Note: This review covers a 70mm IMAX print of Sinners, which looked tremendous!
This year I watched Powell & Pressburger‘s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin each for the for first time. These classic French features both inspired a single reaction out of me: “why can’t more movies look this resplendent?!?” Colonel Blimp and Donkey Skin wash every environment and costume in glorious colors. Even Blimp’s more subdued trenches of No Man’s Land have very distinct hues peppering the sky. In these movies, shots as simple as a woman standing in front of a window with her hands crossed behind her back are jaw-droppingly gorgeous. Why must these titles be exceptions rather than the enthralling norm? Why do so many features embrace yawn-worthy “realism” while eschewing cinema’s rich visual possibilities?
A similar reaction kept racing in my mind throughout Sinners. Ryan Coogler’s fifth directorial effort is outstanding entertainment overflowing with striking images and imagination. So many 2025 genre movies have been consumed with cramped framing, snarky dialogue dripping with self-consciousness, and poor lighting. Sinners, meanwhile, is a lavish accomplishment bursting with confident personality. Like Colonel Blimp and Donkey Skin, the latest Coogler gem had me wondering why more modern cinema isn’t this good.
It’s 1932 in the Mississippi Delta. Identical twin gangsters Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) have returned home after a lengthy absence to start up a juke joint just for the local Black community. With cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) tagging along, the pair begins recruiting old friends like pianist Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo). Their criminal exploits in Chicago have made them legends. However, Smoke and Stack still grapple with grounded problems upon their homecoming. Smoke, for instance, reunites with wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) while Stack encounters old flame Mary (Hailee Steinfeld).
Coogler’s earliest Sinners scenes thoroughly impress with how much entertainment they wring out of intimate conversations. That’s far from a surefire thing in “set-up” sequences in genre cinema. Fellow 2025 horror movie Wolf Man had me checking my watch in opening segments establishing characters and fractured familial relationships. These stale pastiches of Blue Valentine or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’s depictions of domestic strife didn’t make subsequent scary Wolfman encounters more engaging. They just reaffirmed how little dramatic weight there was to the story. In sharp contrast, Coogler’s initial depictions of Smoke and Stack getting their juke joint together keep thoughts like “when are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?” far from one’s mind.
Instead, audiences are treated to deeply warm and humorous exchanges that enrich the bonds between principal Sinners characters. Stack explaining a specific sex act with ice cream-based metaphors, for instance, is exquisite. Ditto a moment where Smoke teaches a young girl how to haggle proper financial compensation. Within these sequences, memorable dialogue and profoundly specific performances abound. Even Coogler and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw's visual impulses remain strong when the story is firmly planted in reality. I especially adored an introductory shot of Annie standing in the doorway of her home. Here, nearby rustling branches cast a flickering shadow on her figure. The combination of bright lights and fragmented shadows covering her body vividly reflects the psychologically conflicted place she occupies in Smoke’s mind. She’s at once relegated to the shadows of his existence yet Smoke’s mind constantly sets a spotlight on her.
Once the party gets going at Smoke and Stack’s juke joint, the visuals just get even more enthralling. I’m the umpteenth person to praise this sequence, but that extended single-take shot set to “I Lied to You” earns every bit of its hype. My jaw was on the floor realizing both the set piece’s thematic undercurrent and the heightened flourishes Coogler was incorporating. It’s a magnificent tour de force scene radiating the creative chutzpah so many 21st century musicals and music-driven movies lack. There are no characters here saying “ugh, why are you guys singing???”
Instead, there’s sweeping theatricality exuding infectious energy and radiant life. Not even a five-foot story 70mm IMAX screen can seem to contain all this vivacity. As a lover of musical cinema, this whole "I Lied to You" sequence was an absolutely breathtaking wonder to experience. Speaking of that genre, Sinners often takes cues from musical features, including how it lets characters' musical performances play out uninterrupted. That's how confident Coogler's script is. You don't just get an excellent vampire movie with Sinners, audiences also get elements of a musical!
Amazingly, the “I Lied to You” performance is far from the only great musical Sinners sequences. The combination of Jayme Lawson’s stirring vocals, Michael P. Shawver's precise editing, and energy-inducing clapping makes a “Pale, Pale Moon” performance also a winner. Appropriately for a feature all about Blues music and guitar-strumming, Sinners is an absolute force to be reckoned with sonically. Go-to Coogler collaborator Ludwig Göransson's score is especially a magnificent accomplishment. His tracks accentuate a sweeping scope with a rollicking mixture of genre influences, including heavy uses of fiddles and harmonicas. I’ve never heard a horror film soundtrack or a major American movie score sounding quite like Göransson's unforgettable composition. His bombastically distinctive creations are a perfect auditory companion to the maximalist images.
That creative conviction also seeps into how Sinners approaches vampires, which is one of its greatest assets. For too long, us fans of these bloodsuckers have dealt with movies like Morbius and Dracula Untold deeply afraid to actually be vampire yarns. These titles dealt with “vampires” who could walk out into sunlight and just looked like normal people. Coogler, meanwhile, revels in making the Sinners adversaries classical vampires. These creatures can’t come in unless you invite them in. Garlic and wooden stakes can kill them. They have these glassy and piercing red eyes. Heck, characters like Annie unblinkingly call them “vampires.”
None of that Morbius timidity over being a “silly” vampire movie here. Sinners instead wrings all the fun, chaotic, frightening, and gory possibilities out of Irish vampire foes like Remmick (Jack O'Connell). They’re a microcosm of a motion picture exploding with enthusiasm for its world. That even comes through in what material Coogler and Arkapaw capture with IMAX cameras. Sinners, like other blockbusters, changes up its aspect ratio for its IMAX presentation. Most scenes are in 2.76:1 framing. However, several sequences expand into a 1.43:1 aspect ratio covering up the entire screen. Typically, tentpoles switch for the latter, more expansive framing for action-heavy set pieces. Sinners sometimes follows that modus operandi as well to tremendous effect.
However, Coogler and Arkpaw also fill up a five-story-tall 70mm IMAX screen with intentionally mundane images. Intimate corners of Sammie, Smoke, Stack, and other characters are often rendered in lavish and quietly subversive terms. Sammie finishing up his shift in the cotton fields at dawn or just a shot of clouds floating across a blue sky get all the rich colors and expansive space that 70mm IMAX can afford. Subtly, this tendency in Sinners communicates to moviegoers that every facet of these lives is worthy of grand cinematic tools. These characters navigate a world constantly undermining their humanity. Hence the necessity for a Blacks-only domicile like Smoke and Stack’s juke joint.
Heck, cinema as a medium has repeatedly been utilized to dehumanize Black existence. Just look at the montage of classic film scenes closing out Spike Lee's Bamboozled. In using that 1.43:1 aspect ratio for low-key Sinners sequences, Coogler and Arkpaw vividly announce that scenes of various Black characters just existing are just as essential as gory stake-heavy sequences or transfixing musical numbers. Visual storytelling historically deployed to strip Black people of their humanity instead reaffirms it in Sinners. Meanwhile, the IMAX cameras normally exclusively tapped for expansive spectacle now capture ordinary facets of life. These intimate moments subvert what constitutes " proper" IMAX cinema within a realm molded in the shadow of Michael Bay cinema.
It’s a richly human approach that the murderer’s row of terrific Sinners performances perfectly complements. For instance, in his fifth collaboration with Coogler, Michael B. Jordan shines joining the pantheon of great pop culture twin performances alongside Jeremy Irons, Nicolas Cage, and Ewan McGregor (among others). He’s so effortlessly superb at making Smoke and Stack come alive as different people.
Even with Jordan and others like Wunmi Mosaku and Hailee Steinfeld doing such remarkable work, the Sinners cast MVP is handily Delroy Lindo. This always reliable performer nails every one of his comedic line deliveries while exuding a profoundly lived-in aura in Delta Slim’s quietest moments. I’ll especially never stop thinking about Lindo’s screen presence in a short flashback with Sammie during a big musical number, where Slim tells this young guitar player about how “the blues belongs to us.” In just a few seconds of screentime, Lindo commands your attention and subtly radiates Slim’s decades of experience. It’s just one of countless miraculous qualities contained in the many outstanding turns scattered throughout Sinners.
Like Powell & Pressburger, Demy, and countless other cinematic masters, Coogler and company realize that anything can look glorious on the silver screen. This visual medium’s endless possibilities can manifest in moments as quiet as visiting a grave to spectacular set pieces like a packed house energetically dancing. Sinners exploits all that enthralling potential to create a mesmerizing tour-de-force. Like Mad Max: Fury Road ten years ago, Sinners shines as both the basis for lengthy academic dissertations and Saturday night popcorn entertainment with equal levels of success. Thoughtful and endlessly entertaining, it’s bound to leave you wondering why more features aren’t this toe-tappingly dazzling and visually audacious.