Sinners Review

Coogler shot this on large-format 65mm, and Autumn Durald Arkapaw uses the gauge for what it is actually good at: cotton fields laid out in wide horizontals, faces held enormous, a juke joint whose interior feels like a room you could walk into. The peak is a musical sequence in which one performance summons dancers from across the diaspora and across centuries into a single unbroken shot, a transporting idea executed without a trace of irony.

Michael B. Jordan plays twins with enough separation of posture and rhythm that the trick stops registering as a trick, and Miles Caton and Delroy Lindo are the ones you remember afterward. Ludwig Goransson's score fuses Delta blues with Irish folk, which is also the plot's thesis. What holds it back is the back half: once the vampires arrive the film settles into siege mechanics and rule-explaining, the shift from historical drama to genre is abrupt, and a second epilogue explains what the images had already said. Ambitious, uneven, worth it.