3 hours ago
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It’s a symptom of the modern entertainment landscape that movies are now either commercially successful or critically acclaimed, but rarely both. Look over the highest-grossing films of 2025 and it’s a familiar roll call of sequels and spin-offs; look over the critics’ favourites and they are mostly fine movies that not enough people watched – all hoping for a boost from awards season. But Sinners ticked both boxes: it was a smash hit (the seventh highest grossing picture in the US and virtually the only original movie in the top 20), and it was a critical triumph (97% on Rotten Tomatoes, 84% on Metacritic). And most importantly of all, Sinners was a true original, combining action-horror excitement with deep, rich, personal storytelling. There’s nothing more gratifying than seeing a film-maker swing for the fences and actually knock it out of the park; against expectations, 39-year-old Ryan Coogler did just that.
What’s more, Sinners contains what’s surely one of the most transcendently cinematic moments of the year: the scene when blues singer Preacher Boy (Miles Caton) performs his new song I Lied to You for a rowdy Mississippi jook joint, which is powerful enough to pierce “the veil between life and death, the past and the future”. As the song builds, reality breaks down. African tribal musicians, Chinese opera performers, modern-day turntablists, P-Funk-style electric guitarists: all join the swirling revelry. Coogler literally tears the roof off the joint: it catches fire from all this energy and we’re in another realm of space and time. Give the film an Oscar just for this!
Awesome as the scene is, it’s more than just gratuitous theatrics; it’s also the moment when Sinners pivots from what could have been an engaging historical drama into something more supernatural and action-packed. Preacher Boy’s piercing of the veil attracts the attention of Jack O’Connell’s Irish vampire, and the film kicks into another gear.
The vampire element adds another layer of mythology to a story that is already stacked with it. At heart, Sinners evokes the black experience of the early 20th century, in a deep south where slavery is a living memory and Jim Crow laws a lived reality for black folks. Even more recent are the first world war, the “Great Migration” (of southern African Americans to northern states), the Great Depression and the persecution of the Ku Klux Klan. Michael B Jordan’s twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, carry all this baggage with them as they return from Chicago to set up their new club venture.
Then there’s the folklore of the blues, which arose in this exact time and place. Its primal power is juxtaposed with that of the church. “Blues wasn’t forced on us like that religion,” says Delroy Lindo’s veteran pianist, Delta Slim. “No, we brought this with us.”
On the surface, O’Connell and his folksy interlopers could be seen as a straight metaphor for cultural appropriation: white folks crashing the party and appropriating what black folks have built. But it’s not quite that simple. O’Connell references Ireland’s own history of colonisation, for example. But in contrast to the liberating blues going on inside the jook joint, his demonic folk music insists everyone dances to the same manic tune – which, admittedly, kind of slaps. Dualities abound in this story: church and blues; day and night; melting pot multiculturalism and top-down hierarchy; good and evil; past and present; happy twin/scary twin. In his own way, Coogler also pierces the veil.
The result is a film you can admire from every angle: the performances, the music, the historical settings, the costumes, the special effects, the swooping camerawork, the technical finesse with which Jordan portrays his dual roles so seamlessly – we stop questioning it the moment Smoke passes Stack a cigarette in their first scene together (give him an Oscar too!). It’s also, as cast member Yao declared in an interview, “sexy as fuck”. No wonder it’s earned a record 16 Oscar nominations: it’s a triumph across the board. It’s a living, breathing work of art.
English (US) ·