ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

Female Film Critics 24/375

ryan coogler

SPOTLIGHT 

SPOTLIGHT March 2026: Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Cinematographer Supreme, SINNERS

Leslie Combemale , , , , , , , , , ,

First after first, award after award, Autumn Durald Arkapaw has shown she is artistically up to the task for any genre or project. Her career offers great inspiration for women, especially women of color, who feel passionately about cinematography, or really any below the line career. In an interview with Variety, she said, “It means the world when young girls, or film students of similar heritage, come up to me and express their gratitude, not just for the work, but for the fact that they can see someone like themselves behind the camera”.

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Reviews 

SINNERS – Review by Sherin Nicole

Sherin Nicole , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

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Reviews 

SINNERS – Review by Leslie Combemale

Leslie Combemale , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

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Reviews 

SINNERS – Review by Silvi Vann-Wall

Silvi Van-Wall , , ,

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.

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SPOTLIGHT 

SPOTLIGHT February 2025: Rachel Morrison, Director, THE FIRE INSIDE

Leslie Combemale , , , , , , , , , ,

Cinematographer/director Rachel Morrison has the distinction of being the first female DP to be both nominated for an Academy Award, for the 2012 Dee Rees drama Mudbound, and lens a Marvel feature film, with 2018’s Black Panther. As an Oscar nominee, she broke a 90-year male monopoly on the category. Although she is a trailblazer and an outspoken advocate for women in film, she has said she wishes nothing better than for the screen industries to get beyond gender, and for women to be known simply for their work. Only through talented women like Rachel Morrison getting hired and recognized will that be achieved. When she was inducted as a member of the American Society of Cinematographers, only 18 out of the 390 members were women.

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Reviews 

BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

Valerie Kalfrin , , , , ,

Wakanda Forever, then, had a tall order to fill, and if it’s flawed in parts, it also acknowledges this loss and moves forward in a way that’s ultimately satisfying. The plot is sometimes messy, with many moving parts, but the film gives its actors—especially Wakanda’s formidable women—powerful performances and moments to shine. Ultimately, Wakanda Forever delivers an emotional sendoff fit for a king—and a message that Wakanda, cherished by its creators onscreen and off, will carry on.

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Reviews 

MASTER – Review by Lonita Cook

Lonita Cook , , , , ,

Regina Hall (who also co-produced) gives a rousing performance as the newly appointed first-ever Black House Master of a traditionally White college dorm when Jasmine, a Black student moves in. Mix Black House Master, Black student, Black professor seeking tenure, favored White students, an evaluation board, the legend of a witch, the mythic tale of the first Black student who ended up hanged and you get a fertile landscape in which to cultivate a narrative around placing the displaced.

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