Movie Reviews
Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sinners’ on VOD, Ryan Coogler's ambitious vampire epic set in the segregated South of the 1930s
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) gets 2025’s One Hell Of A Movie award. Free from the confines of franchise filmmaking – although he didn’t fail to show his acumen as a storyteller with Rocky-adjacent story Creed and two Black Panther films for Marvel – he concocted a genre-mashing action-horror-drama about life and death, good and evil, and how music bridges those dichotomies, set in the 1930s Deep South. Oh, and it’s a vampire movie. Coogler produces, writes and directs, once again casting his muse/creative partner Michael B. Jordan to lead the charge. Two things here are self-evident: One, it connected with a passionate audience, grossing $350 million worldwide. And two, you have no choice but to admire his ambition.
SINNERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Music: It can create and reflect joy. Same goes for pain. And as Sammie (Miles Caton) explains in voiceover, It lives right on the thin line between various extremes of the human experience. We meet Sammie in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932. He looks a little worse for wear – bloody, ragged clothes, holding a broken guitar neck, his face slashed and bleeding and bearing the visage of someone who saw too damn much. He’s the son of a preacher (Saul Williams) who warned him about all that, the devil and Hell and yada yada, and all that’s pretty much the too much that he saw. It’s morning, and the congregation’s gathered in the church, gawping at the state of this young man. Then we jump back 24 hours.
It’s a hot day. The fields are full of people picking cotton, and driving past them are Smoke (Jordan) and Stack (also Jordan), twin brothers returning home after fighting in The War to End All Wars, and some further toughening up as Chicago gangsters. They have fat rolls in their pockets and a satchel full of cash, and it’s best not to ask where it all came from. They hand the satchel over to a grotesque, tobacco-spitting white man who lies through his nasty stained teeth that “the Klan don’t exist no more” before giving them the keys to an old sawmill. Smoke and Stack are going to fast-track the building into a juke joint with music, dancing, food and booze. It’ll open tonight, and it’ll be hot and delirious and ecstatic.
And this is feasible because it’s the 1930s in a rural area so nobody has anything going on. Smoke and Stack’s first recruit is Sammie, who can play glorious slide guitar and sing with his big, deep well of a voice that belies his youth, much to his father’s chagrin. They wave booze and cash in front of pianist Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) so he’ll play, too. Storekeepers Bo (Yao) and Grace Chow (Li Jun Li) will tend bar, the burly Cornbread (Omar Miller) will mind the door. Will the woman Sammie’s sweet on, a singer named Pearline (Jayme Lawson), come by? Almost certainly. Same for Stack’s ex, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who passes for White; they have lingering lusty urges to reconsummate. Smoke’s ex, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), will fry up some catfish for everyone – and stir painful feelings, as he visits their baby’s grave.
Now, what’s this party missing? That’s right: trouble. There’s a big difference between fun and too much fun, and Smoke and Stack sure seem to be magnets for the latter. But that’s why this movie is titled Sinners, you know. Midway through the evening, a trio of White folk arrive with their fiddles and banjos, hoping to stir some bluegrass and Celtic flavors into the mix, but they’re met with suspicious eyes. As it should be, since we met their leader, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), in an earlier scene, R-U-N-N-O-F-T-ing from Choctaw vampire hunters, then converting a couple of Klansfolk into fellow bloodsuckers like he, and at this point you’re thinking boy it’s a good thing Annie is a Hoodoo practitioner, so somebody around here will believe what they’re seeing. Anyway, these party crashers want to taste blood in that juke joint tonight. But will someone invite them in?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Sinners finds the sweet spot between Jordan Peele (it’s more Us than Get Out) and From Dusk Till Dawn.
Performance Worth Watching: Jordan continually comes to life when Coogler directs him, and the supporting cast – Steinfeld, Lindo, Mosaku especially – is just as good. But the breakout is Caton, a first-time actor who finds depth of character via his tremendous singing voice.
Memorable Dialogue: Stack gives a sales pitch for the juke joint that nobody can resist: “Y’all ready to eat? Y’all ready to drink? Y’all ready to sweat til y’all stink?”
Sex and Skin: There’s some rampant horniness here via a few steamy sex scenes, but none of it is particularly graphic.
Our Take: Choose your prefix: over-, uber-, extra-, they all apply. Sinners bursts with style, characters and worldbuilding, and it’s a minor miracle that Coogler corrals it all just enough so it makes thematic, visual and tonal sense. His ideas burst the bag and run in all directions – spirituality and religion, racism, crime, infidelity, trauma, creativity, art and music, social politics. It’s a lot, and I struggled with the uneven pace; the more-is-more narrative tends to sap the dramatic momentum and dilute the suspense. It seems Coogler aimed to generate a boiling kettle of provocation, but it never reaches a roll. It simmers atop a blue flame though, and it’s still hot enough to burn flesh.
I can see fuddy-duddies tut-tutting the potentially awkward marriage of Serious Period Drama with splattery horror, and I say LET THEM TUT. That’s just Coogler’s blacksploitation influence showing. Vampires are forever a rich metaphor, appropriate for a time and place where aggressors accumulated power by extracting the lifeblood, so to speak, from the less powerful – one bite, and you’re Uncle Tom. More compelling, though, are Coogler’s ruminations on the potential for music to illuminate the inexplicable, its place in the social and historical structures of a people. That’s the film’s richest idea, one that the filmmaker could have explored in great detail in a more traditional story, instead of brushing up against it. But that wouldn’t be as much fun.
Coogler spends the first 45 minutes building to the big party, and it takes another 15 for it to get saucy. Sinners truly takes flight when Sammie takes the juke joint stage to sing and strum, and Coogler choreographs a stunning unbroken shot winding through the revelers, inserting musicians from different eras, from African percussionists to Funkadelic-style electric guitarists and Chinese dancers. Such robust storytelling seems incongruous with the inevitable corn syrup-drenched vampire showdown, but Coogler makes it work through force of will, and the ability to make us feel intoxicated with the film’s energy and impressive visionary overtures. Music is love and danger and life. Music is for sinners, and that, of course, is all of us.
Our Call: Sinners ain’t perfect. But you have to see it anyway. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Movie Reviews
1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy
by | May 9, 2026May 9, 2026 10:30 am EDT
Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s May 9, 1986, and we’re off to see Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit.
Dangerously Close
I would love to tell you what the point of this film was, but I’m not sure it knew.
An elite school has turned into a magnet school, attracting some “undesirables,” so a group of students known as The Sentinels take up policing their school, but will they go too far?
The basic plot of the film is simple enough, but there is an oddball “twist” toward the end tht served no real purpose and somehow turns the whole thing into a murder-mystery. Mysteries only work when you know you’re supposed to be solving them, and not when you’re alerted to one existing with 15 minutes left.
Decent 80s music, some stylistic shots, absolutely no substance.
Fire with Fire
Oh wait… I may want to go back and watch Dangerously Close again over this one.
Joe Fisk (Craig Sheffer) is being held at a juvenile delinquent facility close a high-end all-girls Catholic school. One day while running through the forest as part of an exercise he spots Catholic schoolgirl Lisa Taylor (Virginia Madsen) and the two fall immediately in love because… reasons.
This film is just so incredibly lazy. The ‘love story’ really can just be chalked up to ‘hormones.’
Last Resort
Once again I am baffled how Charles Grodin kept getting work so much through out the 1980s.
George Lollar (Grodin) is a salesman in Chicago in need of a vacation. He loads up the family and takes them to Club Sand, which turns out to be a swingers resort as well as surrounded by barbed wire to keep rebels out.
There are a lot of talented people in this movie such as Phil Hartman and Megan Mullally, but the film lets them down at every turn with half-baked ideas of jokes. Supposedly, Grodin rewrote nearly the entire script and I think that explains a lot about how this film feels like unfinished ideas. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a script with half-complete ideas that feel like they are from completely different movies.
Short Circuit
Lets just get this out of the way: What in the world was Fisher Stevens doing?
NOVA Laboratory has come up with a new series of military robots called S.A.I.N.T. (Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport). Following a successful demonstration for the military, Five is struck by an electrical surge and finds itself needing ‘input.’ After inadvertently escaping the lab, it wands into the life of Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), who cares for animals and takes Five in. Dr. Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) is trying to get five back, while the security team wants to destroy it.
Overall, the film is thin, but harmless. The 80s did seem to love a ‘technology being used for the wrong reasons’ theme, and this falls into that camp. What is mind-blowing, however, is Stevens as Ben Jabituya, Crosby’s assistant. Not only is he wearing brown face, but he’s doing a horrible Indian accent and later reveals he was born and raised in the U.S.
His whole character is mystifying.
Honestly, a couple of decades ago I may have recommended this movie, but it’s a definite pass now just for being offensive.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 16, 2026, with Sweet Liberty and Top Gun.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: May 8th, 2026 / 08:34 PM
AFFECTION movie poster | ©2026 Brainstorm Media
Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, Julianna Layne
Writer: BT Meza
Director: BT Meza
Distributor: Brainstorm Media
Release Date: May 8, 2026
AFFECTION is an odd title for this tale. While it is about a number of topics and emotions, fondness isn’t one of them. Obsession, definitely. Love, possibly. The kind of general warm fellow feelings associated with “affection”? No.
There have been a lot of movies lately in which characters – mostly women – are grappling with false identities and/or false memories imposed upon them, mostly by men.
Let us stipulate that the protagonist (Jessica Rothe) in AFFECTION is not an android or in an artificial reality. However, we can tell something is way off from the opening sequence. A car is stalled on a tree-bordered highway. Rothe’s character is lying face down on the asphalt beside it, possibly dead.
But then the young woman rises, dragging a broken ankle. She experiences a full-body seizure. Fighting to recover, she sees oncoming headlights and tries to run, only to be hit by a car.
The woman wakes up in a bed she doesn’t recognize, next to a man (Joseph Cross) she likewise is sure she’s never seen before. One big confrontation later, the man says his name is Bruce – and that the woman is his wife, Ellie.
Ellie insists that her name is Sarah Thompson, and she is married to someone else, with a son. When she sees her reflection in a mirror, she doesn’t relate to the face looking back at her.
Bruce counters that Ellie has a rare neurological condition that causes her to block out her waking life and believe her dreams are real. This is why they agreed, together, to move to this isolated house, without the kinds of interruptions that can hinder Ellie’s recovery.
The set-up is presented in a way where we share Ellie’s skepticism. But Ellie and Bruce’s little daughter Alice (Julianna Layne) immediately identifies Ellie as “Mommy!” Alice appears to be too young to be in on any kind of deception, so what is going on here?
AFFECTION eventually explains this via a helpful videotape, though it’s so convoluted that viewers watching on streaming may want to replay the sequence to make sure they understand the exposition.
Writer/director BT Meza musters a sense of menace and lurking weirdness, as well as making great use of his location.
We still have a lot of questions, many of which are still unanswered by the film’s end. It may not matter to the points AFFECTION is trying to make, but a better sense of exactly how all this started might help our investment.
As it is, despite a heroically versatile performance by Rothe, a credible and anguished turn by Cross and appealing work from Layne, we’re so busy trying to piece together what’s important and what’s not and how we’re supposed to feel about all of it that it can be hard to keep track of the action as it unfolds.
Agree or not, Meza’s arguments are lucid and illustrated clearly by AFFECTION’s events. However, the movie is structured in a way that becomes more frustrating as it goes. We comprehend it intellectually but can’t engage viscerally.
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