Review: Sinners

Director:  Ryan Coogler

Stars:  Michael B. Jordan, Wunmi Mosaku, Delroy Lindo

If the crushing loss of Chadwick Boseman made Black Panther: Wakanda Forever a conflicted, bittersweet epitaph to the great actor, the Marvel machine still managed to mangle it into a watered down “one for them” affair. Few Hollywood filmmakers have flexed with a “one for me” like Ryan Coogler does here with Sinners, his first movie since 2013’s Fruitville Station to be (for the moment at least) a standalone outing. This is Coogler, doing his own thing, coincidentally providing us with the most fulfilling popcorn flick of 2025 so far.

‘Popcorn flick’ is a loaded descriptor that I’ve grown less and less fond of, in fairness. There’s some inherent snobbery in it, suggestive that what’s being offered is in some way insubstantial. In truth, some of this decade’s finest movies have been built for the masses (The Matrix Resurrections, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga)… it’s just that, for whatever reason, the masses haven’t been in attendance. It’ll be a pity if Sinners suffers the same fate, for it shares the same top-tier pedigree, flaunting a not-insignificant mix of high-end craft, top-tier acting and deep pockets of ideas.

We’re in Mississippi in the 1930s, and twin gangsters Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan in a great dual performance) have fled Chicago with a truckload of mobster liquor and enough cash to follow their dream of opening their own country juke joint for traditional blues music and dancing. Within a day of arriving they’ve made inroads with the musical talent they have their eye on – including their own cousin, undiscovered talent and literal son of a preacher man Sammie (Miles Caton) and busking bluesman Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo). Both of the brothers’ old flames are also in the mix. For blue-hatted Smoke, that’s cook and backwoods witch Annie (the great Wunmi Mosaku). For red-hatted Stack it means former squeeze Mary (Hailee Steinfeld). The stage is set for a fiery opening night out in the sticks. But Sinners is about to crash that party with a supernatural hole card that Coogler holds on revealing with wry coyness.

The brio of Sinners can be broadly traced, but are eminently found in three other superlative popular genre pictures; both John Carpenter’s The Thing (in which evil hides in the skin of the ordinary) and Assault On Precinct 13 (as this is, for a large portion of the running time, a siege movie) and Robert Rodriguez’s schlocky From Dusk Till Dawn (Sinners sort of plays like an inverse reimagining of that film). And there’s a sense, when the violence comes, that Coogler’s fondness is pointedly old school. Blood-letting is of the gloopy, paint-looking variety favoured in Hammer horrors, or back-in-the-day George A. Romero flicks. This is, one senses, a quite deliberate aesthetic choice, announcing the quotation marks within which Sinners sits.

But, as intimated, there’s a lot more going on under the hood than simple in-the-moment genre thrills (though those are delivered in spades). Sinners is deeply involved in the spiritual interconnectivity of music. As an avenue for joyous catharsis, as an intrinsic link to grief, traumas and their healing, and as a conduit through which one can discover and celebrate an entire cultural lineage. The two halves of the picture are intertwined by the music of Ludwig Göransson, which develops from acoustic picking to electric chugging as the schlock intensifies. Speaking of musical joinery, for all the fantastical elements that swarm over the latter half of Sinners, it’s exalted peak may be a mid-film jamming sequence – caught in a superlative meandering shot – that gambles all on mixing past, present and future in a single communal space. It’s the kind of gambit that could have badly misfired, but Coogler’s confidence in his own vision – combined with the effectiveness of the artistry – turns it into a high-water mark in his filmography to date.

Sinners is also, fundamentally, about appropriation. Deep in the Jim Crow south where the spectre of the Klan is as grimly menacing as open, unmasked racism, Coogler has set his film quite specifically at a time and place where traditional Black music was soon to be plundered for all it’s worth by white commerce. Just a few short years away, rock’n’roll would pick the bones of rhythm and blues. But beyond music, Sinners addresses the manner in which majority culture (i.e. white culture) scavenges from minority sources. An act of suppression through subtraction. It’s literal vampirism. Coogler just makes it, well, more literal.

This is an expansive film, and Coogler is leisurely in his build up, taking as much as half the movie to corral all his pieces into place. It’s a long day’s journey into night, if you will. It may be relatively slow, but it’s by no means time wasted. Characters are fleshed out before us and Sinners is handsome, funny and engaging long before it lets it’s secrets out of the box.

Like the duality of the leading brothers – one cool, one tempestuous – it’s a movie of two halves; night and day. The day is coated in a warm, honeyed glow. The night is thick and murky, heady and full of half-seen hazards. The dancehall scenes that knit the two halves together are hot and sticky and mixes the sensibilities. The people glow and the room is dark. Here, in the midsection, Steve McQueen’s blues party hotbox Lovers Rock might be another pertinent comparison point on Coogler’s buzzy mood board.

The balance here between thematic layering and more immediate audience-sating thrills is sublime, as is the craft. Coogler’s long build-up and ultimate siege end game unfurl in such a way as to feel operatic. Leone-esque in their largess. It’s like what Quentin Tarantino tries to eke out of his similarly heightened late-career schtick, albeit shorn of all the insufferable peacocking (if only The Hateful Eight had half the power and punch of this movie!). It allows Coogler to get away with a rather indulgent set of endings (including a sizeable mid-credits coda – stay seated). They feel warranted. Everyone likes a punchy cut-to-black exit. Coogler’s aversion here is a necessary-seeming comedown from the ravages of the night. There may be one flashback too many, perhaps. But it’s a fine thing, and among the only visible weaknesses in what amounts to a major motion picture event for genre moviegoers everywhere.

This is a potent rural brew with the future in it’s sights, all but guaranteed to knock your socks off. And it also confirms something I’ve long suspected; Irish folk dancing really is kinda evil.