Sinners – ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

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

March 1, 2026March 2, 2026 Leslie Combemale afi, American Society of Cinematographers, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, black panther, cinematography, gia coppola, Kate Herron, Loki, ryan coogler, Sinners, wakanda forever

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”.

Movie of the Week

MOVIE OF THE WEEK January 9, 2026: Team MOTW’s Favorite Oscar Contenders

January 4, 2026January 15, 2026 Jennifer Merin Belén, BLUE MOON, Hamnet, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, Left-Handed Girl, motw, Movie of the Week, One Battle After Another, oscar contenders, Rental Family, Sinners, Weapons

Movie awards presentation is an industry unto itself. Awards season has expanded in duration to include more than the entire year. It starts in January with awards buzz erupting out of Sundance Film Festival — even before the previous year’s awards season has culminated with the Oscars gala presentation that’s staged in early March. It’s truly a challenge to keep up with the countless award-eligible movies that are released throughout the year or seen at film festivals, and for awards voters, making lists, discussing and advocating for award-worthy titles is a year round preoccupation. At AWFJ, determining our EDA Awards nominees involves elimination of titles in order to reach consensus. But even after consensus is reached, everyone has personal favorites that may or may not have landed on our official list of nominees. This week, Team MOTW members recommend their favorite award contenders for your watch list. Click film titles for links to full reviews.

Reviews

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 MaryAnn Johanson

June 16, 2025June 18, 2025 MaryAnn Johanson ryan coogler, Sinners

A movie to make you remember why you fell in love with movies. Writer-director Ryan Coogler’s cinematic event is an unmissable howl of a passion project: big and bold, messy and magnificent, and wildly primal. It is fueled by pain and rage, but also throbbing with community and family, with love and sex and joy. It is infused with all sorts of magic.

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.