Miles Caton – ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

SINNERS – Review by Sherin Nicole

December 18, 2025December 21, 2025 Sherin Nicole Autumn Durald Arkapaw, hailee steinfeld, hannah beachler, Jayme Lawson, Li Jun Li, MICHAEL B JORDAN, Miles Caton, Ruth E. Carter, ryan coogler, Sinners, Wunmi Mosaku

Sinners is alive. Both in the moment and immortal. It’s a story about stories, a cinematic conjuring where folklore, music, and family become the marrow of survival. Ryan Coogler has crafted a bold reclamation but also an expansion of the American narrative on film, where vampires are less monsters than metaphors for the forces that have haunted and fractured our communities for generations. Here, the juke joint isn’t just a set piece. It’s a crossroads where Black-American, Chinese-American, Choctaw, and Old Irish traditions intersect in harmony and discord—each of our musical traditions entwined in the story’s DNA. Coogler trusts us to reconcile the mixing of genres, allowing the weight of history and centuries of rage to roil beneath the surface of Mississippi culture and lore. Never spelling out what anything means but trusting us to find the poetry in what we see and how it makes us feel.

Reviews

SINNERS – Review by Leslie Combemale

April 24, 2025April 26, 2025 Leslie Combemale Autumn Durand Arkapaw, delroy lindo, hailee steinfeld, hannah beachler, Jayme Lawson, Li Jun Li, Miles Caton, Ruth E. Carter, ryan coogler, Sinners, Wunmi Mosaku

While it’s true that Sinners is multi-layered, and filled with symbolism, the film can absolutely be enjoyed by those just wanting to experience a great period vampire thriller. The film takes place in 1932’s Mississippi Delta. Twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Coogler longtime collaborator Michael B Jordan) have returned home from Chicago with a bag full of money, and plan to build and run a new juke joint. They gather friends and family to help with opening night, and it gets off to a great start. Mid-evening, they find themselves forced to fight dark supernatural forces that want kill them all, or worse yet, integrate them into their vampiric colony. In addition to what’s seen on the entertaining surface, there are deeper layers in which vampirism becomes a metaphor for both colonization and conversion to Christianity and away from African spirituality.

Reviews

SINNERS – Review by Silvi Vann-Wall

April 18, 2025January 13, 2026 Silvi Van-Wall MICHAEL B JORDAN, Miles Caton, ryan coogler, Sinners

Let’s get one thing straight: Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is probably the most original genre film you’ll see in mainstream cinemas this year. Best described as a Southern gothic blues tribute with vampires (and even then that’s insufficient), Sinners sees Michael B. Jordan playing the dual roles of Smoke and Stack Moore; troubled twins who’ve returned to their home in Mississippi after living out their wildest gangster dreams in Chicago. Unbeknownst to them, beneath the veneer of emancipation, cottonfields, bone-white chapels and Spanish moss, there is a threat that even the KKK can’t hold a tiki torch to.