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Sinners, starring Michael B. Jordan and directed by Ryan Coogler
Trailer: Warner Bros.

Sinners
Directed by Ryan Coogler
Rated R
Strummed 18 April 2025
#SinnersMovie

With Sinners, moviegoers finally end a long drought and have a fresh, thematically rich experience to sink their teeth into and savor.

Club Juke

Sinners is a wild vision from writer-director Ryan Coogler, who’s no stranger to big movies, including top-shelf pop culture characters in Marvel’s Black Panther and Creed, which saw the transition of Rocky Balboa from fighter to trainer. Here, it’s his own original, singular vision that almost inconceivably brings cultures (among them, Black, Native American, Chinese and Irish) together with Hoodoo, blues, vampires, religion, history, racism, the Ku Klux Klan, Al Capone and Tommy guns in one story of music, freedom and life’s choices.

The opening narration talks about the power of music and those who engage in making music — the singers, the guitarists — are the people who pierce the veil between life and death. Music heals, but it also attracts evil.

What a setup.

And so it is a bloodied, disheveled young man enters a church, carrying the fret board from what was once a beautiful guitar. He’s Sammie Moore and the preacher is his father, who asks him to drop the guitar. They need to pray. Only 24 hours earlier, Sammie was warned by his father — the Father — to not go out that night, to not play music. He’s dancing with the devil, he’s warned, and if he dances long enough, the devil’s going to follow him home.

But maybe — just maybe — you have to face the devil to defeat the devil. Or cop out and sell your soul.

That’s the crux of Sinners. And it’s not just the story that fascinates. It’s how it’s told.

Smoke Stack

Entering into this dark and mysterious world — 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi — are Stack and Smoke. They’re twin brothers who grew up in Clarksdale but experienced the horrors of war in the battlefields of World War I before moving to Chicago for financial gain and to learn the ways of the world writ large while witnessing a wholly different kind of horror on the streets. They were schooled in the world of Al Capone and now they’re back home to give Black people a place to go, to escape their harsh lives working in the cotton fields. To have a drink. Listen to some music. Dance. Congregate.

Smoke and Stack. One’s slick, a smooth talker. The other has a harder time containing his inner demons.

Both are played by long-time Coogler collaborator Michael B. Jordan. And it is totally legit; this isn’t a cheesy dual-role gimmick. Jordan’s performances as the two distinctly different brothers are so seamless, it totally escapes the mind it’s the same actor as two different characters facing the audience in the same shot.

The brothers gift Sammie with that guitar from the opening scene. It’s supposedly a guitar from Charlie Payton’s personal collection. It’s a beaut. As for Sammie, he’s played by Miles Caton in a stunning theatrical debut. Caton is a remarkable talent who stands toe to toe to toe with Jordan and Jordan.

Their dream is to convert a cruddy, dusty old sawmill into a juke joint. But, as with almost everything in Sinners, even this building has a sordid past that’s still haunted by demons. The draws for opening night will be Sammie and a local gin joint favorite, Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo, Get Shorty).

In this juke joint — Club Juke — unfolds a truly incredible scene (yeah, shot with IMAX cameras) that deftly moves through space and time; it’s an encapsulation of music and cultural history featuring allusions to Isaac Hayes, Run DMC, Missy Elliott and so many other musical influences from around the world and through the ages. Chinese. Native American. It’s music history. It’s future history. It’s only April, but this scene is a frontrunner for the year’s coolest movie moment.

But that’s not all. That’s followed by another major music, this one in an open field down from Club Juke. It brings together Irish jigs and American folk that sets the stage for a clash of cultures fancifully told through the lens of a horror movie.

In some respects, Sinners is a kindred spirit to Jordan Peele’s Nope. But Sinners throws in a couple scenes of over-the-top bloodletting — Fangoria, grindhouse levels and styles of blood dipping, splattering and flowing — that veers into some cheesy territory that almost knocks it down a notch, but Sinners recovers.

Sympathy for the Devil

Music and its power has been front and center quite a bit lately, with A Complete Unknown, The Ballad of Wallis Island and O’Dessa, plus, of course, the little movies that could, Wicked and Moana 2. But none of them go where Sinners goes.

Adding to the tall pile of great moments in Sinners is seeing Buddy Guy make a mid-end credits cameo as none other than an older and much wiser Sammie. He’s on stage performing in a club called Pearline’s, named after Sammie’s first love (or first lust, at least). It’s a stroke of pure casting genius that brings all kinds of history together. And topping it off is a message. Going back to that original comment on life’s choices, including the big one: either fight the devil or sell your soul to him.

Following up on Guy’s cameo, there’s a post-credits extra. It’s not a tease in the vein of a Marvel movie. Instead, it’s a nice, short musical performance by Miles Caton. It didn’t have to be done. But it ends Sinners on the right note.

This is the kind of bold, original storytelling Hollywood should be focused on for the theatrical business to survive not just the recent decimation brought on by the pandemic and the advent of streaming, but the broader problem of the growing disenchantment of younger generations with modern Hollywood celebrity as a whole.

This is a big movie and Coogler puts the IMAX format to terrific use (the end credits thank Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan, the Oscar winners behind Oppenheimer, which enjoyed an historic IMAX film and 70 mm film theatrical run). It demonstrates the dramatic differences between a movie merely shot "for" IMAX and a movie filmed with IMAX film cameras. And it’s the first such production shot by a female cinematographer, Autumn Durald Arkapaw (The Last Showgirl).

Scenes slickly move from scope to IMAX, not always in a traditional scene cut, but by way of a graceful, smooth frame expansion that shifts aspect ratios until it’s full-scale IMAX. With this, Coogler is — truly — demonstrating a taste for the theatrical.

That taste runs the gamut from the grandiose to the subtle, as with one scene in which Delta Slim recounts a horrific lynching while driving through a cotton field in an open-top car. The lynching is off-screen, but Delta’s story is supported by haunting audio, an aural transcript ceaselessly running on auto-replay in his mind.

Risky Business

Maybe Warner Bros. learned a lesson after Christopher Nolan ditched the studio in the wake of Tenet and Warner’s all-in approach to streaming at the expense of theatrical exhibition during the pandemic and the long, dry stretch during which theatres were shuttered. Sinners is a great movie, carrying more power and a bigger punch than Martin Scorsese’s clumsy Killers of the Flower Moon.

Even so, Sinners probably won’t turn a theatrical profit in the current theatrical environment. That’s partly the fault of all the studios and how they handled the pandemic; a case of greed at the expense of longtime exhibitor relationships.

But, even as complex and layered as the Sinners storyline is, so is the complexity behind the scenes and Coogler’s wheeling and dealing with the studio, which reportedly found Coogler footing a $20 million tab when the budget soared past the original $80 million earmarked.

Coogler has made a thoughtful work of cinematic art and Warner Bros. added it to a risky slate of movies that includes the much (undeservedly) maligned Joker: Folie a Deux, the ambitious but disappointing Mickey 17, the goldmine that is A Minecraft Movie and the stratospheric expectations for Superman this summer.

It’s a testament to Coogler’s talent that he’s able to make the jump into and — more importantly — out of the Marvel ways of moviemaking. In looking at the trajectory of the Russo brothers, who made movie history with the astonishing box office receipts (pre-pandemic) of the Avengers blockbusters Infinity War and Endgame, it seems more and more dependent on all the supporting machinery of Marvel (and Disney) to make movies that aren’t the cinematic equivalent of an upset stomach.

Sinners is Coogler’s vision and a landmark that suggests more grand theatrical experiences are still to come.

• Originally published at MovieHabit.com.