Picking Poor Robin Clean - "Sinners (2025)"

There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future.

In ancient Ireland, they were called fili.

In Choctaw land, they called them fire keepers.

And in West Africa, they're called griots.

This gift can bring healing to their communities, but it also attracts evil.

In May, James and I went to see Ryan Coogler's Sinners (2025) on the strength of some really good word of mouth and quite liking Coogler's other films Fruitvale Station (2013), Creed (2015), and Black Panther (2018).  (There are others, but those are the ones I had seen.  Coogler has at least co-writing credit on all of these, by the by.)

Sinners is a period piece set in 1932 in the Mississippi Delta in the Black sharecropping town of Clarksdale.  Taking place over the course of a single day, it follows young blues musician Sammie Moore and the prodigal Smokestack twins (aka Elijah and Elias Moore) as they open their own juke joint for the community.  It deals with ideas of identity, connection with cultural heritage, assimilation, and the specter of Jim Crow.  Oh, and vampires show up about halfway through.

(Weirdly, of the six movies I've seen in the theater in the last 2 years, three of them were vampire movies: The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023), Nosferatu (2024) and now Sinners.  I don't have a larger point here, it's just odd.)

Sinners was a critical and commercial hit, grossing at least triple its $100 million or so budget, no small feat in 2025 for a non-sequel, non-franchise, non-pre-exisiting-IP film.  But does it really justify all the-

Yes.  Yes, it does.

Seriously, if you're reading this and haven't seen it, please consider stopping right here and watching it. (It hit streaming the first weekend in July.)  I'm not going to avoid spoilers.

Quick Plot Speedrun

Identical twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B Jordan) return to Clarksdale and purchase an old sawmill with money they've brought back from their sojourn working in organized crime in Chicago, intending to open their own juke joint.  They recruit their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) and others in town to play music, provide food, work the door etc.  Smoke reconnects with his old love Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a Hoodoo practitioner and the mother of his deceased infant daughter and Stack reconnects with his white-passing ex-girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), herself in town from Arkansas for her mother's funeral.

When night falls, the juke opens and Sammie's music, as the opening narration quoted above prefigures, breaks down the barriers between the community's past and future.  (The Clarksdale participants don't consciously see this, but the visuals and music are incredibly striking and compelling for the viewer.  I have yet to see a review that doesn't single this scene out for effusive and deserved praise.)

Just as Sammie's song finishes, the Irish* vampire Remmick arrives outside with two white Klan members he has recently turned into undead.  They appear to just be three normal, if intense, white people bearing a banjo, a fiddle, and a guitar.  The twins turn them away but they linger outside, as they cannot enter without an invitation.   

(*Maybe he's Irish.  I'll get to it.)

Mary, after learning the twins aren't making the money they'd need to keep the juke going beyond a few weeks, goes out to talk to Remmick and his crew to see if they have money to spend.  She is attacked and turned into a vampire.  She goes back to the juke and the door guy, Cornbread, invites her in.  She lures Stack into a private room and bites him, but is interrupted by Smoke, who shoots her.  She runs outside and Smoke, mourning his now dead brother, sends all the townsfolk home, unwittingly sending them straight to the vampires outside.

Smoke, Sammie, Annie and a handful of other characters end up trapped inside the juke facing down an army of vampires.  I'll just leave the summary with "all hell breaks loose."   

Filmmaking Thoughts

This is a really well done film that succeeds in basically every way a film can.

Cast and Characters

The performances in this movie were universally good and frequently fantastic.  I don't remember ever seeing even a "so-so" performance in a Coogler film, so I suspect that, in addition to his films casting quality actors, that he is a skilled "actor's director."  It certainly helps that the characters in Sinners are well written, being both well realized and feeling like they have histories that inform who they are, which no doubt makes it easier for an actor to deliver a compelling performance.  These histories are not super explicit and are a little fuzzy but they are definitely there and I appreciate that there's no stopping the story to inelegantly exposit on character lore.

To quote Dan Olson from his video essay "Earthsea and Adaptation Sickness," regarding Ursula Le Guin's world building in her Earthsea books:

The best way to handle [world building] is by under explaining it. ... The key to doing it well is to have people explain the important stuff but also leave a lot of unimportant stuff unexplained.  This is where Le Guin's work shines... the Earthsea books do a masterful job at building a rich world with deeply realized cultures all while walking the fine line of explanation, communicating the details without blatant info dumps."

Olson was discussing world building, but i think the point is instructive when thinking about characters as well; character writing is just world building for a person, after all.  Apparently there's some easter eggs in the form of newspaper clippings in the Sinners Spotify page that exposit a little bit on the history of the twins and the vampire Remmick, but as those are not part of the whole "text" of the film, I'm not going to talk about them here.

As I get older and grumpier I've decided fixation on wiki style lore minutia is the root of a lot of modern media illiteracy.  The "plotcel" mindset I referenced in my Tosca review, where a person only engages in the most literal surface level way with a story's plot, and only its plot, is adjacent to this.  Plotcels probably hate this movie.

The Goat

To me the obvious standout performance in a sea of good performances is Michael B Jordan as the Smokestack twins.  Jordan makes them very legible as different characters that you can easily tell apart even after the production design signifiers (e.g. Stack's maroon brimmed hat and Smoke's blue flat cap at the start) are gone.  Smoke and Stack have very different demeanors but to me they still feel like variations on a theme.  Despite how different they are on the surface, (Stack smiles, Smoke doesn't) they feel like they could have come from the same household and are molded from the same stuff.

It's impressive how real and affectionate their relationship feels considering they're being played by one person who, obviously, wasn't interacting with himself in real time.

Also, I like the "show off" shot when they are first introduced.  When we first see them, they are waiting by a car and they pass a cigarette back and forth.  It's seamless and they really look like they're interacting.  There's another impressive shot early on when the twins are driving with Sammie, the camera looking back from the dashboard and focused on Sammie in the back center seat in the middle of frame while both Smoke and Stack are visible in the driver and front passenger seats in the foreground.  Having several of these kind of shots early on almost tricks your brain into forgetting this is movie magic; if the movie had set a different precedent at the beginning by obviously contriving reasons to keep them apart in the frame to make the shooting easier I think my suspension of disbelief would have been diminished.

Michael B Jordan as the Smokestack twins

Between the cinematography and the performance, if I didn't know who Jordan was and you told me this part was played by actual twins I would have believed you.  (Edit from future me: Weeks after writing that bit, I was talking about this film with someone who didn't know who Michael B Jordan was, and sure enough, he thought Smoke and Stack were played by actual twins.  How he didn't know who Michael B Jordan was is beyond the scope of this piece. Or of reason.)

The Chupacabra and the Witch

Another performance I've seen rightly singled out is Jack O'Connell as Remmick.  He plays the vampire with a charismatic presence and an easy smile that's just a little too intense to be anything other than off putting.  Even when his eyes aren't glinting red (or he's not covered in blood) there is an underlying threat to him that is deeply unsettling.

Remmick is the best kind of villain in this type of elevated horror: he wants something articulable and absolutely believe's he's doing right thing, and O'Connell really sells it.  Also, O'Connell apparently did his own singing for the three song the vampires perform (i.e. "Pick Poor Robin Clean" "Rocky Road to Dublin" and "Will Ye Go, Lassie Go") and he sounds great.  He also does Irish dancing during "Rocky Road to Dublin" which is pretty cool.  (In a fairly horrifying scene.)

On the other end of the supernatural spectrum I think Wunmi Mosaku as Annie also turned in a  really compelling performance.  You can feel the sense of loss in her and yet also the resolve.  This could have been a really functional and stock "character who's just there to explain to everyone else what a vampire is" but she wasn't.  Annie even gets some of the only tender moments out of Smoke and they feel earned.

This last thing applies to the cast in general (the humans anyway) but I really appreciate that they seem legitimately unnerved when Remmick shows up and genuinely terrified when the breadth of what they're facing becomes clear.  No one is too cool for any of this, in contrast to the tension destroying trend in a lot of movies of the last decade or so.  If characters are too badass to have human reactions to apocalyptic revelations, why should the audience be invested in the danger?  (The new Jurassic World movies are probably the most obvious example of this, especially when compared to the original Jurassic Park ones.)

Some Cinematography Stuff I Thought Was Cool

So much of the first half of Sinners is in the bright daylight and, knowing that there were going to be vampires eventually, there was this subtle tension building in the back of my mind when the shadows started to lengthen and sunset approached.  Also the shot of the setting sun where Remmick first appears is a really beautiful shot and would almost be idyllic if it wasn't the consummation of a looming threat.

I also very much loved the shot of Stack, Smoke, and Sammie driving their car down the road through the endless cotton fields, framed so the car is going away from the camera towards the vanishing point on the horizon.  It feels like the final shot of a film where the characters head happily into a future of endless possibility.  Of course, that's not this film, and they're headed toward the juke, nightfall, and death.

I really liked how the vampires look.  They are mostly normal, but in moments of coiled threat, when their predatory nature is about to burst out, their eyes take on a slight red glint.  It's...frightening.  And special hat tip to the way Remmick's attack on Mary is framed, with a focus on her in the foreground as she walks quickly away and him just starting to lift off the ground in the middle distance before it cuts away.  At that point the viewer knows what's about to happen, but the execution still caught me off guard.

Jack O'Connell as Remmick

Music

Perhaps not surprisingly for a movie so focused on music, the score is really good and interesting.  There's a lot delta blues motifs, though not always played on the guitar.  The first shot of Sammie's guitar has a really heavy string version of a blues riff which gives it the extra dramatic weight that orchestral scoring can lend.  There's also a neat moment early on that teases an electric guitar, which initially stuck out as anachronistic as the rest of the score instrumentation was either orchestral or locality / temporally appropriate, but it was actually some clever foreshadowing for The Scene, later.

Speaking of which...

The Scene - "I Lied to You"

As I alluded to earlier, the scene where Sammie breaks down the barriers between past and present is a highlight and the centerpiece of the film.  The opening narration quoted above telegraphs this is coming but it played out in a way that I wasn't expecting, both sonically and visually.

The Scene is centered around Sammie playing his Delta Blues song "I Lied to You."  Sammie's actor, Miles Caton, is an accomplished musician and he is the one actually singing this.  And he's pretty awesome.  (Should have mentioned this earlier, but in addition to the singing, Caton gives a fantastic acting performance too, extra impressive since this is his first film.)

The song starts with just Sammie's voice and guitar.  Soon the juke patrons, swaying along, start stomping the beat, and veteran bluesman Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo; always a pleasure to see him in stuff) joins in on the piano.  There's a quick flashback to Slim telling Sammie:

"Blues wasn't forced on us like that religion.  No, sir. We brought that from home. It's magic what we do. It's sacred. And big."

Then the ambient sound starts to fade as Sammie sings and the patrons dance, leaving only the sound of the music.  The opening narration repeats and we see (and hear) a West African man in traditional garb playing (I think) a xalam among the patrons.  Then a Jimi Hendrix-ian electric guitarist shows up, then a DJ, and then a modern beat drops.  The original Delta Blues song we're hearing blends all the traditional, period, and modern instruments together.  Rappers, breakdancers, djembe players, all the people from different time periods dance and perform together.  This isn't just limited to the black characters, either: Bo and Grace Chow dance while a traditional Chinese dancer spins around them.

It culminates with Sammie holding a high note while the camera pans up and the roof of the juke erupts into fire, burning away the ceiling and revealing the stars.

The Scene is unexpected, unique, and ecstatic.  As it goes on, Gospel tinged vocalizations come in, making it feel like a charismatic revival meeting, which....it is.  And, especially in the theater, it is spellbinding.

It's also the event that triggers the entire back half of the film.  After the building ignites, the camera moves through the revelry, now happening under the open sky amid the burning juke, and pulls back until the entire juke is visible, and then back still more, only stopping when Remmick and his two thralls enter the frame.  The spell is broken, and Remmick and company walk up to the no longer burning juke.

The vampires arrive

I want to link this scene (it's on YouTube) but I'm not going to because if you haven't seen it, you should watch the entire film.

Honorable Mention - "Rocky Road to Dublin" and Other Diegetic Music

For me, the other standout musical scene is when Remmick, outside the juke among his new horde of vampires, sings "Rocky Road to Dublin," an Irish traditional.

It's an incredible arrangement of the song, starting with a slow a capella rendition of the second half of the first verse over some tense low drones before the fiddle comes in and the tempo picks up.  (Like Caton, Jack O'Connell is actually the one singing.)

While Remmick sings, his thralls circumambulate around him while clapping and grinning.  The thralls takes up the next verse while Remmick does some Irish dancing.  Everyone is covered  in blood and gore and the blocking and choreography make it take on the the aspect of a pagan ritual as the music crescendos.  It's a distorted, cracked mirror version of "I Lied to You."  Rather than communal it's cultic and like in "I Lied to You," the end of "Rocky Road" is layered with gospel vocalizations and gives it a similar charismatic revival feel, but the entire atmosphere of this scene is different.   

If "I Lied to You" is "ecstatic," "Rocky Road to Dublin" is what the academics would call "fucking demented."  It manages to be extremely threatening but still pretty compelling and almost hypnotic; the vampires honestly all look like they're having a lot of fun.  (More on this later.)

"I Lied to You" was my most memorable set-piece in the entire film, but "Rocky Road" is  definitely second.

All of the diegetic music (i.e. the music that the characters can also hear as opposed to, say, the score) is great.  I really like the blues and as mentioned earlier, Caton sounds fantastic.

Bonus - "Wild Mountain Thyme" and Film Language

Before they've revealed their true natures to the Clarksdale residents and are still trying to con their way inside the juke, Remmick and his two vampire friends play the most threatening version of "Wild Mountain Thyme" I've ever experienced.  The arrangement and performance of this rather beautiful song is actually pretty straight up; the menace is achieved through context and filmic language.  It's an interesting case study in how connotation can affect meaning.  This also applies to "Rocky Road to Dublin," which if you listen to the soundtrack version isolated from the visuals, is perhaps more intense than most standard versions but doesn't feel apocalyptic like it does in the film.

Writing and Themes

Vampirism

Vampirism is, and has been, a layup for social commentary.  Was Bram Stoker making a statement about aristocracy by making Dracula a Count and (most) of his pursuers common folk? I don't know but I've definitely seen that argued.  Marx in Das Kapital (volume 1, 1864) and Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) certainly were explicitly using vampires as a criticism of Capitalism.  (Both of these predate Stokers book by decades, which speaks to the pervasiveness of vampires in folklore even before Stoker's hugely popularizing novel.)

Sinners use of vampires as commentary is not at all subtextual.  I want to say it's not even subtle, but it's handled extremely deftly and it doesn't feel like a clumsy sledgehammer of didactic exposition. Vampires, of course, are predatory and a force of ravening desire to consume, and by that consumption they not only erase people, but convert and change them.

In Sinners, Remmick is a force of...

Cultural Appropriation, Co-option, and Erasure

Note: I'm potentially drifting out of my lane a little bit here but the following are the impressions i had while watching the film.

On the wider metaphorical level, it is not a coincidence that Remmick and his friends show up right when the black characters are connecting with their past and future.  It has echoes of the disruptions of cultural continuity that occurred when ethnically diverse Africans from wide geographic origins were subjected to the Middle Passage and scattered in the New World and the pervasive family separation inflicted on enslaved people. Or perhaps of the looming violence implicit in old slave codes that prevented more than four enslaved people from meeting with each other.  In the film it also prefigures the explicit violence of the Klan who have taken notice of the gathering and will arrive the next day.

But Remmick is here not only to interrupt the gathering, but also to co-opt it.

The vampires' first ploy to get invited into the juke is to "audition" by singing "Pick Poor Robin Clean" which is an African-American Delta Blues song.  In their hands it sounds so much like an Appalachian folk / proto-bluegrass tune that I had no idea it was a blues song until I looked it up later.  Even more subtly, Remmick is playing the banjo here which is a whole other layer of appropriation, as the banjo has its origins in West Africa and was recreated in the Americas by the enslaved population.  So Remmick is playing a white-i-fied version of a black song on an instrument so thoroughly co-opted from the black population that I would would guess many people don't even realize its origins.

This initial attempt at "benign" appropriation doesn't result in an invitation into the juke.  It was a trojan horse anyway; an invitation in would have condemned all the black patrons to death and then rebirth as Remmick's thralls.

It's telling that later, during "Rocky Road to Dublin," his horde of mostly black vampires take up the singing of an Irish traditional for him while he dances and their gospel vocalizations from "I Lied to You" are co-opted into the decidedly un-gospel song "Rocky Road to Dublin."  They are his now, and they sing his songs.

Remmick tells the survivors holed up in the juke:

I am your way out. This world already left you for dead. Won't let you build. Won't let you fellowship. We will do just that. Together. Forever. ... You ain't safe here. No matter how many guns, or how much money.  They gon' take it from you when they want. ... They was always gonna kill you.  I happen to show up at the right place at the right time.

And vampire Joan adds:

We gonna start a new clan, based on love.

And on the surface, I can see why Remmick wouldn't think this was a terrible argument to make.  As I mentioned earlier, all his thralls do seem to be having fun and he is telling the truth about the Klan coming to take everything from them.

I also believe his early "Sir, we believe in equality and music" line from his first conversation with Smoke to be actually sincere.  He does mean it but for the Clarksdale residents, Remmick's colorblind utopia comes at the price destroying who they were, forever.  They can be equal but they will sing his songs from now on.

A really interesting aspect of this film that I was absolutely not expecting is that Remmick himself is a victim of cultural disruption.  The reason he is drawn to the juke gathering and desperately wants Sammie is that he is cut off from his own barely remembered culture:

I want to see my people again. I'm trapped here.  But your gifts can bring 'em to me.

And tying into the theme of erasure it is strongly implied that the Irish culture Remmick is proselytizing with isn't even his.  Late in the film, while saying the Lord's Prayer along with Sammie, he says:

Long ago, the men who stole my Father's land forced these words upon us.  I hated those men, but the words still bring me comfort.

This could be interpreted to mean that Remmick may be from the pre-Christian history of (probably) the British Isles.  Remmick, then, serves as a warning about forced assimilation and erasure and highlights the importance of what Sammie was doing for his people at the juke.

I like that Remmick isn't there just because of bloodlust and his motivation directly intersects with the cultural ideas the film is exploring.  He is a victim too, similar to how Mina characterizes Dracula in Dracula.  Note that I am absolutely not saying, what I've seen some deeply strange people say online, that Remmick is actually a tragic hero which i think is an absolutely batshit take.  He is absolutely a monster and a villain.  He's just a highly motivated and charismatic one.

Power, Domain, and Invasion

Another thing I thought was interesting was how the film portrayed Remmick's reaction to not being invited in after he played "Pick Poor Robin Clean."   He bristles at not being invited in to a minority space with "[We were] sounding damned near perfect and you're saying we ain't welcome?" And when Smoke tells him "No, I'm saying you get down that road and get back to town.  Plenty of white barrelhouses there" he gives an  incredulous "Oh, this cause we're [white]"

It feels very true to how I've seen people in majority groups try to get into minority spaces and then call racism when they aren't immediately welcomed in with open arms.  It quickly turns into the 'Who's the Real Racist?" argument I mentioned in my piece on "Yellowface."  I don't know if it's anachronistic for Mississippi in the 1930's but it feels authentic to me as I've seen variations on that conversation play out in online spaces in the 2020's.

Remmick says "Can't we just, for one night, just all be family?"  This is a way to put the moral burden on the people at the juke, casting them as unreasonably rejecting someone who just wanted to, like, be friends, man.  Of course, Remmick isn't telling the truth.  It won't be for one night; the bitten can never go back and he's not interested on amity on any terms but his.

The film really shows the power dynamic between the two groups of people.   Smoke, Stack, and company are in a bit of a bind with regards to letting Remmick in.  Stack legitimately seemed to enjoy their performance and is perhaps open to the idea of letting them in, saying to Smoke "What if they just came here to sing?"  But Smoke replies with:

And what if somebody spill something on 'em? Step on their shoe?  Look at their woman a bit too long? We gon' have a  bigger problem than just a fight.

He's right, of course.  The social power gulf between them and Remmick is huge and almost guarantees Remmick and company will dictate the terms, even they don't realize it.  It doesn't matter that there's only three of them.  They will, by default, have the law, the authority, and the system on their side, no matter what they say.  Slim's earlier story about his friend being lynched over a made up story so the authorities could take his money proves that.

The anxiety about their disempowerment and the knife's edge they are always on in Mississippi also comes out when Mary comes to the juke.  Stack tries to convince her to leave, saying "All it'd take is the wrong person in here to see you, word get back to them crackers, and they gon' try to kill you."

I also very much like how the film reveals that the "safety" of the juke is an illusion.  Grace, who invites the vampires in, makes a pretty valid point.  Why let the vampires go kill everyone in town?  Even if the people still in the juke make it until dawn, the vampires will just come back tomorrow.  They can't just hunker down and hope they won't be hurt.  It's too big, any passive reprieve will only be temporary.  They have to be actively fought.  Today.   

This echoes the Klan sub-plot.  Hogwood, who sold the twins the saw-mill, is the Grand Dragon of the Klan.  He sold it to them one day and they might have a safe night, but he and his men will return to kill them the next day.  Or the next.  And, like Grace, Smoke chooses not to run and hide until the next time the Klan comes knocking; he takes the fight to them.

Gallimaufry

• Smoke's Klan bloodbath the morning after Remmick is destroyed was really satisfying.  I could watch Michael B Jordan obliterate Klan members all day.  Also, Smoke's fatal bullet wound looks a lot like a vampire bite wounds in the film.  Allegory, folks.

• I am curious why Coogler chose to make Smoke and Stack identical twins?  It must be important because it would have been a massive pain in the ass to do.  Then again, maybe he just though "Man, Michael rules.  I want him to play more parts in this movie."

• The lyrics to "Pick Poor Robin Clean" are appropriate when being sung by vampires:

I picked poor Robin clean, picked poor Robin clean

I picked his head, I picked his feet

I woulda picked his body, but it wasn't fit to eat

Oh, I picked poor Robin clean, picked poor Robin clean

And I'll be satisfied having a family

Lord, didn't that jaybird laugh when I picked poor Robin clean?

I also like that there is a reprise of the song later by the whole group of vampires, this time as an overt threat / taunt to the people still in the juke.

• It's cool that all three of the people's mentioned in the opening, the Irish, the Choctaw, and West Africans are present in the film, even if the Choctaw are only shown briefly hunting Remmick before they flee at sunset.  It's also noteworthy that the power through music ability is not confined to non-white people though it's probably telling that only the Irish have a singular country.  "Choctaw land" isn't really Choctaw land anymore and "West Africa" encompasses a huge array of people, and in the American context, "West African" is about the most precise most enslaved of formerly enslaved people can get.

• I didn't pick this up on first watch but Grace and Bo Chow's daughter Lisa code switches. Her two lines at the black grocery store are in a distinct Chinese accent but once she goes across the street to the white grocery store where her mother works she speaks with her parent's southern accent.

• I was surprised when Stack and Mary showed up in the epilogue, having survived the destruction of the vampires, though I probably should have seen it coming. In retrospect it should have been a tell that we didn't see either of them in the final confrontation with Remmick and his brood outside the juke.  There was a lot going on in that scene; it was authentically tense and I was emotionally invested enough in the Sammie / Smoke / Remmick characters that I didn't notice Stack and Mary's absence.  It would have been kind of a weird anticlimax to have two main characters like Stack and Mary just faceless-ly die in the crowd; I might have done this meta-textual detective work in a less compelling film, but as it stands I didn't notice and I had a nice surprise at the end.

• It's interesting that Mary describes her grandfather as half-black, rather than half-white.

• I like how Remmick's line that "Long ago, the man who stole my Father's land forced these words upon us," is an echo of Delta Slim's line earlier that "Blues wasn't forced on us like that religion."

• Hey look it's Buddy Guy as Sammie in the epilogue!  Also, the club he's in is called "Pearline's" after the woman Sammie, um, "connects" with before the vampires arrive.  I love Sammie's poignant and elegiac line to Stack:
  

You know something? Maybe once a week, I wake up paralyzed, reliving that night. But before the sun went down, I think that was the best day of my life.

• These are the kinds of vampires whose ecology doesn't really make much sense.  (This is not a criticism. This isn't CinemaSins.)  Any vampire who creates another one every time they bite someone (And it only takes a few minutes to turn, here) would overrun the earth in like a week and a half.  It's a not infrequent mechanic of the genre, though, and doesn't bother me even a little bit.  I just think it's kind of funny, like when zombie stories start with the protagonist waking up from a coma and having missed the apocalypse because no writer wants to try to explain how unarmed shambling bodies who spread infection by biting people could overwhelm the world's militaries.

• There's only one incredibly minor thing that is a little off from an editing perspective, and that's the sort of jarring dissolve cut after Hogwood, the man who sells the twins the saw mill, says "Klan don't exist no more."  It's kind of abrupt and I think it was the only dissolve in the film, or at least the only one that lodged in my brain.  To be fair I didn't even notice it in the theater but I think on a rewatch, it really stood out because it was so out of step with how the rest of the movie was edited.   The fact that this piddlyshit is basically the only critique I've got is an indicator of how good i think this movie is.

• Smoke and Stack aren't saints, they're type that 21st century internet culture would dig though the past of and decide it doesn't matter what vampires (or power structures) do to them because they've broken laws so they deserve it.

• I really like the tension when the newly turned Cornbread is trying to get invited back into the juke despite being the door guy not 10 minutes earlier.  Overall, I'd say this film is more tense than outright scary.

• I like Smoke's early scene with Annie.  In it he lays out his bleak philosophy:

I've been all over this world.  In cars, ships, trains. I seen men die ways I didn't even know was possible. I ain't never saw no roots, no demons, no ghosts, no magic. Just power.

When he says "roots" he's literally talking about the plant roots Annie uses for her Hoodoo, but it also works with the ideas of cultural continuity and disruption the film is about.

This scene is a good microcosm of how the film's characters have an inner world and history that makes them feel real without giving large info dumps.  Smoke and Stack both served their country in World War I and then returned to be second class citizens.  And God knows what they saw in the trenches.

Conclusion

Sinners is not only the best thing I saw in the theater in 2025 (as of mid September anyway), it's also the best movie I've seen in a while.  It absolutely is deserving of the accolades it received, and if you somehow got this far and haven't seen it, do consider making the time to check it out, even if you aren't a horror fan.   As I said, once the vampires show up it's very tense and honestly kind of emotionally stressful but it isn't that scary.

It's sharply written, looks great, sounds great, the performances are riveting, and It handles its social commentary with great facility and nuance.

10 out of 10.  I eagerly await Coogler's next film.

-m