Film Review - Sinners (2025)

Sinners is the new movie by Ryan Coogler and stars Michael B Jordan as Smoke and Stack, a pair of twins who come home to Mississippi in 1930’s America from Chicago and want to open up a Juke Joint but elsewhere a great evil lurks in the shadows.

Sinners shows once again why Ryan Coogler is a great talent of a filmmaker and the first reason why is the sense of history that permeates throughout this movie, the world of the early 30’s American South and the Jim Crow era laws that were part and parcel of that time is fully realized here and you really feel enveloped in that period and what people of colour who lived there had to go through be it the cotton fields or the sense of danger that lurked around every corner.

Secondly this movie is very well crafted in a lot of areas, Ruth E Carter’s costume design, Hannah Bleachler’s production design, Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography and Ludwig Goransson’s score are all top notch and all of these people deserve Oscar nominations and even wins for their work here, the costumes are beautiful to look at, the production design is excellent, the cinematography is nice and the score is terrific with its mix of original cues and songs on the soundtrack.

And then there are the performances, Michael B Jordan plays both the Smoke/Stack twins here and does a really good job creating distinct personalities with each brother, Delroy Lindo is a lot of fun as a boozy harmonica player who is hired to play at the Juke Joint while Hailee Steinfeld is magnetic here as Mary one of the twins’s love interest and she has never looked more beautiful than she does in this movie.

Also good is Jack O’Connell as an Irish Folk music player who gets wind of the Juke Joint and wants to play there and has sinister intentions of his own.

But where this movie does fall over a little bit is its transition from the historical blues musical drama to vampire horror movie and as good as both sections of this movie are (and they are definitely very good) the transition between the two sections felt a little jarring to sit through at first but once the second half kicks into gear and finds its groove it works very well and delivers some fun bloody effects work.

And so that was Sinners and despite a slight storytelling stumble this is a really good movie with a great sense of history, impeccable craftsmanship and good performances, this is a movie well worth watching, 4 out of 5.