Written and Directed by Ryan Coogler
**** (four stars)
RATED R
Running Time: 2 hrs 18 min
I am going to begin this in an unlikely place.
I am thinking back to when I first saw Writer/Director Wes Anderson's eighth film "The Grand Budapest Hotel" (2014). As with all of his films--barring his debut feature "Bottle Rocket" (1996), which I still have not seen--I adored the experience as it again contained Anderson's idiosyncratic cinematic trademarks and eccentricities while weaving them into a gorgeously written and executed story resulting in a melancholic emotional resonance containing essential gravity where the film would otherwise flat off into the atmosphere if that said gravity did not exist.
Even with that high praise, there was something so beautifully extra to the experience for me. It was as if even after seven previous films, where Wes Anderson has already more than asserted himself and his cinematic visions with complete universes each film, "The Grand Budapest Hotel" felt to be Anderson at his most unfiltered and unleashed. I remember at the time that this film made his past films--as great as they are--feel like warm ups! And for my money, he has never looked back as his subsequent films have pushed even further into an even greater unfiltered creative freedom.
While Wes Anderson's filmmaking aesthetic is completely different, I am having the exact same reaction after having witnessed the latest film from Writer/Director Ryan Coogler.
Now, for longtime fans of Ryan Coogler like myself, we have been watching his trajectory so closely and completely with pride. Yet, we all know very well there are some--some of whom are "detractors" quiet as it's kept--who are not seeing (whether by accident or intent) what has been so clearly in front of themselves regarding Coogler's artistry. Because despite all of his previous successes, artistically, critically and at the box office, perhaps some have been taking Ryan Coogler for granted in the following fashion.
His "Fruitvale Station" (2013), a biographical drama about the last day in the life of Oscar Grant III murdered by police in the early hours of New Year's Day 2009, was a sorrowfully humane film that proved to be an excellent debut feature. His second film "Creed" (2015), a simultaneous spin off/extension of Sylvester Stallone's "Rocky" franchise, was unquestionably superlative and downright surprising as I certainly felt that we never need see a "Rocky" anything ever again!
Next, of course, Coogler joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe with "Black Panther" (2018) and delivered a film I felt transcended the entire MCU enterprise and then, followed that film with its seemingly impossible and tremendous sequel "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" (2022), arriving in tribute to the late Chadwick Boseman.
A debut feature, a new installment in a legacy franchise ("Rocky") and new chapters within an established franchise (Marvel) are spaces where the white hot attention was not necessarily placed fully onto Ryan Coogler as a cinematic artist to watch closely, and despite how unapologetically Black his filmography is. With "Sinners," his fifth film and first fully original vision, unconnected to any real life events or past film franchises, Ryan Coogler is announcing himself as a cinematic force to be reckoned with unlike ever before...so much so, that I am wishing--the third "Black Panther" film notwithstanding--that he stick to solely original features moving forward, for now Coogler feels to be unburdened and fully free. For those of us who knew, we knew! For those that didn't, it is impossible to ignore or underplay him now.
Ryan Coogler's "Sinners" is a multilayered, multifaceted, monstrously entertaining experience that is overflowing with as much creativity as it is armed with a cultural purpose, intent and engagement as Coogler continues to explore where we as Black people exist within the larger White society and how we as Black people exist within ourselves, in our collective present, history and futures.
While Ryan Coogler's filmmaking skills have grown powerfully from film to film, with "Sinners," he has taken a quantum leap into a new echelon, firmly placing him at the front ranks, alongside the likes of Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Jordan Peele and the aforementioned Wes Anderson, directors who are able to open a film in the 21st century based solely upon their name...an especially rarified feat during these dark cinematic times run amok with all manner of sequels, prequels, remakes, re-imaginings, reboots and so on. Ryan Coogler's "Sinners" is not only one of the best films of 2025 as well as one of the best films of this decade. It is unquestionably the best film of his young career to date.
Set in 1932 in the Mississippi Delta, twin brothers and World War 1 veterans Elijah "Smoke" Moore and Elias "Stack" Moore (both brilliantly played by Michael B. Jordan), return home after a stint in Chicago working for Al Capone. Using money stolen from gangsters, Smoke and Stack plan to purchase an abandoned saw mill from Klandestine landowner Hogwood (David Maldonado) to transform the space into a juke joint for the Black community.
Enter Sammie "Preacher Boy" Moore (Miles Canton), Smoke and Stack's younger cousin and aspiring blues musician who wishes to perform at the juke joint despite the warnings from his Father, Pastor Jedidiah Moore (Saul Williams), that the blues is the devil's music and continuing upon this path will soon bring the devil to his door.
As Smoke and Stack ready their enterprise and recruit staff--including elder blues pianist Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson), sharecropper Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) as bouncer, and local Chinse shopkeepers Bo Chow (Yao) and Grace Chow (Li Jun Li) as suppliers--Smoke is reunited with his estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) while Stack reconnects with ex-girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who incidentally passes for White.
To say much more from this point, would be unfair to you as I do not wish to produce spoilers and I wish for you to experience the film as clearly and as cold as I was able. But, I can tell you that as stunning as the film is at the beginning, once hell breaks loose, Ryan Coogler's "Sinners" will hold you in its vice grip all the way to its conclusion (and please remain seated through the end credits as we are given a stunning and essential mid-credit epilogue).
As previously stated, "Sinners" is an experience in which Ryan Coogler has demonstrably raised his own bar, making for an immersive experience that is passionate, triumphant and one that demands subsequent viewings due to every last element he placed within the work. Certainly by now, and again without spoilers, you are all aware of the film's horror element, which Coogler delivers with ferocious urgency and genuine, knowing terror. But the overall genius of this element is how Coogler has performed a bit of a bait and switch: come for the horror but you will stay and be captivated with what is a cinematic meal in a world of cinematic fast food.
Working with an expert team of key collaborators, including Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw and Composer Ludwig Goransson (who continues to raise his own bar), "Sinners" delivers a historical epic and a musical richly intertwined with the horror film. Every performance rom the entire cast is magnetic yet I must give exceedingly special mention to Michael B. Jordan who is the film's greatest special effect as he so deftly and completely gives his dual performances of Smoke and Stack such quality and depth of characteristics that I often forgot that there was only one actor feeling that I was seeing two.
Yes, the technical special effects of this sort are probably the most seamless that I have seen to date! Trust me, the days of "The Patty Duke Show" (1963-1966), the sitcom about the identical cousins, with cameras stationed over the actors stand in's shoulders representing the twin are obliterated. Even the dizzying effects in Robert Zemeckis' "Back To The Future Part II" (1989), feel of a different age entirely. To regard Jordan rolling and passing a cigarette back and forth to himself in a space that is visualized as real as life is an astounding feat. Yet, with all that occurs afterwards, you will always know which twin you ae with, what their motivations are, and the history of each relationship they share with the film's characters. The partnership between Jordan and Ryan Coogler is a beautiful thing and this time they shot for the moon.
Just as he achieved with his two "Black Panther" films, I loved how Coogler continues to challenge and shatter the American beauty myth for with "Sinners," placing two dark skinned Black women, one of whom is voluptuously full figured, defiantly in the forefront as love interests and narrative leads was uplifting to say the least.
And to that end, we are given a series of stories about Black love--romantic partners, fraternal, family, and with the birth of Smoke and Stack's juke joint, the film is a Black love letter to our community and our individual Black selves. The film's musical element--throughout and deep into its epilogue--is particularly stunning is Coogler unleashes the story of our musical history, especially during a sequence unlike anything I have ever seen or experienced in a film before as it combines Blues mythology with the reality of everything the Blues ever was, it origins and everything it produced afterwards from its core. I was absolutely transfixed with what I was seeing as it is a sequence that culminates with such ancestral pride and the transcendence of Black joy, essential to harbor and cultivate especially during the darkest of times. If that one scene could be given its own award, (right alongside Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's staggering, stupefying 7 minute opening sequence to his "Ladies & Gentleman...50 Years Of SNL Music" documentary) I would wish to have a magic wand to make that happen.
Even further and deeper, Ryan Coogler's "Sinners" serves us a slice of American history with the importance of representation fully on display and equally as organic as Coogler makes space for pieces of the Irish American experience, Chinese American experience and the indigenous presence of the Choctaw nation with the Black experience.
Through this tactic, Coogler gives us a sense of history as it is so rarely portrayed with varying nationalities and ethnicities all playing supporting characters to a White narrative, if not ignored entirely. Coogler shows us the interconnectivity that existed then, and therefore, mirroring where we exist in 2025 with clear eyed detail and empathy, illustrating how cultural aspirations and struggles ran concurrently, often intersecting, as we are all facing and carrying the generational and racial traumas that inform us as we collectively make our ways through White America.
And here is where the horror element works powerfully.
"Sinners" often made me feel the very same emotions I experienced when seeing Writer/Director Jordan Peele's "Get Out" (2018) for the very first time as the combination of horrors, both otherworldly and intensely real within the Black experience, the kind that author James Baldwin once expressed as "that particular social terror which was not the paranoia of my own mind but a real social danger visible in the face of every cop, every boss, everybody..." was ingenious.
Within "Sinners," you can see the connective tissue between itself and "Get Out" plus Peele's "Us" (2019) in addition to Damon Lindeloff's "Watchmen" (2019) and Misha Green's "Lovecraft Country" (2020)--both of which for HBO-and the comedic surrealism of Donald Glover's often very frightening "Atlanta" (2016-2022). And you know, toss in Glover's musical alter-ego Childish Gambino's "Awaken My Love!" (released December 2, 2016) for good measure.
From those conceptual stepping stones, we arrive at "Sinners," where Ryan Coogler utilizes the aesthetics of the horror genre and creature mythologies to create an especially potent canvas to explore and confront cultural appropriation and theft, racial generational trauma, PTSD, and the mental health and survivalist compartmentalization of Black people--with Smoke and Stack standing in for Black men in particular. Even grander is the exploration of the nature of sin and the concept of freedom-racial, societal, economic, spiritual-and our individualistic and collective pursuit of it, by any means necessary...consequences be damned.
Coogler probes and provokes as he poses existential questions for his characters as well as for us in the audience. What is freedom and for that matter, what is sin? With regards to sin, the film is essentially a series of lust stories intermingled with the love stories. Sexual lust, certainly. But, also lust for wealth, power, and control and how that very lust is transformative to terrifying degrees...even when the intentions might be for the right reasons. And really, we all know what the road to Hell is paved with.
The dream of Smoke and Stack to use their juke joint as a means to create a sanctuary exclusively for their own is one of uplift as well as one that stands as a counter point to Sammie's Father's church. For what is sinful? The Blues, alcohol and sexual gratification of the nightclub or the adherence to a religion forced upon us by the ones who stole and enslaved us rather than engaging with the spiritual structure and beliefs we created for ourselves?
Coogler asks of us what it means to really dance with the devil. Is it Blues music? Or is it utilizing money from the underworld to then use for transactional purposes with figures who would otherwise see you swinging dead from trees as a means to create a positive monument and one with the hopes of building economic wealth within our community? Is there not a spiritual cost to blood money intended for an ultimate good cause regardless of how many unclean hands said money has passed through? What does it means to try and ingratiate oneself to an adversary solely due to a perceived proximity to power? Wouldn't that very same power dynamic remain in place, with the inevitability of swallowing you up as well? Does a capitalistic approach inherently lead to spiritual decay rather than deliverance or is there another way to salvation?
I also feel that Coogler is using his film to ask of us as Black people to think hard about the means in which we have a hand in our own eradication through our own sense whether through negative self imagery or through aligning ourselves with those who wish nothing but our ultimate erasure, therefore, dividing ourselves so we fight ourselves instead of banding together to all reach Black freedom together. Can we survive in a White America when it exists at the expense of our own people?
Questions we are faced with even more urgently in another Trump America.
Ryan Coogler's "Sinners" makes space for all of those concepts and I am certain there are even more as he has detailed this film so intricately and meticulously. There's no way I caught every nuance with just one viewing! Even so, I could not help but to think of the Great Migration, sundown towns, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre-itself, the story of the existence and racist destruction of Black Wall Street, and the ghost story of Robert Johnson while being enraptured by the cinematic world building and language on display narratively with one character's final lines in the film has haunted and reverberated over the two weeks since I have seen the film. It is a harsh reality for Black people in America to live under constant threat. To escape one nightmare to just fall into another when we just wish to live in peace and...be free.
And still, we exist. We live, survive, thrive, love fiercely, excel grandly, create and represent euphorically. Ryan Coogler's "Sinners" is a monumental artistic statement by us for us and still, it is shared with the world to experience. It is a vision forged through a growing cinematic language so powerful that it is solely identifiable to Ryan Coogler yet presented with love and urgency for all to embrace.
Couldn't that be some kind of freedom?
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