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.
Photo: Everett Collection
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.
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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.
You can call me one-track-minded or say that I focus on the wrong things, but do not include an element that I am then expected to forget. Especially if that “element” is an animal – and a dog, even.
In No More Time, we meet a couple, and it takes quite some time before we suddenly see that they have a dog with them. It appears in a scene suddenly, because their sweet little dog has a purpose: A “meet-cute” with a girl who wants to pet their dog.
After that, the dog is rarely in the movie or mentioned. Sure, we see it in the background once or twice, but when something strange (or noisy) happens, it’s never around. This completely ruins the illusion for me. Part of the brilliance of having an animal with you during an apocalyptic event is that it can help you.
And yet, in No More Time, this is never truly utilized. It feels like a strange afterthought for that one scene with the girl to work, but as a dog lover, I am now invested in the dog. Not unlike in I Am Legend or Darryl’s dog in The Walking Dead. As such, this completely ruined the overall experience for me.
If it were just me, I could (sort of) live with it. But there’s a reason why an entire website is named after people demanding to know whether the dog dies, before they’ll decide if they’ll watch a movie.
The Timothée Chalamet movie that’s arriving on Christmas Day is “a 150-minute-long heart attack of a film,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. In “a career-best turn” that’s “a feverish go-for-broke tour de force,” Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, an aspiring table tennis champ in 1950s New York City who’s ready to lie, cheat, and steal for the chance to become the best in the world. This first film from director Josh Safdie since 2019’s Uncut Gems turns out to be a character study that “doubles as a cracked American success story,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Marty is a scrawny kid with a pathetic mustache, but he’s also a fast-talking grifter with supreme self-confidence, and his game earns him a trip to London and the world championship tournament before a humbling stokes his hunger for a comeback.
Surrounding Chalamet is “a supporting cast you’d swear was assembled via Mad Libs,” because it features Fran Drescher, Penn Jillette, Tyler the Creator, Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, and—as a faded movie star Marty sweet-talks into an affair—Gwyneth Paltrow, “reminding you how good she was before Goop became her full-time gig.” To me, it’s the story beneath the story that makes Safdie’s “nerve-jangling, utterly exhilarating” movie one of the best of the year, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. “It’s about a Jewish kid who knows just what kind of antisemitism and finely stratified racial dynamics he’s up against in postwar America, and who is using every means at his disposal to smack back.”
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‘Is This Thing On?’
Directed by Bradley Cooper (R)
★★★
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“There are far worse things that a gifted filmmaker could offer an audience these days than a feel-good divorce comedy,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. But it’s still slightly disappointing that screen star Bradley Cooper has followed up A Star Is Born and Maestro with this minor work, due Dec. 19, about a father of two who starts doing stand-up in New York City to cope with the likely end of his marriage. With Will Arnett and Laura Dern as its co-stars, Is This Thing On? is “an observant, bittersweet, and highly watchable movie,” but it’s also so eager to hide the agonies of divorce that it “can feel like it’s cutting corners.”
The 124-minute film “doesn’t really get going until hour two,” said Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. Until then, it’s “lethargic and listless,” slowed by long takes “that drag on and on.” Fortunately, Arnett and Dern have real chemistry that kicks in when Dern’s Tess accidentally catches Arnett’s Alex performing his bit about their sidelined marriage and sees him with new eyes. Good as Arnett is, “it’s Dern who’s the revelation as a woman who truly doesn’t know what she wants and is figuring it out in real time,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. Cooper, playing a reprobate friend of Alex’s, gives himself the script’s biggest laughs. More importantly, he proves again to be a director with “a real flair for domestic drama.”
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Joe Carnahan was a sagacious choice to co-write and direct the engrossing and visceral survival thriller “Not Without Hope,” given Carnahan’s track record of delivering gripping and gritty actioners, including early, stylish crime thrillers such as “Narc” (2002) and “Smokin’ Aces” (2006), and the absolutely badass and bonkers Liam Neeson v Giant Wolves epic “The Grey” (2011).
Based on the non-fiction book of the same name, “Not Without Hope” plunges us into the stormy waters of the Gulf of Mexico for the majority of the film, and delivers a breathtaking and harrowing dramatic re-creation of the 2009 accident that left four friends, including two NFL players, clinging to their single-engine boat and fighting for their lives. The survival-at-sea story here is a familiar one, told in films such as “White Squall,” “The Perfect Storm,” and “Adrift,” and the screenplay by Carnahan and E. Nicholas Mariani leans into well-worn tropes and, at times, features cliché-ridden dialogue. Still, this is a well-paced and powerful work, thanks to the strong performances by the ensemble cast, some well-placed moments of character introspection, and the documentary-style, water-level camerawork by Juanmi Azpiroz.
Zachary Levi (the TV series “Chuck,” the “Shazam!” movies) is best known for comedy and light action roles. Still, he delivers solid, straightforward, and effective dramatic work as Nick Schuyler, a personal trainer who helps his friends Marquis Cooper (Quentin Plair) and Corey Smith (Terrence Terrell), two journeyman NFL players, get ready for another season. When their pal Will Bleakley (Marshall Cook) shows up at a barbecue and announces he has just been laid off from his financial firm, he’s invited to join the trio the next morning on a day-trip fishing trip from Clearwater, FL., into the Gulf of Mexico. (The casting is a bit curious, as the four lead actors are 10-20 years older than the ages of the real-life individuals they’re playing — but all four are in great shape, and we believe them as big, strong, physically and emotionally tough guys.)
We can see the longtime bond between these four in the early going, though we don’t learn much about their respective stories before the fishing trip. Kudos Carnahan and the studio for delivering a film that earns its R rating, primarily for language and intense action; the main characters are jocks and former jocks, and they speak with the casual, profanity-laced banter favored by many an athlete. (Will, describing the sandwiches he’s made for the group: “I got 20 f*cking PB&Js, and 20 f*cking turkey and cheese.”) There’s no sugarcoating the way these guys talk—and the horrors they wind up facing on the seas.
The boat is about 70 miles off the coast of Clearwater when the anchor gets stuck, and the plan to thrust the boat forward to dislodge it backfires, resulting in the vessel capsizing and the men being thrown overboard. Making matters worse, their cell phones were all sealed away in a plastic bag in the cabin, and a ferocious storm was approaching. With title cards ticking off the timeline (“13 Hours Lost at Sea,” “20 Hours Lost at Sea,” “42 Hours Lost at Sea”), we toggle back and forth between the men frantically trying to turn over the boat, keep warm, signal faraway ships, battling hunger and thirst, and the dramas unfolding on land. Floriana Lima as Nick’s fiancée, Paula, and Jessica Blackmore as Coop’s wife, Rebekah, do fine work in the obligatory Wait-by-the-Phone roles.
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It’s terrific to see JoBeth Williams still lighting up the screen some 40 years after her “Big Chill” and “Poltergeist” days, delivering powerful work as Nick’s mother, Marcia, who refuses to believe her son is gone even as the odds of survival dwindle with each passing hour. Josh Duhamel also excels in the role of the real-life Captain Timothy Close, who oversaw the rescue efforts from U.S. Coast Guard Sector St. Petersburg. At one point, Close delivers a bone-chilling monologue about what happens when hypothermia sets in—“hallucinations, dementia, rage…eventually, it breaks your mind in half”—a point driven home when we see what’s happening to those men at sea. It’s savage and brutal, and heartbreaking.
Given this was such a highly publicized story that took place a decade and a half ago, it’s no spoiler to sadly note there was only one survivor of the accident, with the other three men lost to the sea. Each death is treated with unblinking honesty and with dignity, as when the natural sounds fade at one point, and we hear just the mournful score. With Malta standing in for the Gulf of Mexico and the actors giving everything they have while spending most of the movie in the water and soaked to the bone, “Not Without Hope” is a respectful and impactful dramatic interpretation that feels true to the real-life events.
