Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)

[black&huge]

I've felt the same about this movie as perspexicon since I saw it in theaters last year. All it serves as is a piece of pre-summer blockbuster entertainment. Is it poorly made? absolutely not. Costumes, sets, cinematography are excellent. Is it a mid script? absolutely yes. This movie had one big thing going for it: it came out at the right time. Amidst reboot and superhero fatigue which at that point and still has hit a snag where audiences will go see those out of habit/what's available, Sinners became the big original movie of the year becuase of it's major studio backing and advertisement. Lump that in with the fact that Gen Z glorifies hip hop culture increasingly more every year you had the makings for not only a good box office but might-as-well awards season nominations.I will say the greatest strength is the music. i enjoyed every piece of perofrmed songs and original score. The big violent climax at the end is absolutely laughable and horribly choreographed though.

[knives]

Blus summed up my feelings pretty well, but I’ll put down a small jotting anyway. In a lot of ways this is Coogler’s best. The first that really feels like him trying to make a movie he would enjoy unbeholden to producer needs or even audience desires. Giving this a Wages of Fear structure really works; perhaps too well as I think this is a great musical that obliges itself to be a bad vampire movie. All the vampire stuff and action hero beats are just bad like a less capable Tarantino. They also really muddle the social concepts of the film. Like, I doubt Coogler is anti-miscegenation, but that’s the loudest concept here with how Mary is handled and what the lead vampire says. Likewise while I think we’re supposed to love the music, the amazing past present future sequence certainly says so loud and clear there’s more than a little of Adorno’s hate of jazz here. It’s just a movie terribly confused with itself that would have succeeded more leaning into its most fun tendencies.

[Mr Sausage]

Predix

Picture
Will Win: One Battle After Another
Should Win: Would be equally happy with One Battle After Another or Marty Supreme
Worst in show: While other movies (Hamnet) in the category were worse than it, honestly, fuck Sinners the most this time around. Racist piece-of-shit actioner with a pathetic, cloying, manipulative awards season sob story built around exploiting a man with a neurological disorder. An awards-season villain if I have EVER encountered one, and worse than Emilia Perez because that film self-destructed most of its potential to win awards once people saw it/its star's Twitter feed. Fuck everyone associated with this stupid, bigoted movie and its stupid, bigoted campaign. (not seen: F1)

Director
Will Win: PTA
Should Win: PTA (lifetime achievement/"sorry for shutting you out 4 times"), Josh Safdie (on the merits)
Worst in show: Chloe Zhao

Actor
Will Win: Timothee Chalamet
Should Win: Timothee Chalamet
Worst in show: Michael B. Jordan

Actress
Will Win: Jessie Buckley
Should Win: Emma Stone
Worst in show: Jessie Buckley (not seen: Song Sung Blue)

Sup. Actor
Will Win: Sean Penn
Should Win: Benicio del Toro
Worst in show: Delroy Lindo

Sup. Actress
Will Win: Teyana Taylor
Should Win: Teyana Taylor
Worst in show: Wunmi Mosaku (not seen: Weapons)

Orig. Screenplay
Will Win: Sinners
Should Win: Anything but Sinners (Marty Supreme)
Worst in show: Sinners

Adap. Screenplay
Will Win: One Battle After Another
Should Win: One Battle After Another
Worst in show: Train Dreams

Intl. Feature
Will Win: Sentimental Value
Should Win: Sirat
Worst in show: The Voice of Hind Rajab, but this is the only category where all five nominees are at worst okay

Anim. Feature
Will Win: KPop Demon Hunters
Should Win: Little Amélie or the Character of Rain. I haven't seen it, but, y'know, just out of spite.
Worst in show: KPop Demon Hunters. Watched a quarter of it and DNFed. First movie I've intentionally done that for in years. (Not seen: all other nominees)

Doc. Feature
Will Win: The Perfect Neighbor
Should Win: N/A
Worst in show: N/A (seen: 0/5)

Casting
Will Win: Sinners
Should Win: Marty Supreme or, honestly, The Secret Agent
Worst in show: Hamnet

Cinematography
Will Win: One Battle After Another
Should Win: Marty Supreme
Worst in show: Sinners

Editing
Will Win: One Battle After Another
Should Win: One Battle After Another
Worst in show: Sinners

Costume Design
Will Win: Frankenstein
Should Win: Marty Supreme
Worst in show: I didn't even see it, but Avatar: Fire and Ash. What???

Sound
Will Win: F1
Should Win: Sirat
Worst in show: (seen: 4/5)

Production Design
Will Win: Frankenstein
Should Win: MARTY SUPREME. HOLY SHIT. HOW THE FUCK DOES JACK FISK NOT HAVE AN OSCAR?
Worst in show: Sinners

VFX
Will Win: Avatar: Fire and Ash
Should Win: no one
Worst in show: Sinners, but really just for existing

Score
Will Win: Sinners
Should Win: One Battle After Another
Worst in show: Sinners

Song
Will Win: "Golden"
Should Win: no one
Worst in show: "Dear Me" (in conception), "I Lied to You" (as it functions in the movie), (not seen: everything save Sinners and Train Dreams)

Shorts: Whatever knives says

Could you fill me in on what’s fuelling your Sinners reaction?

[Never Cursed]

Feel free to move this if desired. Besides devolving into a (for my tastes dull) genre film after flirting with more interesting material in its first half, the movie ultimately scoffs at the possibility of an end to American racism while presenting heavily stereotyped non-white characters as a "progressive" intervention. In doing so it is ultimately quite "race"-essentialist and posits the superiority (and thus inherent difference of) black Americans from their white counterparts, which is a justification of racism rather than an escape from it.

Spoiler

1. All of the non-white characters in this film are tired and cliched stereotypes, and the movie does not, in my opinion at least, develop them enough to escape the tropes from which they are cut. Michael B. Jordan plays two Smooth Black Hustlers, one of whom is dating a Hoodoo Woman (witch/healer stereotypes), the other dating a Lightskinned Race Traitor (who is of course the first to leave the black social event/get turned and killed by the white villains). Elsewhere in the film we have a Magical Musician, his Firebrand Preacher father, an Old-Timer Blues Legend, a Goofy Fat Drunkard, and a Loose Young Wife (indeed, all of the black female characters, and none of the other female characters, are quite vocal about their sexual desires for a 1930s period piece). Most of these are pretty well-worn roles, and I imagine that my summation of them as tropes will invoke some comparisons in the minds of any reader (Lando Calrissian, the daughter in Imitation of Life, a number of characters in the two adaptations of The Color Purple, etc.) without necessarily condemning the films to which one compares. The Mississippi Chinese mom who wants to protect her kids more than anything and the wise-but-ignored, horse-riding indigenous monster hunter also fall into this category (doesn't Twilight literally have the exact same kind of indigenous characters, right down to them hunting vampires?). Instead of spending time, say, having one of Jordan's characters shoot two people in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses, some white, with no repercussions, or engaging in cheap jumpscares (the snake), could we have learned anything novel, witty, or interesting about these people in the endless first half? I understand that the film is not denigrating most of these characters, and I appreciate the attempts to make them seem like part of a cohesive community that existed outside of pure victimization at the hands of white segregationists, but would giving any of these characters more characterization than what could be found in an '80s slasher have detracted from anything? TWBB and I were actually talking a few days ago about this and one of us made the point that save the obvious studio note of their color-coordinated outfits, it's very difficult to tell Jordan's twins apart in terms of motivation or characterization or attitude. I don't know how they differed as people at all, and test audiences, though notoriously stupid in many other instances, evidently had the same reaction.

Compare these characters to the nonwhite characters in what are, to my mind, the three best Best Picture nominees this year: One Battle After Another, Marty Supreme, and The Secret Agent. Whether you love or hate those movies, all three of them pretty indisputably have nonwhite characters that are believable as genuine human beings, whether or not they were major or minor presences in the films and whether or not the characters themselves experienced racism within the film. All of the above is not necessarily a fatal flaw for any movie, but it is a serious problem in a movie that attempts to fantastically analogize and provide a cathartic resolution to American racism - in other words, it is a serious problem for Sinners.

2. In a similar vein to 12 Years A Slave, the most interesting and original character in the film is the principal white villain, and this film shares a problem with McQueen's in that it spends most of its time with one-dimensional black characters and a minority of its time with a far more interesting white antagonist. The stuff Jack O'Connell went through before his dramatic first appearance (which, side note, as scripted is the opening shot of the movie) is more interesting than what ends up happening to the community he attacks.

3. The movie proposes a genuine physical or metaphysical separation between white and nonwhite people that justifies racism while intending to discredit it. I should make clear that it is not an issue for me that all of the white characters are villains. It is pretty true of the period/setting and, outside of the main antagonist, their cliched composition (fat duplicitous businessman, evil country hicks) is effective synecdoche for the amorphous, threatening Other of early 20th-century Southern whiteness as experienced by black Southerners. But the film weaponizes not just that otherness, but the concept of genuine social equality between white and nonwhite Southerners as the fabrication of vampiric white culture vultures. The promise of "no more pain, no more hate" delivered by the film's coven leader is a lie at some level of its conception, and to accept it debases the humanity of those seduced by the lie, a point underlined by the duelling musical numbers at the heart of the movie. Nonwhite people are in the house and have access to good magic that transcends time and space and self-actualizes humans as human beings, as depicted in the "I Lied to You" number. (By the way, is it itself not offensive to conflate DJ culture and rock music with religious dance, as this sequence also does?) White people and race traitors, infected with the race traitor sickness by white people (and again remembering that the "lightskinned" girl is the first to be seduced by the lie), are outside the house, physically nigh-immortal but forced into the service of evil magic and arranged into a nefarious coven (the "Rocky Road to Dublin" cover). The two most morally virtuous black characters (Smoke and Annie) choose to die rather than accept such a false, undead life. How is all of this not an argument against the possibility of social equality between black and white Americans? Sure, it's presented through genre lenses and privileging blackness rather than whiteness, but all of this is an argument that there is an essence in black people separate and irreconcilable from what is found in white people. As someone who rejects this idea, who hopes and tries to work for a world where the notion of "race" disappears and people of different skin colors can live with each other in social equality, and who can argue historically and philosophically against the idea of "race" as a real rather than sociocultural thing, I cannot help but find the movie's supposed progressiveness and "race-consciousness" false and contemptible.

If all of this is beginning to sound familiar, remember that this film's writer-director is himself responsible for Black Panther, itself an enormously retrograde movie about Africans that reflects American stereotypes about Africa in an unconvincing attempt to construct an Afrofuturist utopia where black people haven't surpassed the notions of kings and tribes.

But, of course, a white man with Tourette's syndrome yelled a slur in the presence of some of the creatives who made the movie (people with enormously greater wealth and power than this man, and who teamed up with other wealthy and powerful people to bully him in the media for his uncontrollable outburst), so it is now a cultural imperative to hand several of these people Oscars.

[Mr Sausage]

Fair enough. My only real disagreement is that I think you found a lot more coherence in the movie than I did. I chalked up the weirder and more troubling implications to a script cobbled together unthinkingly out of a lot of tropes and types rather than the result of deliberate messaging.

[Never Cursed]

Oh, I wouldn't say that Coogler intentionally planned out the most objectionable material, or that it was "deliberate" messaging. Rather, I think the movie unintentionally exposes the incoherence of the modern liberal elite attitude towards racism in my country. I don't think Coogler believes himself to think that social equality is unattainable or a lie, just that his art speaks louder than he does.

[Mr Sausage]

Because how the movie conceptualizes its vampire coven is fundamentally incoherent, I'm not sure it's possible for the movie to have an attitude on social equality, unintentional or otherwise. On the one hand, the vampire coven has a white leader, its first two members are white supremacists, it's introduced as the enemy of a minority culture, and it engulfs and homogenizes. Buuuut the coven is itself represented by an oppressed underclass, ie. working-class Irish immigrants, whose own cultural products have been subsumed into larger white American popular culture. And the homogeneity of the vampires is also a feature of the black partygoers, where jazz, hip hop, dance, and peking opera(!) all congeal together. What both sides have is a passion for music and for melting pot solidarity. Are these groups opposed? Mirror images? Are whiteness and blackness an essentialized opposition, or is it a false division and the movie an allegory for how racial politics conspired to keep apart mutually sympathetic underclasses to the benefit of the overclass? Who the fuck knows, because the movie has no idea what its vampires are doing in the narrative. They accrue cultural and political signifiers at random until the movie kinda collapses in on itself.

So there's a lot here that could've been racist, I agree, but the movie's too undercooked to even get that far. I can't be offended, it's just such a nonsensical mishmash.

[pistolwink]

The Oscars are always mostly stupid, and lots of bad films win every year, but seeing Michael B. Jordan get a best actor award for this performance, and seeing the often incompetent cinematography win an award, and seeing people mouth platitudes like how the characters in the film were "fully lived-in" sent my head spinning. Maybe I'm wrong and the enthusiasm so many have shown for this film will prove deep and lasting, but I wonder if this will be another Crash, a movie that everybody almost instantly wonders why they fêted, and then forgets. (At least Sinners didn't win Best Picture.)

[The Narrator Returns]

I wonder if this will be another Crash, a movie that everybody almost instantly wonders why they fêted, and then forgets.

I thought Sinners was pretty good but a lot better in the long set-up than the genre pay-off, with problems carrying over from Coogler’s Marvel tenure (Black Panther’s third act is also fascinating ideas muddied by rushing to the finish line for bad action). But I can guarantee you, no matter how much the consensus here is that it’s somewhere between bad-messy and a societal ill, that this is not going to happen. Crash was already plenty disliked even at its peak but this is beloved by basically every group, Hollywood and critics and the general public, and I’ve already seen so many pieces of it enter the public consciousness much like One Battle. It’s got staying power, whether you like that or not.

[brundlefly]

I've assumed a lot of industry enthusiasm for this picture comes through the lens of Coogler's deal, however unlikely it is to be precedent, and the plain fact of its non-franchise crossover box office success.

[pistolwink]

I think that's absolutely correct, but that doesn't explain why Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor for a dual role in which you can scarcely tell the two characters apart (not, I assume, by design). :sigh:

[therewillbeblus]

It’s got staying power, whether you like that or not.

Definitely. I'm still not sure why, but the masses love this film. Anecdotally, some of my wife's friends -who don't generally like movies, and definitely not horror- are coming out of the year with a strong recommendation to her, to the point where my wife is dying to see this despite not being able to handle blood or violence whatsoever! We'll see how it goes

[knives]

Coogler definitely knows how to deliver to the people regardless of what else one thinks of him. Even going back to Fruitvale Station he has had an amazing sense of what audiences will get out of a story.

[Never Cursed]

Yeah, I doubt this will get reassessed downwards either. My experience with people outside the world of cinephilia is that they think the movie's fun and don't concern themselves with the film's message (whereas "a message," whatever one thinks it might be, is inescapable when watching something like One Battle After Another). I don't think Coogler should get much credit formally as a showman, since he's not nearly as interesting a filmmaker as Spielberg/Cameron/etc., but he's good at making stuff that sells.

[pistolwink]

Yeah, "knows how to deliver to the people" just seems like a gloss on "his films make money." Which nobody can dispute! (And you can say the same of Jon Favreau, Brett Ratner, etc.)

[Walter Kurtz]

1. Vince!!!!!!!!!!
2. The new Denzel.

[bearcuborg]

As I said earlier, I like this movie more than some, less than others. I’d rather have Delroy Lindo make a speech than Michael B Jordan - or Stellan for that matter. Hell, if Penn showed up and made a political speech that would have been fine-but what a bummer neither of those 3 made a speech.

Coogler never comes off as anything less than charming.

Despite my frustration with the awful use of aspect ratio, I’m glad we finally got a female DP to get a win.

[Beloved Aunt]

I haven't seen this but I'd be surprised if it truly compares as an embarrassing morning-after "Why the f**k did we like this?" to Crash. Crash, kind of like The Hours and American Beauty, is a pretty uniquely embarrassing, fourth-rate, trite, threadbare, eminently mockable and shoddily transparent Trojan horse stuffed with cheap self-regarding (and pandering) Hollywood "liberalism", piece of junk. There are bad films, there are bad Hollywood films, but these films are on a whole other level, and I haven't encountered too many that are in this class. Seems to me like Hollywood, maybe, has become better at covering its ass than it was when it ejected Crash into the world?

[The Curious Sofa]

The comparison to Crash is absurd, and those who hate the film are really trying to outdo each other in how disparaging they can be. The only thing the two films have in common is that they feature black people.

[Beloved Aunt]

So, there's at least a vague consensus, here or somewhere, that this film is at the very least a better overall effort than Crash? Crash is pretty dire, like a really half-assed Altman imitation filmed with the production values and dull trite visual aesthetic of an especially bad Criminal Minds episode. It makes everyone connected with it look like such a loser, at least while they're caught in the film while one is watching it. I've never seen anything quite like it.

[The Curious Sofa]

Crash is often considered to be one of the worst, if not the worst, Best Picture winner of all time, and it is widely disliked. The only place where I've seen such vehement hatred of Sinners is here, at hot take-central; it's otherwise still highly regarded wherever I've looked.

[domino harvey]

Members of this board both love and hate many popular movies, often the same ones. As of right now Sinners is ranked fourteen for the year overall in the top ten lists - that’s higher than movies like Eddington or If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and it received the same number of votes as the Secret Agent and Sirat. As ever, the loudest voices get heard, but you could always add yours to the mix rather than deciding we are acting as a collective group of iconoclastic naysayers

[The Curious Sofa]

I made some positive comments about Sinners earlier in the thread, but when posters describe the film as evil and racist, I don't even want to engage with such hyperbole. I don't actually have that much to say about it. I enjoyed it as a ride and I think what others dislike about it, such as its supposed disjointedness, is exactly what I like. Its constant shifting and morphing through genres is what makes it such fun, but then I enjoyed it more on a purlely emotional level than on an intellectual one. I still haven't got round to rewatching it; maybe I can think of more then.

[Never Cursed]

I made some positive comments about Sinners earlier in the thread, but when posters describe the film as evil and racist, I don't even want to engage with such hyperbole.

I neither called this movie evil nor (consciously and intentionally) racist. Indeed, I don't think that anyone who had any meaningful input in the vision or ultimate final product of this film is consciously racist, and I think they would disagree (as Sinners does) with the assertion of films like Crash that everyone is a little racist. (I don't think that this film is a Crash or American Beauty or indeed an Emilia Perez, where its acclaim will be walked back in a few months as people process a regrettable awards season darling). What I objected to is what I found to be an unintentional bolstering of racist stereotypes and messages that is ultimately a consequence of the film's slapdash construction (as Mr. Sausage accurately highlights), which congealed (in my reading) into a film that accidentally makes an argument for the impossibility of inter-"racial" social equality. If anything, I think the film is an object lesson in how distasteful stereotypes or social messages can be perpetuated in the absence of intention; how racist ideas don't require "a racist" or "racists" to appear or be received. I do not think that people who like the movie are bigoted; rather, I think some of these ideas (most importantly that there is something fundamentally distinct and "other" between "racial" categories) are accepted preassumptions for many people and most others would rather just focus on a fun vampire movie. But any art form can be intellectually analyzed as well as emotionally received, which is why I tried to unpack my objections to the movie at length upthread.

[pistolwink]

I didn't find the film super-objectionable in that sense, except maybe in the way the female characters were written. It mostly just seemed really intensely "hard-sell" (bombastic, portentous, banging you over the head with Style) without being imaginative, inventive, or even especially competent.

It was also a very stupid movie, not least in the way it seeks to portray Black southern rural life in the 1930s. I caught about 30 seconds of a Coogler interview on NPR, and he was talking about all the "research" into blues he did for the film. But everything this movie has to observe about "blues culture" is equivalent to an AI summary of the introduction to a few books deeply invested in the standard clichés. In fact, much of the "visualization" of that culture reminded me of what a slightly more advanced model of SORA might spit out. A lot of people seem happy that a big-budget Hollywood movie shows even the slightest bit of interest in this stuff, and... sure, I guess (maybe it'll spawn a brief "blues revival" as the similarly, if gleefully, historically inane O Brother Where Art Thou? did with old-time country). But as someone who actually cares about this milieu and the music it features I couldn't help but think it could have tried a bit harder?

I could probably be OK with even this if the film was more modest and had more formal smarts. I like They Live a lot—there's a movie (a "genre" movie, even) that's equal parts stupid and clever.

I don't totally begrudge the wish-fulfillment, alternate-history aspect of Sinners, which is really no smarter or stupider than that in some of Tarantino's films (Django Unchained is the obvious comparison), although the execution, as one might unfortunately expect of a director who spent a decade in the Marvel Cinematic Universe mines, amounted to a barely-coherent set of action setpieces with really ugly use of CGI.