Sinners: Best Film of 2025 (thus far)
The one-word title might sound be too simple, but Sinners is an original and entertaining vampire movie, defined by a nuanced portrait of a small-town Mississippi Delta community in 1932.
Like Spike Lee, who’s shockingly 68, the dean of Black filmmakers over the past four decades, Ryan Coggler, who’s 39, is the most versatile Black director working in Hollywood today.
I deliberately use the label Black as Coogler’s movies are all dealing with significant black themes–past and present. (I have no issue in describing him as one of the best filmmakers working in Hollywood today, period).
Coogler tells the story of underworld twins, Smoke and Stack (both played by star Michael B. Jordan), who return to the Deep South to open a juke joint with a new kind of freedom.
The mov9e is also a pop vision of the blues, depicting why that music would lure the vampires like moths to a bonfire–they want to own the music and destroy it, all at the same time.
There’s a lot going in Ryan Coogler’s Robert Johnson underworld social horror–many ideas, some better developed than others.
Yet it’s exhilarating to see a mass oriented commercial entertainment that’s provocative too, a richly dense tale in which forces of evil build upon each other en route to inevitably oppressive destiny.
Coogler has said that there will be no sequel to Sinners, and in an age of recycling, remakes, reboots, and sequelitis, you have to respect his decision for that.
I cannot wait to see what he will do next!
