a small Southern town on a weeknight and decides to cut the heads off municipal parking meters with a pipe cutter.…...
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is not merely a great science fiction film. It is the film that demonstrated, once and for all, that science fiction could be art.…...
Tilman Singer's Cuckoo arrives with the kind of premise that horror fans dream about: a remote Alpine resort, a mysterious half-sister who cannot speak, a father who is clearly hiding something, and a creature that mimics the young to replace them.…...
Jean-Francois Richet's Mutiny is a Jason Statham vehicle doing exactly what Jason Statham vehicles are supposed to do.…...
Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is not merely a great film. It is the template from which virtually all modern action cinema descends.…...
Lee Kirk's Nimrods is the kind of movie that has no business working as well as it does.…...
Orson Welles's Citizen Kane has carried the 'greatest film ever made' mantle for so long that it has become something close to homework. That is a shame, because Kane is not an obligation. It is a fireworks display.…...
The Insidious franchise has been running for sixteen years now, and what keeps it going is not worldbuilding or lore, it is the same thing that has always powered the best horror films: the primal fear of losing the people you love.…...
Gremlins is not just a creature feature. It is a 1980s time capsule that happens to contain one of the most traditionally structured moral fables in the Amblin catalog.…...
Your Letter is a small, gentle film with a big heart, and it arrives like a reminder that not everything made today carries an agenda.…...
The Matrix Reloaded is the most misunderstood blockbuster of its decade, a film dismissed on release as a hollow special-effects reel that is, in fact, the franchise's most serious meditation on free will.…...
The Rivals of Amziah King is a throwback in the best sense: a slow-burn Western built on mentorship, craft, and the slow passing of hard-won skill from one generation to the next.…...
Monsters, Inc. is a film about a creature who discovers he would rather protect a child than frighten her, and that single instinct upends an entire industry. That is as traditional a story as Pixar has ever told.…...
Groundhog Day is the rare comedy that has become a moral touchstone, and for good reason. What looks like a high-concept gimmick is actually a tight, humane parable about redemption through humility and service.…...
Unforgiven is often called the anti-Western, and that label is half right. It dismantles the romantic myth of the gunslinger, but it does not dismantle morality.…...
Six is a dazzlingly produced, genuinely catchy piece of theater built on a thesis that is pure modern identity politics: the six women are defined only by their victimhood until they reclaim their voice and rewrite history without the man at the cent…...
Angel Studios has carved out a unique lane in American film: faith-adjacent, historically grounded, and unembarrassed about treating conservative figures as genuine heroes.…...
Parents of young children already know whether PAW Patrol lives in their house. If you have a child under seven, the theme song has been stuck in your head since 2013 and you have opinions about whether Marshall or Chase is the better pup.…...
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…...
The End of Oak Street is a tight, 99-minute family survival thriller that spends its runtime on exactly what the premise demands: parents trying to keep their children alive in an impossible situation.…...
Apollo 13 is one of the most traditionally American films ever made, and it achieves this without a single speech about patriotism or a flag in the frame that wasn't there in 1970.…...
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.…...
A Few Good Men is not about the military. It's about truth. That distinction matters, because Rob Reiner's 1992 courtroom drama has been misread for thirty years as a liberal takedown of military culture, when what it actually is is a conservative ar…...
One Night Only is a Will Gluck romantic comedy built around a single high-concept hook: in this version of America, single people pay a bachelor tax, and one night a year the government forgives it.…...
It's a Wonderful Life is the most traditional American film ever made, and it accomplishes this without ever feeling like propaganda.…...
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....
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.…...
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.…...
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....
Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window is not merely one of the greatest thrillers ever made.…...
Eli Roth returns to his grindhouse roots with Ice Cream Man, a summer horror that knows exactly what it is: a bloody, darkly comic crowd-pleaser about a demonic ice cream vendor terrorizing an idyllic small town.…...
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.…...
The Godfather Part II is the greatest sequel ever made and one of the three or four best films in the history of American cinema. It won six Academy Awards including Best Picture, the first sequel ever to do so.…...
Gregg Araki has been making films about sex, power, and queer identity for over thirty years. I Want Your Sex is being called his most accessible work yet. By Araki standards, that is true.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Deadpool and Wolverine is the third Deadpool film and the character's official entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe following Disney's acquisition of Fox. It earned $1.338 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time.…...
The Wizard of Oz is the most beloved film in American history, and it earns that status on every rewatch. Under VVWS methodology, it scores STRONGLY TRADITIONAL by a wide margin, and that scoring is not close.…...
72 Hours is a Netflix comedy that feels like it was assembled from leftover parts in the streaming factory.…...
The Deer Hunter opens with a steel mill. Men in masks pour metal in a Pittsburgh suburb. The shot lasts long enough to feel like work.…...
Fifty years later, Taxi Driver remains the most uncomfortable film in the American canon. Not because of the violence, which is extreme but not gratuitous.…...
Robert Towne wrote a different ending for Chinatown. In his version, Evelyn shoots her father Noah Cross and escapes with Katherine. Good wins. The detective's efforts mean something. Roman Polanski refused to shoot it....
The Silence of the Lambs is that rare film whose reputation is not inflated by nostalgia.…...
Thirty years after its release, the Coen brothers' Fargo remains one of the most purely moral crime films ever made. Set in the snow-blanketed expanses of 1987 Minnesota, it tells the story of car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H.…...
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.…...
David Fincher's Seven is a medieval morality play dressed in a detective's trench coat, and it may be the most theologically serious film ever to gross $327 million at the box office.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Casino is Martin Scorsese's longest film, his most operatic, and in some ways his most conservative.…...
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.…...
Splash City is a small, scrappy independent crime drama from the Bay Area that knows exactly what it wants to be. That is rarer than it sounds, and it is worth more than most things a film can be.…...
The Kidnapping of Arabella is Italian director Carolina Cavalli's sophomore feature, a wry and visually deliberate character study that premiered at the 82nd Venice Film Festival, where star Benedetta Porcaroli won the Orizzonti Best Actress prize.…...
Psycho is Alfred Hitchcock's most influential film and one of the few movies that genuinely changed what cinema was allowed to do.…...
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is not merely one of the greatest films ever made. It is one of the most profoundly traditional stories American cinema has ever told, wrapped in the superficially countercultural packaging of Ken Kesey's 1962 novel.…...
Apocalypse Now is the greatest war film ever made and one of the most morally serious works of art produced by the American studio system.…...
Christopher Nolan's The Prestige is a magic trick in film form: a precisely engineered machine that rewards attention at every level.…...
A road-trip comedy that runs its horny premise into the ground, David Wain's latest delivers consistent laughs at the cost of any moral coherence whatsoever.…...
Pixar's first feature is not just a landmark of computer animation. It is a deeply traditional story about the things that matter most: loyalty, sacrifice, and earning your place in the world....
The Western is the most traditional American film genre, and The Isolate Thief appears to know exactly what that means....
Moana (2026) arrives in theaters with a question hanging over it that no amount of Dwayne Johnson charisma can fully answer: why does this exist? The 2016 animated film earned two Oscar nominations, grossed nearly $700 million worldwide, and remains …...
12 Angry Men is 96 minutes of men arguing in one room, with no action, no romance, no special effects, and a cast of twelve actors most modern audiences could not name. It is also one of the greatest films ever made.…...
Little Brother is a Netflix comedy that knows exactly what it is doing and does it better than you might expect.…...
Casablanca is the greatest film Hollywood ever made, not because it set out to be great but because everything that could go right did. The script was written day by day during production. Nobody knew how it would end until the final week of shooting.…...
The Invite is the best-directed film Olivia Wilde has made, a brittle, frequently hilarious dinner-party dramedy that doubles as an autopsy of modern marriage.…...
Young Washington is the most confident film Angel Studios has ever released. Jon Erwin, the director who built a faith-based empire on modest budgets and underserved audiences, has taken on his most ambitious subject: the making of George Washington.…...
Blade Runner is the rare film whose reputation has grown with each passing decade.…...
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is one of the most traditionally moral films ever made.…...
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.…...
Enola Holmes 3 continues the franchise's pivot from charming Victorian detective romp into something heavier and more politically pointed. The film opens in Malta, where Enola and Tewkesbury have arrived for their wedding.…...
A Clockwork Orange is one of the most misunderstood films in cinema history. At the time of its release, it was condemned as glorifying violence. In reality, it is a deeply conservative philosophical argument disguised as a dystopian thriller.…...
The Shawshank Redemption is the most conservative film ever to be voted the greatest movie of all time, and the fact that it holds that title on IMDb despite containing not a single progressive message should tell you something about what audiences a…...
Scary Movie (2026) is not a good movie in any conventional sense. It is a loud, crude, aggressively stupid 96-minute assault on taste, logic, and the human attention span.…...
The Death of Robin Hood is a medieval Christian film about a mass murderer who finds redemption through confession, forgiveness, and sacrificial death. A24 did not make a woke Robin Hood.…...
The second Harry Potter film is darker, longer, and more confident than the first, and it holds up remarkably well....
There are films you watch and films you endure. United 93 is one you endure, in the best possible sense: it places you inside the most significant domestic terrorist attack in American history, in real time, with the knowledge of what is coming, and …...
The Sixth Sense made $672 million in 1999 because it is, at its core, one of the most purely emotional movies ever made in Hollywood. The twist is the mechanism. The love story is the point....
The Green Mile is the best Christian film Hollywood has made without knowing it made one....
Citizen Vigilante is exactly the kind of film that mainstream critics despise and a specific audience genuinely wants.…...
American History X is the most honest film ever made about the appeal of white supremacy, which is also what makes it so difficult to score ideologically. It understands its subject too well to be purely a condemnation.…...
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....
Leviticus is a competent horror film with a very clear ideological mission: to argue that religious communities opposed to homosexuality are not just wrong, but monstrous....
Hungry knows exactly what it is: a survival horror film about a hippo in the Louisiana bayou. It does not pretend to be anything else, and within that frame it delivers a tightly constructed 93 minutes of sustained tension....
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…...
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.…...
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…...
Office Romance is a real romantic comedy. Not a deconstruction of one. Not a parody of one. Not a movie that uses the form to make a point about gender politics. A romantic comedy.…...
Girls Like Girls is exactly what it advertises itself to be. That is both its most honest quality and, for VirtueVigil readers, its most important characteristic to understand upfront....
The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act is a cultural phenomenon wrapped in a genuine creative achievement. That combination is rare enough to deserve serious analysis, even for an audience that will find real objections in the content....
Forty-two years later, The Karate Kid still works. It works for the same reason it worked in 1984: because it believes in something, and it has the craft to make you believe it too....
Rudy does not have a twist. It does not have irony. It does not subvert your expectations. It does exactly what it says it is going to do, and it makes you cry anyway. That is not a trick. That is craft....
Ocean's Eleven is not a film about anything in particular. That is almost its highest compliment....
The Banshees of Inisherin is about a man ending a friendship and the destruction that follows. That is the whole plot. What Martin McDonagh does with that premise is something you will not forget....
Let me tell you the most surprising thing about Knock at the Cabin: it is a film about gay people that arrives at a verdict more theologically conservative than anything Hollywood has produced in a decade....
All Quiet on the Western Front is a technically brilliant film with a clear ideological agenda, and those two things are inseparable from each other....
Prisoners is Denis Villeneuve's most morally demanding film and one of the best American thrillers of the last twenty years. Coming back to it years later, what strikes you is how seriously it takes its own question....
Extraction is a very good action film that got dismissed by critics and embraced by audiences, which is probably the more accurate verdict....
Drive is one of the best films made in the last two decades. That's a strong claim. Here's why it holds up....
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....
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 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....
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....
Carolina Caroline (2026) has a 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes critics score from its limited release. With 17 critics counted as of this writing, that is not a large sample, but the unanimity is notable.…...
Clint Eastwood made Juror #2 at 94 years old. Warner Bros. gave it 50 theaters. Critics gave it 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. That tension tells you almost everything you need to know about where Hollywood is and where Eastwood has always been....
Platoon won Best Picture in 1986. It is Oliver Stone's Vietnam experience rendered as cinema. And it is, forty years later, still one of the most honest American war films ever made.…...
Maria (2024) is the third film in Pablo Larrain's unofficial biographical trilogy of iconic women who lived under the weight of impossible public expectation. Jackie examined the widow. Spencer examined the princess. Maria examines the diva....
Gone Girl came out in 2014 and it has not aged. If anything it has gotten more relevant....
Fury is a war film made by someone who actually cares about war. Not the spectacle of it. The weight of it....
Disclosure Day is Steven Spielberg's return to science fiction spectacle, but thirty years into his career, he is a different filmmaker than the man who made Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The wonder remains.…...
Alien is 47 years old and it still works. That says something about the quality of its construction....
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.…...
Firebreak takes a premise that could have been a standard missing-child thriller and builds something with more psychological weight. The fire is not just a backdrop.…...
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.…...
January 15, 2009. Both engines failed over New York City. 155 people on board. Three minutes to decide. Captain Chesley Sullenberger chose the Hudson River, flew the approach by hand, and put the plane down so cleanly that everyone walked off alive....
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…...
The Shining is the most debated horror film ever made. Room 237, a documentary about fan interpretations of the film, dedicates ninety minutes to theories about what Kubrick was really doing, including the theory that the film is a confession that he…...
Let's get something out of the way first: The Exorcist is not a woke movie. It is the opposite of a woke movie.…...
Scarface is a great film that is telling you a lie about itself....
The opening four minutes of Up contain more emotional truth than most films achieve in their entire runtime. You know the sequence. Carl meets Ellie. They share a dream. They build a life together. They plan to go to Paradise Falls. They don't.…...
Home Alone is the most financially successful live-action comedy ever made, and most people can tell you exactly why: Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, John Williams, and a script by John Hughes that knows the exact difference between comedy and cruelty....
Twenty-five years later, this film still works....
WALL-E is one of the most technically and emotionally ambitious animated films ever made. It is also one of the most ideologically complicated films Pixar has produced.…...
The Princess Bride is thirty-nine years old and people still quote it at weddings....
Finding Nemo is twenty-three years old. It still works....
Tuner arrived in theaters on May 22, 2026, and it is quietly one of the best crime thrillers of the year so far.…...
The Truman Show (1998) turns 28 this year, and revisiting it now is a genuinely different experience than watching it in 1998.…...
The Last Viking opens with an animated fable that is worth describing in full because it announces the film's intentions more clearly than any plot synopsis could....
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....
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.…...
The Revenant is one of the most physically demanding cinematic experiences ever put in front of an audience.…...
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....
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....
This review contains a genuine disagreement with itself, and that is appropriate for a film that has been doing the same thing since 1987....
There is a version of this review that starts with the film's feminist credentials and works backward. That version is not this review.…...
Midsommar is a genuinely good film. That's the most important thing to say before everything else, because it shapes how dangerous it is....
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 …...
A Quiet Place is, without question, one of the most pro-family mainstream studio films of the past decade. That's not a political argument. It's a description of what the movie is about....
The Australian zombie film has developed a distinct subgenre identity in recent years, and We Bury the Dead belongs to the thoughtful end of it. This is not a film about survival.…...
Twenty-five years after Shrek changed what an animated film could be, the 25th anniversary theatrical re-release gives audiences a chance to measure the original against its cultural legacy.…...
Fifteen years after Jeethu Joseph introduced the world to Georgekutty, the cable TV operator from Goa who outsmarted an entire police department to protect his family, Drishyam 3 asks a question the previous films deliberately avoided: what does it c…...
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.…...
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.…...
A Star Is Born is, first and last, a love story. Everything else, the music, the industry commentary, the feminist readings, the addiction narrative, runs through and around that core.…...
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....
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.…...
Backrooms is A24's biggest box office success to date, and it earns that crown by delivering a genuinely unsettling horror experience that respects its source material.…...
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.…...
The 1976 Omen is one of the great supernatural horror films. Robert Thorn is an American diplomat who discovers his son may be the Antichrist. The film is about a father trying to protect his family from a truth too terrible to accept.…...
There's a scene about forty-five minutes into Ghostbusters where the mayor of New York calls Peter Venkman into his office.…...
Let's start where the film earns its credibility....
Brendan Fraser won the Academy Award for Best Actor for this role. He deserved it. That does not make The Whale an easy film to watch, and it does not make it a film that conservative audiences will embrace without reservation.…...
Baz Luhrmann does not make subtle films. That is both the gift and the problem with Elvis.…...
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 story of Possum Trot, Texas, is one of the most extraordinary stories in American religious life in the last thirty years. A small church. A community that most people in most coastal cities couldn't find on a map.…...
The critic consensus on Jesus Revolution is 54 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The audience score is 99 percent. That gap tells you everything you need to know about how professional film critics and ordinary Americans see faith differently....
There's a version of Kurt Warner's story that gets made as a gritty prestige drama. Dark photography, ambivalent faith, a marriage under strain, the question hanging over everything about what all this suffering was for.…...
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…...
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.…...
John Carney has now made five feature films about musicians. Once. Begin Again. Sing Street. Flora and Son. Power Ballad....
Here is what Curry Barker understands that too many horror filmmakers get wrong: the scariest thing isn't a monster. It's what a person does to themselves when they're desperate enough....
Boots Riley made Sorry to Bother You in 2018. That film, about a Black telemarketer who discovers his 'white voice' leads him into complicity with something monstrous, was a Marxist nightmare comedy that earned its politics through sheer formal inven…...
Corporate Retreat is a survival horror film that uses the corporate team-building setting as a pressure cooker for examining moral choice, loyalty, and the true measure of a person under existential threat.…...
The Departed is not a comfortable film. It never wants to be. Martin Scorsese spent his career making films about men who choose the wrong path and pay everything for it.…...
Parasite is a masterfully made film. Let's get that out of the way immediately. Bong Joon-ho is a technical virtuoso. The script architecture is near-perfect. The performances are uniformly excellent.…...
There is a scene near the end of Gran Torino where Walt Kowalski walks up a driveway knowing exactly what is about to happen to him. He has thought it through. He has made his confession. He has put his affairs in order.…...
The Tony Kiritsis standoff of February 8, 1977 was one of the most extraordinary events in Indianapolis history.…...
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, …...
Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the most beloved animated series ever made. That is not opinion. It is measurement. Three seasons, 61 episodes, and a cultural footprint that has only grown in the eighteen years since it concluded.…...
Tolkien spent decades building a mythology. Peter Jackson spent a decade turning it into cinema.…...
Here is what Pamela Anderson knew when she agreed to play Shelly: nobody was expecting this from her. That gap between expectation and reality is the film's engine....
Eddington is the film Ari Aster has been building to since Hereditary. His earlier work destroyed the family as a unit of safety. Midsommar destroyed the romantic relationship. Beau Is Afraid destroyed the male self.…...
The Battle of Midway is one of the most improbable military victories in American history. Four Japanese fleet carriers sunk in a single day.…...
The Hurt Locker opens with a quote from Chris Hedges: 'The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.' That quote is the film's thesis, its argument, and its final verdict.…...
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....
Fight or Flight is a film that knows exactly what it is and delivers that thing with efficiency and occasional flair.…...
August Wilson is underrated in contemporary culture. Not by academics or theater people, who treat him with the respect he deserves.…...
Sofia Coppola is one of the most consistent directors working in American cinema. Consistent in craft. Consistent in worldview. And in Priscilla, consistent in producing a film that is both genuinely beautiful and ideologically predictable....
The critics who said Maestro was a vanity project were not entirely wrong. Bradley Cooper spent seven years making a film in which he transforms himself into Leonard Bernstein, wears a prosthetic nose, trains to conduct a real orchestra, and plays op…...
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....
Here's the question VirtueVigil readers want answered: is Evil Dead Rise just another female-led horror film where the message is that men are useless and women are the only ones capable of defending what matters? Short answer: no.…...
The Wizard of the Kremlin opens in the United States on May 15 after premiering at Venice in August 2025 and opening in France in January 2026.…...
Is God Is arrives on May 15 as one of the most explicitly ideological films of the year. Director Aleshea Harris has been clear about what she's making. A Black feminist revenge myth.…...
Gothic horror has always understood something that secular literary culture keeps forgetting: the past does not stay buried....
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.…...
Sicario opens with the discovery of dozens of bodies. An FBI hostage rescue team raids a suburban Arizona house and finds human remains packed into the walls.…...
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.…...
Here's the thing about Rian Johnson: he's good at this....
A man's wife died. He couldn't let her go. So he invented a way to keep watching her....
George R.R. Martin's short story 'In the Lost Lands' is not a story about epic battles or sprawling political intrigue.…...
The Sheep Detectives is the most tonally surprising family film of the year: a genuinely funny, genuinely sad murder mystery told from the perspective of a flock of sheep.…...
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.…...
Christopher Nolan made Dunkirk at the height of his commercial and critical power, coming off Interstellar and The Dark Knight trilogy, with the creative freedom to do whatever he wanted.…...
Ryan Coogler took one of Hollywood's most sacred franchises and made it matter again. That should have been impossible.…...
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…...
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.…...
Evil Dead: Burn is the franchise asking the same question it has asked since 1981: what does it take to survive when the people you love try to kill you?...
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: …...
Se7en is the movie that made darkness fashionable in Hollywood for a decade. It is also, under honest VVWS analysis, a traditional film that earns its TRADITIONAL LEAN verdict through genuine ambiguity rather than hidden ideology....
Die Hard is one of the few action films where the traditional values aren't incidental decoration. They are the engine....
Back to the Future is the most quietly conservative film of the 1980s, and Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale probably never thought about it that way....
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....
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....
Extraction 2 does something rare in action sequels: it actually justifies its existence....
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.…...
Stephen King's It is one of the longest novels ever written by a major American author. It is also one of the most thematically traditional.…...
Blade Runner 2049 is the rarest kind of sequel: one that earns its existence by asking questions the original could not have asked, and answering them in ways that deepen rather than diminish what came before....
The Color Purple (2023) is a well-made musical adaptation of a story that VirtueVigil readers should understand before purchasing a ticket....
There are very few films that score STRONGLY TRADITIONAL on the VVWS scale and deserve it as completely as The Boys in the Boat....
Fly Me to the Moon is an entertaining romantic comedy that does more things reasonably well than it does anything brilliantly....
There are moments in The Chosen: Last Supper that feel genuinely sacred. That is a word I rarely apply to film.…...
The Breadwinner has not released at time of writing. But Nate Bargatze, Wonder Project, and the Mr. Mom premise tell you most of what you need to know....
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....
The Godfather is not a film about crime. It's a film about family. Specifically, it's about what happens to a family when the values that held it together begin to corrupt, and what is lost when the patriarch who embodied those values passes his auth…...
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....
Let's be direct: GoodFellas is one of the greatest American films ever made. That's not a controversial statement in 2026 and it wasn't controversial in 1990.…...
Whiplash presents a problem for people who think movies must take sides....
The Social Network is a brilliantly made film that requires some ideological sorting before you decide what to do with it....
La La Land is the rare film that earns its reputation without being what its reputation suggests....
The Last Jedi is a technically accomplished, cinematically confident film that is also one of the most ideologically aggressive studio blockbusters ever made....
Bohemian Rhapsody presents a genuinely complicated case for a site like VirtueVigil....
1917 is the rare war film that makes you feel, rather than observe, the cost of duty....
Illumination is reliable. Not always great, sometimes very good, occasionally exceptional, but reliably delivering what it promises.…...
Twenty-five years is a long time to keep doing anything, let alone keeping the same group of friends together to hurt each other on camera. Jackass: Best and Last is the franchise's farewell, and that framing matters more than it might seem....
Lorne Michaels once said that he didn't create Saturday Night Live to be a political show. He created it to be a comedy show. The politics followed from the talent, and the talent, from 1975 to today, has skewed left....
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.…...
The phone call that made Liam Neeson a different kind of movie star....
No Country for Old Men has a conservative soul. You might not know it from the ending....
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…...
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.…...
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.…...
Let's be direct about what Get Out is. It is a very effective horror film built on a very specific political argument: white liberals are the primary threat to Black Americans, they disguise their predation behind progressive language, and the approp…...
Paddington 3 continues the beloved franchise with the same warmth, decency, and gentle humor that made the first two films modern family classics.…...
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.…...
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die pairs Tom Holland and Zendaya in an action comedy that is transparent about its progressive gender politics from the opening scene.…...
Shutter Island grossed $294 million worldwide, making it one of the most successful psychological thrillers ever made. It holds a 82% Rotten Tomatoes score and an 81 Metacritic.…...
A Different Man is a film about male entitlement, romantic rejection, and violent revenge disguised as an indie character study about self-acceptance and social anxiety.…...
The Last Witness is a legal thriller built on a single, uncompromising premise: the institutions designed to protect the vulnerable are themselves compromised, and Saoirse Ronan's Rachel must navigate a judicial system that has become as dangerous as…...
Interceptor Protocol is a military action thriller that knows exactly what it is and does not pretend to be anything else: Charlize Theron commands an elite unit, the threat is clear, the mission is urgent, and competence is the highest virtue on dis…...
Deadpool 3 reunites the Merc with a Mouth with Wolverine in an R-rated satire that treats earnestness of any kind as the enemy and mockery as the only reliable worldview.…...
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.…...
Toy Story 5 is Andrew Stanton's meditation on childhood, play, and the siege of imagination by algorithmic entertainment.…...
The Mandalorian and Grogu is Jon Favreau's theatrical expansion of the Mandalorian universe, continuing the story of Din Djarin and the Child (Grogu).…...
Pressure is Ron Howard's historical submarine drama exploring military decision-making under crisis conditions.…...
Omaha (2026) is a pre-release predicted triumph of quiet American cinema: a stripped-down 84-minute road film about a father who loses his house in the 2008 financial crisis and drives his two young children across the country toward an uncertain fut…...
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 Christophers (2026) is a Steven Soderbergh-directed original drama starring Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel about artistic integrity, family betrayal, and what remains when a life's work is reduced to commodity.…...
François Ozon's The Stranger is a significant artistic achievement and a deliberate challenge to contemporary sensibility.…...
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.…...
I Swear is one of the most profoundly human and profoundly traditional films in recent cinema. It celebrates family love, personal courage, and the dignity of every human being.…...
Hunting Matthew Nichols is a microbudget Canadian found footage horror film that punches well above its $275,000 weight.…...
Fuze is a crime heist thriller with traditional values at its core. The military and police work to protect public safety. The criminals plan a heist. The good guys and bad guys are defined by their competence, not their identity politics.…...
California Schemin' is a story about two friends who tried to fake their way to success and faced the consequences. The film's lesson is traditional: authenticity matters, friendships matter, and sustained dishonesty damages both.…...
George Orwell's Animal Farm is arguably the most powerful conservative text ever written. It is a thesis statement against totalitarianism, collectivism, and the betrayal of revolution by elites.…...
Let us be direct about what The Drama is doing and what it costs....
There are films that earn their politics and films that perform them. The Blue Trail earns every frame....
Ryan Coogler made a vampire movie set in Jim Crow Mississippi and turned it into one of the best films of 2025. That sentence should not work. It does.…...
There is a certain kind of New York romantic comedy that feels like it was made by someone who actually lives in New York and actually believes in love. Fantasy Life is that kind of film....
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…...
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.…...
Let us start with the premise, because the premise is everything....
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.…...
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.…...
There is a question that has been circulating in every corner of the comedy-fan internet since the Busboys trailer dropped: is it woke?...
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…...
Take your family. Take your small group. Take the skeptic in your life who thinks faith stories are all saccharine nonsense.…...
You, Me & Tuscany is a warm, formulaic romantic comedy that delivers exactly what its poster promises.…...
Here is what horror films used to understand and largely forgot: the scariest thing in the world is not what you can see. It is what you almost see. What you hear from the next room.…...
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.…...
Here is what you need to know about The Woman in the Yard before you buy a ticket: this is not a haunted house film. There is no monster. The Woman standing in Ramona's yard is Ramona.…...
Ishana Night Shyamalan's directorial debut is a better film than its 27% Rotten Tomatoes score suggests and a less complete film than its atmospheric first act promises. The gap between critical reception and audience response (27% critics vs.…...
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.…...
This is a tearjerker built around one of the most traditional premises in modern romance fiction: a mother fighting to know her child. It is not a politically complicated film. It is not interested in being provocative.…...
Project Hail Mary opens with a man waking up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is or why he is there. It ends with him choosing to stay, alone, in a distant solar system, because someone else needs him more than Earth does.…...
Let us be honest about what Pixar made here. Hoppers is a genuine return to form for a studio that had been coasting on nostalgia sequels and misfires for nearly a decade.…...
There is a woman in this film who will make you deeply uncomfortable. That is the point....
Here is what Stephen Curry apparently remembered about the sports movies that shaped him: the underdog does not win because the system is fixed for him. The underdog wins because he shows up every day, gets better, and earns it.…...
There's a store at the Highland Place mall called Free Eden. It sells cupcake-scented candles, charm bracelets, and the kind of overpriced cotton sundress that costs more than your rent. The employees are gorgeous. They have their own slang.…...
Here's something you don't expect to say about a Faces of Death remake: it has something on its mind....
Let's start with the premise, because the premise is everything....
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.…...
Let's be direct about what Blink Twice is doing and whether it succeeds at it....
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is the sequel to a $1.36 billion phenomenon. It delivers exactly what made the original successful: kinetic fan service, Jack Black's scene-stealing performance, and a clean adventure that never lectures.…...
PRE-RELEASE ANALYSIS: Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey releases July 17, 2026. This review is based on trailers, production information, cast confirmations, and Nolan's documented approach to the material....
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....
Michael Jackson is the most complicated subject a biopic could attempt in 2026. He is the most successful recording artist in American history. He may have sexually abused children.…...
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....
Horror has always been one of cinema's most reliable delivery systems for traditional values. At its best, the genre insists that evil is real, that families are worth fighting for, and that some things are worse than death.…...
Smile opened to $22 million on a $17 million budget and eventually grossed $217 million worldwide.…...
Here is the thing about Megalopolis that most critics got wrong in both directions: it is not a failure of craft. Francis Ford Coppola knows how to direct. Adam Driver gives a genuinely magnetic performance.…...
Hereditary opened to $13.5 million and eventually grossed $80 million worldwide on a $10 million budget. It holds a 90% Rotten Tomatoes score and an 87 Metacritic, making it one of the most critically acclaimed horror films of the decade.…...
Uncut Gems is the most exhausting film on this list. That is not a complaint. The Safdie brothers have made a film designed to induce sustained anxiety in its audience, and they succeed completely.…...
The Wedding Singer is the best Adam Sandler film. Not the funniest. Not the most ambitious. The best, because it is the one where his persona serves a story worth telling....
The Royal Tenenbaums is Wes Anderson's most emotionally ambitious film and the one that best reveals both what he can do and where his sensibility falls short of what the material demands....
The Lion King is Disney's masterpiece and one of the most traditional films ever made by a major studio.…...
The Incredibles is the most explicitly conservative major studio animated film since The Lion King.…...
The Grand Budapest Hotel is Wes Anderson's most accessible film and possibly his best, which makes it the ideal entry point for the question conservatives have been circling: is Wes Anderson worth watching?...
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.…...
There are films that are good. There are films that are great. And then there are films that feel morally necessary, films that exist not just to entertain or to provoke but to bear witness. Schindler's List is in the third category.…...
Moonrise Kingdom is Wes Anderson's most sincere film, and sincerity is the quality he is most often accused of lacking.…...
Lincoln is a film that makes arguments about political leadership and moral conviction that no single ideological faction can fully claim. It is a great film.…...
Fifty years later, Jaws is still the template. Not just for summer blockbusters, which it invented, but for a certain kind of American story: a man comes to a new community, finds it threatened, and risks everything to protect it.…...
Happy Gilmore is thirty years old and it still makes people laugh. That is not nothing. Most comedies from the mid-nineties feel like archaeology.…...
Grown Ups might be the most explicitly conservative mainstream comedy of its era, and the critics who demolished it on Rotten Tomatoes (10%) probably sensed that without being able to articulate it....
Fantastic Mr. Fox is Wes Anderson's most straightforward moral tale and his most entertaining film, which is not a coincidence.…...
E.T. is one of the few films where the word 'masterpiece' is not an overstatement.…...
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…...
Click is a better film than it has any right to be, and the reason is that it has something real to say and is not ashamed to say it loudly....
Catch Me If You Can is one of the most purely enjoyable films Spielberg ever made. It is also the most morally complicated entry in his filmography from a traditional perspective.…...
Cast Away is one of the most stripped-down films Hollywood has ever produced. A FedEx systems analyst named Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) survives a plane crash in the South Pacific and spends four years alone on an uninhabited island.…...
Captain Phillips is one of the best thrillers of the 2010s and, for VirtueVigil's purposes, one of the more interesting ideological exercises in our database.…...
Bridge of Spies is the kind of film that does not get made very often, not because it is difficult or dark, but because it requires a belief in something unfashionable: that a man who does his duty with integrity, even when everyone around him is tel…...
This is the kind of film that almost doesn't get made anymore....
Billy Madison is not a film you defend to people who don't already like it. It operates on a specific frequency: loud, dumb, cheerfully juvenile, and completely unconcerned with whether you think it is smart. That is its whole deal.…...
Big Daddy is the film that revealed what Adam Sandler was actually capable of when someone gave him a story with real emotional stakes.…...
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…...
A Man Called Otto is the American remake of the Swedish film A Man Called Ove, itself adapted from Fredrik Backman's bestselling novel.…...
Zootopia is the most technically polished Disney has ever been. It is also one of the most ideologically explicit animated films a major studio has released.…...
The Creator is a genuinely beautiful film with a genuinely bad politics problem....
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....
Thanksgiving is exactly what it needs to be. That's not as easy as it sounds....
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....
The Greatest Showman is critic-proof. It has been critic-proof since it opened Christmas 2017 to 55% on Rotten Tomatoes and then proceeded to play in theaters for months, drive one of the most commercially successful soundtracks of the decade, and be…...
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....
There are animated films that earn their reputation and animated films that coast on it. Coco earns every bit of its 97% Rotten Tomatoes score, its two Oscars, and its place in the conversation about the greatest Pixar films ever made.…...
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....
The Iron Claw is a haunting film about the Von Erich wrestling dynasty and the way family legacy and cultural values can become weapons.…...
Tarantino's debut is 99 minutes of men in a warehouse figuring out who lied to them, and it is riveting cinema.…...
Miracle has the easiest setup in sports film history. You already know the ending. The 1980 US Olympic hockey team beating the Soviet Union is one of the most famous moments in American sports, in American history. The miracle is not a spoiler.…...
Kill Bill: Volume 1 is a film that defies easy ideological scoring, which is exactly the kind of challenge VirtueVigil exists to tackle.…...
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.…...
Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino's masterpiece, and it may be the most unambiguously pro-military film in American cinema since The Longest Day. It is certainly the most gleefully patriotic.…...
If you want to explain to someone what a traditional sports film looks like, you show them Hoosiers. That's it. Discussion over....
Fight Club is one of American cinema's most complicated films to score on VirtueVigil's scale, because it contains genuine traditional insight embedded in a deeply anti-traditional ideological framework.…...
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.…...
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 Wolf of Wall Street is a masterpiece about a man you should despise, made in a way that makes it hard to despise him.…...
Rocky is 50 years old and it still works. That's not a small thing. Most films that win Best Picture feel like artifacts within a decade. Rocky feels like it was made last year. The reason is simple: it's about something real....
Remember the Titans scores traditional lean, and if that surprises you, let me explain the math....
Pulp Fiction scores Woke Lean at -6, and I want to explain why that number is actually lower than many people expect....
Black Swan is a brilliant film about a woman who destroys herself to achieve perfection. Whether you find that portrait beautiful or disturbing probably tells you more about your relationship to ambition than it does about Aronofsky's politics....
Here is my honest admission before this review begins: Sing Sing is a film made by progressive filmmakers, distributed by A24, featuring a Black actor nominated for an Oscar, about a rehabilitation program in a maximum-security prison.…...
The first thing you need to know about Rebel Ridge is that it is not about race. It's about property rights....
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.…...
Jordan Peele's Us has a problem that Get Out didn't have: it's trying to do too many things. Get Out was a scalpel. Us is a Swiss Army knife that doesn't quite close back up properly....
The Old Guard surprised a lot of people when it became one of Netflix's biggest hits of 2020.…...
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.…...
Tenet is the easiest film on this list to analyze from a conservative perspective: it has essentially no ideology.…...
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....
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....
Soul is the rare animated film that asks a genuinely adult question and answers it with honesty rather than sentiment. The question: is having a passion you dedicate your life to the same thing as having a reason to live? Pixar's answer is no.…...
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino making a movie about men who are being left behind. Not metaphorically. Literally.…...
No Time to Die is a film at war with itself, and the miracle is that it almost wins....
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…...
Let's start with what Knives Out is, because it is genuinely very good at what it does.…...
Ghostbusters: Afterlife is the most traditionally conservative blockbuster of 2021, and I mean that as a sincere compliment.…...
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.…...
Ford v Ferrari is the kind of film that Hollywood used to make regularly and almost never makes anymore.…...
Dune: Part One is the rare epic blockbuster that takes itself seriously without becoming self-important. Denis Villeneuve spent years fighting to get this film made his way, and the result earns every frame of its 155-minute runtime.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Here's the honest take on the 2019 Aladdin: it's better than the critics said and not as good as the box office suggests. It grossed a billion dollars worldwide and earned a 57% critic score.…...
The Order is about as complicated as VirtueVigil gets, and I want to be honest about that before I score it....
There are filmmakers, and then there is Hayao Miyazaki. The Boy and the Heron is his final film, if we choose to believe that this time, and it is a work of art in the fullest sense: personal, symbolic, emotionally demanding, and visually unlike anyt…...
Let me tell you what nobody expected in December 2022: that an eleventh-year sequel to a DreamWorks spin-off, featuring a talking cat from the Shrek franchise, would turn out to be one of the best animated films in a decade.…...
Here is something you don't say often about a Disney live-action remake: this one earns it....
Wes Ball's reboot arrives many generations after Caesar's legacy, and it works hard to honor that lineage without being enslaved by it.…...
Here is the thing about Flow: it should not be this good. A Latvian animated film made by one person over five years, using free software, with no dialogue, no human characters, and a $3.5 million budget going up against Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks…...
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.…...
Air is the kind of movie that shouldn't work and completely does. A 112-minute film about a sneaker deal. No action, no explosions, no love story to speak of. Just a group of men in bad 1980s clothes arguing about basketball shoes in conference rooms.…...
A Minecraft Movie is an honest film. It is not pretending to be Citizen Kane. It is not sneaking in a gender studies lecture.…...
Here is the most charitable reading of Toy Story 4 I can offer: it is a technically brilliant film that makes a catastrophic moral choice in its final fifteen minutes....
Here's the thing about Paddington 2: it might be the most morally serious film of the last twenty years. It doesn't feel like it. It's brightly colored and funny and stars a CGI bear who gets into scrapes with marmalade.…...
Moana is the Disney princess film that refuses to be about a princess, which is either the most Disney thing imaginable or a quiet act of subversion, depending on your perspective. Moana (Auli'i Cravalho) is the daughter of a Pacific Island chief.…...
Together is a body horror film about codependency that takes its central metaphor more literally than any relationship drama has any right to.…...
There is something fascinating about The Apprentice, and it is not what its makers intended....
September 5 is a film about the birth of something you might love or hate depending on your politics: 24-hour live crisis news coverage.…...
Return to Silent Hill is an adaptation of Silent Hill 2, which has been called the greatest psychological horror narrative ever made.…...
Daniel Craig gives the best performance of his career in a film that probably should not work as well as it does....
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.…...
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.…...
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.…...
The professional critics never liked The Notebook. 53% on Rotten Tomatoes, 53 on Metacritic. 'Shameless manipulation,' one reviewer called it. 'A tearjerker with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.' The audience score is 86%.…...
The Matrix is the most politically contested movie in VirtueVigil history, not because it is propaganda but because everybody wants to own it....
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 first twenty-five minutes of Saving Private Ryan are among the most important minutes in the history of American cinema. Not because they are the most technically impressive war footage ever shot, though they are that.…...
There is a moment in Jurassic Park that I have never fully recovered from. Alan Grant is sitting in a tree with two children he barely knows, watching a brachiosaurus eat leaves in the moonlight.…...
Hacksaw Ridge is one of the most purely traditional films Hollywood has produced in the last twenty years. It is a story about faith, and it takes that faith seriously in a way that most war films don't dare.…...
Will Hunting is twenty years old, smarter than everyone in any room he has ever walked into, and entirely alone. He works as a janitor at MIT.…...
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.…...
Here's the thing about Forrest Gump that critics have spent thirty years getting wrong: they treat its sentimentality as a flaw.…...
Sally Hawkins ruins you in Bring Her Back. There is no other honest way to start this review.…...
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.…...
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.…...
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…...
Till is not a film about Emmett Till. It is a film about Mamie Till, and that distinction is what elevates it above the civil rights drama genre and into something genuinely moving....
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.…...
The Menu is a slick, well-crafted class satire that will make you laugh and make you uneasy, sometimes at the same time. It is also a film whose ideological message is more muddled than its admirers want to admit....
Jordan Peele's third film is his most formally ambitious and his most politically restrained, which may be why it polarized audiences in ways his earlier work didn't.…...
Here is what Rian Johnson is very good at: constructing mechanical puzzles. The Glass Onion mystery , Miles Bron's island, his orbit of enablers, the twist about who Janelle Monáe's character actually is , works as clockwork.…...
Mark Wahlberg paid for this film himself. Sony looked at the premise, a Catholic boxing biopic about a man who embraces progressive muscle disease as participation in Christ's suffering, and declined to fund it.…...
Don't Worry Darling is a film with a beautiful surface and a sermon underneath. Olivia Wilde's second feature arrives packaged as a sexy, sun-drenched psychological thriller with Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, and some of the most luscious 1950s produc…...
Black Adam is a movie that has everything it needs to be a great comic book film and makes almost none of it work....
Damien Chazelle wanted to make a film about the magic of movies. He made it by putting that magic through a meat grinder for three hours and nine minutes to see if anything noble survived the processing....
Amsterdam is a film about friendship, decency, and the courage it takes to defend democracy against people with money and no conscience. It is also, unfortunately, a mess....
Tron: Ares cost Disney between $180 and $220 million to make and grossed $142 million worldwide. That is not a small disaster.…...
Art the Clown is back. He is dressed as Santa Claus. And he is going to ruin your Christmas in the most graphically violent way imaginable....
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-commen…...
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.…...
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....
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....
Atlas is the kind of movie you watch on a Sunday afternoon with no expectations and find yourself mildly entertained.…...
Argylle wants to be the smartest spy film in the room. It ends up being the most exhausting....
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.…...
Mel Gibson did not make a movie. He made an act of witness....
Alexander Payne's The Holdovers is a warmhearted old-school character study about three lonely people stuck together at a New England boarding school over Christmas break in 1970.…...
The Hangover is one of the most technically perfect comedies ever made, and it is also an R-rated film about three grown men behaving abominably in Las Vegas. Both things are true. VirtueVigil reviews the film as it is, not as it should be....
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.…...
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.…...
Celine Song's Past Lives is a film about what you give up when you choose to become someone. It is quiet, devastating, and almost defiantly apolitical in a cultural moment when apolitical means brave....
Nonnas is the kind of film that gets made once a year if you are lucky, and usually goes unnoticed because it does not fit the culture war narratives that drive algorithm engagement. It is not woke. It is not a reaction against woke.…...
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.…...
Bob Marley: One Love earned $150 million worldwide against mixed critical reviews, which tells you something important: the audience for a reverential Bob Marley biopic that centers his faith and his music is enormous.…...
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?...
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....
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.…...
American Fiction is the most interesting progressive film of the 2023 season because it is willing to bite the hand it feeds.…...
M. Night Shyamalan's Trap is a high-concept thriller built on a genuinely clever premise: a serial killer attends a pop concert with his teenage daughter, only to discover the FBI has surrounded the venue knowing the killer will be there.…...
Thirty-seven years after the original and fourteen years after the death of Leslie Nielsen, Hollywood finally made another Naked Gun movie. The question was always going to be: could anyone replace Nielsen? The answer is no.…...
The universe is ending. Nobody knows why. Billboards are appearing all over the world with the face of a man named Charles Krantz, an accountant, with the words: '39 Great Years.…...
This is the film our audience has been waiting for....
Jeff Nichols's The Bikeriders is a quietly magnificent film about what happens to institutions built on brotherhood when the culture around them changes.…...
Parker Finn's Smile 2 is a bigger, louder, more technically ambitious horror film than its predecessor. It is also, paradoxically, a more traditionally structured morality tale.…...
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 t…...
Lucy Mason is a matchmaker in New York City. She is good at her job. She has matched nine couples into marriage.…...
M3GAN became a cultural phenomenon in January 2023. The viral dance clip. The meme economy. The gay icon discourse. The TikTok explosion. None of that tells you anything about what the film actually argues....
Three hundred feet below the North Sea, the umbilical line connecting Chris Lemons to the diving bell snaps. His oxygen lasts approximately five minutes. The surface crew has maybe thirty. What happens next is the reason this film exists....
Kevin Costner's Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 is an old-fashioned American epic Western of a kind that Hollywood has largely abandoned - sweeping, unhurried, deeply patriotic, and unapologetically romantic about the American frontier.…...
It's Valentine's Day in Seattle. A serial killer called the Heart Eyes Killer is hunting couples. Jay and Ally are coworkers pulling overtime who have made it professionally painful that they cannot stand each other.…...
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.…...
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.…...
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.…...
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is the highest-grossing animated film of 2023 at $1.36 billion worldwide, and it earned that number honestly. It is not a great film by any measure of ambition or craft.…...
The Nun II is the best entry in the Conjuring Universe since the original Conjuring.…...
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.…...
Across the Spider-Verse is the most technically ambitious animated film ever made. That is not hyperbole. Director Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K.…...
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.…...
Migration is Illumination doing what Illumination does best: a fast-moving family comedy built around a strong emotional hook, driven by a celebrity voice cast, and produced to a standard of visual polish that justifies the theater experience.…...
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.…...
Cocaine Bear is the rare case of a movie that fully delivers on its premise without apology or pretension. You came to see a bear on cocaine commit grievous violence against an ensemble of unlucky bystanders.…...
Anyone But You is the romantic comedy Hollywood forgot how to make. Not because it is especially brilliant, but because it is the simplest possible version of the thing it is trying to be: a film about two attractive people who are clearly meant for …...
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.…...
Titanic holds a strange place in film history. It won eleven Academy Awards and $2.2 billion at the global box office in 1997. It made Leonardo DiCaprio a global superstar and Kate Winslet one of the defining actresses of her generation.…...
Thor: Ragnarok is the MCU doing something it rarely does well: laughing at itself with genuine wit instead of nervous deflection.…...
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…...
The Flash is a film that should not exist, barely does exist, and yet contains some of the best superhero filmmaking of 2023 embedded inside the most troubled production in DC history.…...
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.…...
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....
Joker made a billion dollars. Critics gave it a 69% on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences gave it an 88%. The FBI and several law enforcement agencies issued security warnings before its release, fearing it would inspire mass violence.…...
Interstellar is Christopher Nolan's most emotionally direct film. Where Inception hides its heart inside puzzle boxes, Interstellar puts its heart on the table in the first ten minutes and then spends three hours testing it.…...
Christopher Nolan spent ten years writing Inception. It shows. This is one of the most structurally ambitious mainstream films ever produced: a heist story operating across five simultaneous dream levels, each with its own physics, each with its own …...
Guardians of the Galaxy is one of the most purely enjoyable films the MCU ever produced, and by our scoring system it is also one of the most traditionally coded. The margin is not close.…...
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....
Pixar's Elemental arrived at the box office to an unexpectedly rocky opening weekend and then quietly became one of the most audience-beloved films of 2023. The critics gave it a middling 74%. The audiences gave it a 95%. That gap is not accidental.…...
Doctor Strange is the MCU's most spiritually interesting film, and that is saying something given the franchise's general allergy to anything resembling genuine metaphysics.…...
Creed III is the best pure sports drama since Rocky II and the most traditional-values-aligned major film of 2023. It is also Michael B.…...
Captain Marvel is the MCU's most deliberately ideological film, and the filmmakers would not dispute this.…...
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.…...
Cabrini tells a story that mainstream Hollywood would never make, featuring a protagonist that contemporary progressive culture cannot quite process: a 19th-century Catholic nun who built hospitals, orphanages, and schools through sheer force of pray…...
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 Dark Knight is not just the best superhero film ever made. It is one of the best crime films ever made, full stop.…...
People We Meet on Vacation is the rom-com BookTok has been waiting for, and it delivers exactly what that audience wants: two impossibly attractive leads with crackling chemistry, beautiful international locations, a will-they-won't-they structure th…...
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.…...
Denis Villeneuve completes his Dune trilogy with a film that is simultaneously his most visually ambitious and most explicitly ideological.…...
Coyote vs. Acme has the most dramatic behind-the-scenes story of any film in 2026, and it hasn't even been released yet....
Avengers: Endgame is the highest-grossing film of all time (adjusted for inflation).…...
RaMell Ross has made a film that does not want you to watch it. It wants you to live inside it....
Walter Salles has made the most restrained political film of the decade. I'm Still Here tells the true story of Eunice Paiva, whose husband Rubens, a former left-wing congressman, was taken from their Rio de Janeiro home by agents of Brazil's militar…...
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.…...
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…...
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.…...
Craig Brewer found a true story so improbable, so heartbreaking, and so genuinely joyful that all he had to do was get out of its way. Mostly, he does....
Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value is that rarest of Oscar contenders - a deeply personal, genuinely humanistic film that resists easy ideological categorization.…...
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.…...
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.…...
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....
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.…...
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 Vale…...
Weapons is the rare horror film that conservatives do not need to apologize for enjoying. In fact, they may find themselves grinning through it....
Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! is a film that tells you exactly what it is from the very first frame, and it does not care if you approve. That was true before release, and it is doubly true now that audiences and critics have had their say....
Matt Reeves made the rare superhero film where you forget you are watching a superhero film....
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....
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.…...
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.…...
Five Nights at Freddy's is not a great horror film. But it is something rarer and more interesting: a mainstream Hollywood production built on a conservative Christian creator's values, made with his direct creative control, and released at a moment …...
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.…...
Pedro Almodovar's first English-language film is a meditation on death, friendship, and the right to choose when and how one's life ends.…...
The Optimist is the kind of film that should not need a culture war review. It is a small, independent drama about a real Holocaust survivor named Herbert Heller who kept his past secret for 60 years and the friendship that finally gave him the coura…...
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come takes the original's eat-the-rich horror-comedy formula and dials it up to a global conspiracy. Whether that's a feature or a bug depends entirely on how you felt about the first film.…...
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....
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man delivers exactly what its six seasons of television promised: a masculine, violent, morally complex crime drama about a deeply flawed man who comes out of hiding to save his son, fight fascists, and protect his family…...
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.…...
Jacques Audiard's Emilia Perez is a film that managed the rare feat of uniting both progressive and conservative critics against it while simultaneously earning 13 Oscar nominations - the most for any non-English-language film in Academy history.…...
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....
Better Man is the most creatively audacious biopic in recent memory and also one of the most commercially disastrous.…...
Train Dreams is the kind of film that doesn't get made very often anymore. It's quiet. It's patient. It trusts its audience to sit with silence and find meaning in the accumulation of small moments across a long, hard, beautiful life....
This review contains detailed plot analysis and reveals key story elements including the film's ending....
Guillermo del Toro has been trying to make this movie since the mid-1990s. That is not a figure of speech. He first announced Frankenstein as a project at Universal in 2008. Before that, he had been sketching designs and taking script notes for years.…...
We Live in Time is a weepie. An exceptionally well-made one, built on two of the finest performances in recent romantic cinema. It will make you cry. Whether it should is a more interesting question....
This review contains detailed plot analysis and reveals key story elements including the film's ending....
The Electric State is a $320 million argument that money cannot buy a soul....
Twenty-six years after the original and thirteen years after the widely reviled Scary Movie 5, the Wayans brothers are back. And they're bringing a flamethrower to the culture war....
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.…...
Paddington Bear has become one of the strangest cultural Rorschach tests in modern cinema.…...
Ti West's X trilogy ends the way it began - with a woman who refuses to apologize for wanting more.…...
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. 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.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Babygirl is a well-made, beautifully shot, expertly performed film built around an argument most traditional viewers will find deeply objectionable. It is not a film to dismiss. It is a film to understand before dismissing....
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.…...
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....
Twisters is that rare modern blockbuster that feels like it was made for the entire country, not just the coasts.…...
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....
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.…...
Here's the thing about Mean Girls (2024): it's not the culture war flashpoint that either side wants it to be....
Madame Web is one of the most comprehensively terrible superhero films ever produced by a major studio.…...
Joker: Folie a Deux is a $200 million act of cinematic self-immolation. Todd Phillips took one of the most commercially successful and culturally resonant character studies of the 2010s and produced a sequel that exists primarily to punish its predec…...
Inside Out 2 is the movie Disney desperately needed. After a string of underperformers and culture war disasters (Lightyear's same-sex kiss controversy, Strange World's commercial implosion, Elemental's slow start), Pixar went back to basics.…...
Let's get this out of the way: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is not a film you watch for the story.…...
Let's address the elephant in the Wasteland right up front: Furiosa is not woke. It's not even close.…...
Drop is the best contained thriller since Searching (2018) and one of the most effectively constructed genre films in recent memory.…...
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.…...
Am I Racist? is Matt Walsh doing his best Borat impression, and it works more often than it doesn't....
The Alto Knights is a late-career gift from two of the most important figures in American crime cinema.…...
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.…...
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 …...
Disney's 2019 Lion King is a technically stunning but emotionally hollow recreation of one of the most traditionally structured stories in the studio's catalog.…...
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.…...
Speak No Evil is one of the most uncomfortable films of 2024. It's a clinical, precise horror film about a man who cannot protect his family because he has spent his adult life outsourcing confrontation to social norms. Deeply effective.…...
Solo Mio is the movie Kevin James was born to make. Not the one critics expected, and not the one his sitcom fans were waiting for, but the one that proves this guy has real range when he trusts the material....
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.…...
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.…...
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.…...
It Ends with Us arrives as two films at war with each other, and the battle behind the camera turned out to be far more interesting than what ended up on screen....
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.…...
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.…...
Frozen II is the rare Disney sequel that takes bigger ideological swings than the original, and it connects with roughly half of them.…...
Disney's Frozen is both less radical and more subversive than its reputation suggests.…...
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.…...
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…...
Disney's Cruella is what happens when a studio takes one of its most iconic villains and runs her through the Joker-meets-The-Devil-Wears-Prada sympathy machine.…...
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.…...
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 ch…...
Wonka is the rare prequel that earns its existence. Where most origin stories exist to explain away the mystery of beloved characters, Wonka does something different: it deepens the mystery by showing you where the magic came from....
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....
Turning Red is a technically brilliant, emotionally effective Pixar film that is also one of the studio's most ideologically loaded projects.…...
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....
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, an…...
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 …...
Strange World is the movie where Disney finally stopped pretending and went full ideological accelerator.…...
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…...
Ridley Scott's Napoleon is a film at war with itself. The battle sequences are extraordinary. The portrait of Napoleon the man is deliberately, sometimes frustratingly, small.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Encanto is that rare modern Disney film that actually earns its emotional payoff. Set in a magical Colombian valley, it tells the story of Mirabel Madrigal, the one family member without a supernatural gift, who must figure out why the family's magic…...
Black Widow arrives as Natasha Romanoff's belated solo film and the first entry in MCU Phase Four.…...
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…...
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....
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....
Anaconda (2025) is a film that sounds better as an elevator pitch than it plays as a ninety-nine-minute movie.…...
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....
Director Kathryn Bigelow returns with Silent Storm, a Cold War submarine thriller that represents American military cinema at its finest.…...
Havoc is the closest thing to a Gareth Evans Raid film in English, and for a certain kind of audience, that is exactly enough....
Greenland 2: Migration is a deeply traditional film wearing the clothes of a post-apocalyptic thriller.…...
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....
Presence is the most technically inventive horror film of early 2025. It is also a quietly progressive film wearing an arthouse horror mask....
Tom Cruise's final turn as Ethan Hunt is, by any reasonable measure, a triumph of old-school filmmaking values.…...
Dean DeBlois is a rarity in Hollywood. He directed all three animated How to Train Your Dragon films and insisted on full creative control for the live-action remake. That condition shows in the finished product.…...
Den of Thieves 2 does not break any new ground. It does not need to....
Let's get the headline out of the way. Yes, Death of a Unicorn has a political lean. It is an anti-capitalist satire wrapped in a creature feature, and it does not try to hide it. The rich people are cartoonishly evil.…...
The Bone Temple is better than it has any right to be. After the messy second half of 28 Years Later, expectations for this direct sequel were low.…...
28 Years Later is two movies welded together, and the seam shows....
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.…...
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....
A Quiet Place: Day One is a frustrating film to score because it's genuinely well-made and carries real emotional weight, right up until you look at what it's actually saying....
The moment the first marketing image dropped, showing Halle Bailey as Ariel, the internet divided cleanly in two. One half celebrated. The other half complained.…...
The name alone carries enough weight to sell tickets. Mufasa. The great king. The father James Earl Jones voiced into immortality. The ghost in the clouds.…...
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.…...
The Wild Robot might be the most subversive film of 2024, and not in the way Hollywood usually means that word.…...
Tim Burton made a sequel to Beetlejuice 36 years after the original, and the result is exactly what you'd expect from a director who has been coasting on his own aesthetic for at least a decade: a film that looks like a Tim Burton movie, sounds like …...
James Mangold made a Bob Dylan biopic that is secretly a film about the dangers of ideological conformity. That might sound like a stretch for a movie about a folk singer in Greenwich Village, but hear it out.…...
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? Bec…...
The Conjuring: Last Rites is not the best film in the franchise. That distinction still belongs to James Wan's 2013 original.…...
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....
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.…...
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights survived 179 years, multiple adaptations, and the entire twentieth century with its reputation intact.…...
Somewhere between the 400 brand partnerships, the Limited Edition pink-and-green Stanley cups, and the church-group holiday matinees, something got lost in translation. Universal sold Wicked as the feel-good movie event of 2024.…...
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.…...
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.…...
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.…...
Let's be honest about what The Housemaid is before we decide whether it's any good.…...
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....
Brady Corbet's The Brutalist is a serious, demanding, three-and-a-half-hour epic that positions itself as a meditation on the American Dream, artistic integrity, and the immigrant experience.…...
Sam Raimi has been making gloriously unhinged movies for over 40 years. From the cabin in the Tennessee woods to the streets of Manhattan to the multiverse itself, the guy runs on one fuel: controlled chaos delivered with a grin.…...
Dan Trachtenberg clearly loves the Predator franchise. That much is obvious from three films in three years.…...
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....
Robert Eggers' Nosferatu is one of the most uncompromisingly traditional horror films made by a major director in the past decade.…...
Dev Patel spent seven years developing Monkey Man, got a broken nose, multiple injuries, and a Netflix deal that then collapsed. Then Jordan Peele watched the film and made sure it got into theaters.…...
The short version: Moana 2 is fine. Better than fine for fans of the original. Not as good as the original.…...
Timur Bekmambetov's Mercy arrives with a killer premise and proceeds to do almost nothing interesting with it.…...
A spoiler: Melania is not a documentary in any traditional journalistic sense. Melania Trump said this herself during the film's promotion, describing it as 'a created experience' and 'purposeful storytelling' rather than a documentary.…...
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.…...
Rose Glass made Saint Maud on a very small budget, got it into A24's catalog, and watched it become a cult film about a woman whose religious intensity crosses into psychosis.…...
Longlegs is the most unnerving American horror film of 2024 and one of the few in recent memory that takes Satanism seriously as a moral force rather than as ironic aesthetic.…...
Lisa Frankenstein is Diablo Cody's Jennifer's Body with worse reviews and a better aesthetic. That sentence is both a description and a verdict....
Kinds of Kindness is a nearly three-hour endurance test from Yorgos Lanthimos that systematically dismantles any structure that might give human life meaning.…...
This review contains spoilers. Iron Lung earns its ending and the ending requires discussion....
Sydney Sweeney spent years developing Immaculate as a vehicle that would let her operate in the horror genre while carrying a message she clearly believed in.…...
IF is John Krasinski's most emotionally ambitious film and his most uneven one. But when it works, which is more often than its mixed reviews suggest, it works because Krasinski trusts the audience to feel something genuine....
Let's get something out of the way. Hurry Up Tomorrow is a vanity project. It may be the most unambiguous vanity project to receive a wide theatrical release in recent memory.…...
Hit Man is the most pleasant surprise of 2024's theatrical calendar. Richard Linklater and Glen Powell teamed up to make a romantic crime comedy that is so relentlessly charming, so well-paced, and so smartly cast that it's easy to overlook the fact …...
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.…...
Dune: Part Two is a cinematic achievement of genuine rarity. A sequel that expands the scale, deepens the craft, and improves on its predecessor at nearly every technical level.…...
Luc Besson's Dracula: A Love Tale is a strange, kitschy, deeply sincere movie. And that sincerity is precisely what saves it....
Despicable Me 4 is the franchise at its most comfortable and its most predictable. That is not entirely a bad thing....
Old-school doesn't have to mean simple. Crime 101 is the kind of crime picture Hollywood used to make before every heist had to double as a statement about something. There's a jewel thief with a code.…...
Companion is a sharper movie than you expect and a more ideologically loaded one than the marketing lets on.…...
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.…...
Challengers is a technically brilliant film and a moral void. Luca Guadagnino is one of the most gifted visual stylists working today, and he brings his full arsenal to this story of a love triangle set across thirteen years of competitive tennis.…...
Bad Boys: Ride or Die is a franchise that knows exactly what it is and has stopped pretending otherwise.…...
Alien: Romulus is the best Alien film since James Cameron's Aliens (1986). That is not faint praise.…...
Abigail does exactly what it promises and does it with more craft than the premise deserves. That is meant as a compliment....
Jesse Eisenberg's A Real Pain is a small, honest, and unexpectedly moving film about two cousins who travel to Poland to honor their recently deceased grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. It is 90 minutes long. It does not waste a minute.…...
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....
Hollywood has always fed on its own. Stars rise, burn bright, and are discarded - usually on a schedule dictated by age, gender, and the appetite of an industry that treats women as decorative objects with expiration dates.…...
The original The Strangers (2008) earned its place in horror history with a deceptively simple premise: three masked killers, a couple, an isolated house, no explanation offered and none needed.…...
Let's be precise about what this film is: a $4 million mockumentary in which Charli XCX - pop music's reigning progressive icon - produces, co-wrote, and stars in a fictional version of her own real life, distributed by A24, the most ideologically co…...
Here is a film that has been celebrated by progressive film critics as a sober reckoning with #MeToo, praised by conservative commentators as the most explicitly anti-woke monologue delivered in a mainstream movie since anyone can remember, dismissed…...
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.…...
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.…...
They sold you a gothic aesthetic. They delivered a manifesto wrapped in designer lighting....
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....
Andrew Kevin Walker wrote Se7en - one of the most morally coherent crime films of the past thirty years, a movie that understood evil as evil and paid the price for staring too long. That screenplay took years to get made. So did this one.…...
Hollywood has always loved a metaphor. But rarely has the industry deployed one this nakedly, or this aggressively, and then handed it four Oscars.…...
There's 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.…...
The most disorienting thing about Killers of the Flower Moon is not its three-and-a-half-hour runtime. It is not the murders - dozens of them, deliberate and methodical.…...
Glen Powell murdering his way through a family tree to reclaim stolen wealth sounds like the pitch for a crowd-pleasing dark comedy - and largely, How to Make a Killing delivers exactly that.…...
Let's not dance around it. Heretic is not a horror film that happens to touch on religion.…...
Edward Berger's Conclave is the most dangerous kind of progressive film: one that is genuinely excellent....
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.…...
Hollywood handed its highest honor - Best Picture at the 97th Academy Awards - to a film whose protagonist is a sex worker and exotic dancer, whose marriage to a Russian oligarch's failson disintegrates in real time, and whose director dedicated his …...
Disney's live-action Snow White arrives carrying more baggage than a royal carriage.…...
The original "I Can Only Imagine" was a genuine phenomenon in faith-based cinema, pulling in $83 million on a shoestring budget and proving that audiences hungry for sincere Christian storytelling would show up in droves.…...
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.…...
Steve McQueen's "Blitz" arrives dressed in the clothing of a wartime survival story, the kind of tale that should celebrate British resilience, familial devotion, and the quiet heroism of ordinary people under extraordinary duress.…...
This transcript is a glossy, crowd-pleasing heist fantasy that repeatedly moralizes theft as “justice” and uses modern political talking points as applause lines.…...
Independence Day is built on a traditional moral structure centered on individual courage, earned leadership, and collective survival through merit and sacrifice.…...
Nightbitch opens as a character study of maternal exhaustion - a woman losing her identity in the repetitive isolation of full-time parenthood. The performances are grounded. The frustration feels earned.…...
Director Dee Rees brings formidable craft and genuine humanity to Butterfly Dreams, a coming-of-age drama about a sixteen-year-old trans girl named Maya who leaves her conservative religious hometown in rural Kentucky to live with her estranged grand…...
For audiences who agree with progressive critique of celebrity, capitalism, complicity: film works. For conservative audiences or those seeking entertainment: film is betrayal dressed in transgression. Woke trap real.…...
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.…...
