Sinners
Story Stream
Cinema's Last Great Gamble June 03, 2025
Prophesying cultural doom has become a popular pastime online, to the point of being hackneyed. I have been guilty of it myself. My most popular post on my Substack, Cross Current, titled “There Has Been a Drought of Cultural Greatness for Most of th...
The Spiritual Heart of 'Sinners' May 28, 2025
Set in the Jim Crow South, Sinners tells the story of the opening night at a nightclub, started by two brothers exclusively for the Black sharecropping community from which they emerged. Lured there by the (literally) magical music he hears, an Irish...
Carlos Alcaraz Keeps Smiling At Jannik Sinner’s Expense May 20, 2025
Carlos Alcaraz’s shotmaking style is of the gonzo variety: He’ll opt for the unlikely winner attempt whenever possible, even when safe options are available. As a consequence, Alcaraz at his best is among the most viscerally thrilling spectacles in s...
Show Biz Kids May 08, 2025
Most Tuesdays, I walk a few miles from my apartment in Pasadena down into the main commercial strip of the city, through leafy streets and blankly hostile highway overpasses, to my local chain movie theater, the Regal Paseo. The Paseo is one of those...
On 'Sinners' May 02, 2025
Who are the sinners in the title of Ryan Coogler’s astonishing new film? Early scenes offer us a few good suspects. There’s the local white grandee, Hogwood, a jovial, jowly menace who agrees to sell his mill to Elijah and Elias Moore, local Black tw...
The Bloody Blues of 'Sinners' May 02, 2025
Ryan Coogler slips a deliberate anachronism into an early scene of his new movie, Sinners. In 1932, on a back road near Clarksdale, Mississippi, two twins disagree over when they should open up their new juke joint. They’ve just bought a property fro...
Ryan Coogler’s Road to “Sinners” May 02, 2025
The decade-long dominance of Marvel Studios in American popular cinema has insured that, among other things, we all recognize an origin story when we see one. ...
Sinners’ Is a Sun-Drenched Reclamation April 30, 2025
The highest-grossing Black filmmaker in history has, understandably, many gods to serve. You’ve first got to put people in seats. And because this is America and Hollywood that we’re talking about, that means outflanking the inevitable doubts that yo...
Director Ryan Coogler on 'Sinners' April 22, 2025
Ryan Coogler is the film darling of the moment right now, and for good reason. He’s got a good old-fashioned heater on his hands with Sinners, which pulled in over $60 million globally this weekend—and he's been having a lot of fun, charming movie fa...
'Sinners' Is a Fusion of Historical Realism & Horror April 21, 2025
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the bloodstream, along comes a new horde of vampires, in Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” to taint it with yet another metaphysical curse. But Coogler is, by temperament, an analytical filmmaker: his first fea...
‘Sinners’ Is More Than Enough to Chew On April 21, 2025
Talking to LeBron James recently in Interview magazine, Ryan Coogler used a culinary metaphor: “I want people walking out of the theater and thinking, ‘Man, I had a full meal.’” ...
