Formally launching SINephile with a review of a film called SINNERS felt less like a choice and more like manifest destiny.
After all, if you're going to dedicate your new publication to celebrating cinema’s most sacred and profane pleasures, you’d better bring the receipts. 🔥
🎧 [PLAYBACK: SOUND ON]
Cue it up before you descend into the review. Sin runs deep, but the groove runs deeper.
The moment your soul leaves your body—then turns around and says, “We’re not done yet.”
70MM Baptism by Fire
Some great films bowl you over; others sneak up, split your soul in two, and stitch it back together using 70MM thread. Sinners is the latter.
Admit it, upon seeing the trailer in the months leading up to Sinners, we all instantly leapt to the obvious comparison of From Dusk Till Dawn meets The Color Purple—a blend as audaciously deranged as pairing Jane Austen with zombies.
Yet, whereas writer/director Ryan Coogler intentionally nods to Spielberg’s classic by repurposing one of that film’s most iconic and heartfelt sequences as a framing device, Rodriguez’s campy vampire/heist hybrid, while remaining an awful lot of fun, doesn’t really even deserve to be uttered in the same breath as Sinners.
They’re not walking into danger—they’re walking into metaphor. If the altar had teeth, it would look like this.
The Blood Is the Backstory
What Coogler pulls off here is something far rarer than ambitious originality: near-perfect execution.
He’s elegantly threaded the needle between prestige cinema and pulp carnage, delivering a film that's every bit as thought-provoking and viscerally engaging as it is a rip-roaring, go-for-broke audience potboiler, executed with such refinement that I wouldn’t have been able to conceive such a marriage could exist without having witnessed it firsthand myself. At the risk of over-adjusting everyone’s expectations, not hyperbole, folks.
Black Panther walked so that Sinners could run in that, like Spielberg, only a filmmaker of such repeatedly proven caliber, vision and box office savvy could’ve been entrusted to shape a picture the way Coogler has.
Under typical studio watch, execs would’ve relentlessly pushed to ditch all the upfront exposition to get to the action as fast as possible in the way a child scarfs their peas yearning for the promise of dessert.
Audiences have sadly grown to expect the relegation of any narrative backstory in this genre to the tired trope of incredulous conversational pauses in the midst of life-threatening situations (see literally any Radio Silence movie). Instead, Coogler spends the entire front half of the picture world-building the Depression-era South with a level of artistry that arguably competes with The Color Purple.
The meticulousness with which he paints not just the scenery, but the assortment of characters, is critical to the impact of what Coogler’s offered us with Sinners. Every soul feels fully lived in, like we’re simply peeking into a small slice of life within this richly realized existence, painstakingly setting the stage for the devastating emotional impact to come.
Each window tells a story, and none of them let the light in easily.
Through a Glass, Starkly
In 2014, Variety named Autumn Durald Arkapaw one of its “10 Cinematographers to Watch,” based solely off her indie debut Palo Alto, as well as early commercial work.
A decade later, she hasn't just delivered—she’s made history as the first woman ever to lens a film on large-format IMAX. Consider yourself officially seen. And thank you for gifting us your eloquent eye, with photography that stuns endlessly in its technical prowess (some of her tracking shots here are simply jaw-dropping), without ever threatening to upstage the onscreen proceedings.
Her cinematography doesn't just capture images; it immerses us in the film's rich tapestry, all set alive to the magically wed scorings of Oscar-winner Ludwig Göransson (Black Panther, Oppenheimer).
Dual roles, dual truths. One grins like he’s about to charm your mama, the other like he buried the body and made you watch.
Duality Is Destiny
While Michael B. Jordan expectedly delivers a powerhouse dual performance that frankly defies proper description, there isn’t a single false note among the dozen or so notable performances on display—not a one.
British actress Wunmi Mosaku (Loki, Lovecraft Country) channels early Viola Davis as the film's spiritual backbone, while the always-wonderful Delroy Lindo (Get Shorty, The Harder They Fall), one of the most absurdly undersung actors of our time, gets to revel in welcome flourishes of comedic relief.
Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit, Pitch Perfect) also stands out for her seamless range as the jilted ex-girlfriend of one of Jordan’s twin characters. Singer Miles Caton quietly stuns in his screen debut when his voice isn't knocking the wind out of people's sails both on-screen and off, while Jayme Lawson (The Batman) shines bright in a small role as his love interest.
Coogler structures his film like a pastor's sermon, using shifting aspect ratios in lieu of oratory volume to guide our emotional journey—expanding the frame for revelation, while narrowing it for reckoning during moments of emotional or moral claustrophobia.
None of this is random; his visual modulation directly mirrors the film's themes of sin, sacrifice, and redemption.
A spotlight of memory, rage, and a silk dress.
Righteous Rage, Rarer Grace
Concurrent to its thematic underpinnings, Sinners manages to function as a love letter to cinephiles everywhere.
Those earlier surface-level film comparisons are just the entry point to Coogler’s deeper cinematic playfulness, giddily hat-tipping the celluloid influences that've shaped us all over the decades—from The Thing to The Stand, Aliens to even something as gloriously schlocky as Demon Knight, the salutes are placed proudly on display in a way that’s sure to make every movie lover beam with delight. You owe it to yourself to seek each of them out unaided.
What Coogler has accomplished with Sinners still sits stunningly with me a day following watch—I remain shaken by it while writing this. As in all of Coogler’s work, duality is destiny and strength is vulnerability. Sinners takes that one step further—dividing characters across literal and metaphorical thresholds, revealing not just who they are, but who the world insists they become.
I’m not delving at all into plot because this one deserves to be walked into as blindly as possible. It’s the emotional resonance of what he’s offered us that’s so refreshingly impressive and unique.
In an age when so many of us feel like unapologetic hatred increasingly gets rewarded and gleeful cruelty toward others seems like the new aspirational goalpost of success, where punching down is in vogue and collective resignation feels like the default, it’s pretty damned cathartic to have been gifted these characters who may get battered and bruised for our entertainment, but at least they’re not going down quietly—or alone.
When the music stops, the reckoning begins. What looks like prayer might just be preparation.
PENANCE & PRAISE
+ 3 points for that mid-picture, multi-cultural, era-spanning musical dance sequence as an act of cultural reclamation. Joy, groove, rhythm, and heat as survival tactics. It’s Baz Luhrmann with stakes.
- 1 point for MPA restrictions resulting in notable desaturation of some late-stage effects for ratings purposes
+ 5 points for three racist yokels thinking that juke joint music sounds like something you would’ve heard on A Prairie Home Companion
+ 5 points for honoring the oft-forgotten legacy of the Mississippi Delta Chinese community, a rarely acknowledged pillar of Southern history, via the Li Jun Li arc—she's also wonderful
+ 10 points for Coogler getting me to cry multiple times during a horror movie FFS
This is the first new release I’m CANONIZING (a 4.5-star/5 review on my scale) since All of Us Strangers nearly a year-and-a-half ago, because I can confidently say now that if more than one other film of this caliber lands in 2025, we won’t just be in for a stellar year—we’ll be witnessing a cinematic anomaly.
It may only be April, and the Academy may typically loathe horror, but this thing deserves all the awards and to mint money while it's at it.
A genre-defying masterstroke.
Heads up: There’s narrative tucked into the end credits, so keep your butt in that seat.
Cinema DEFCON Threat Assessment: 46 Days — Theatrical-to-Streaming Window
Yes, it technically overshot Level 2 criteria by a single day—but let’s be honest, Sinnershad major legs. A film with this kind of pedigree and response deserved at least a 60–90 day runway. So, yeah, DEFCON 2.
Verdict Despite early skepticism from industry analysts questioning its profitability, Sinners earned raves from critics and audiences alike, emerging as one of the year's standout successes and deservedly grossing nearly four times its production budget during its (too brief) theatrical run.
🎬 [PLAYBACK: TRAILER] Here’s your burning bush, your baptism, your first blood. Watch the trailer—then tell me Sinners isn’t something rare.
