This article was originally published via the DIASPORA NEWSLETTER on April 22, 2025.
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains specific details about Sinners.
I have told the following story a million times.
Consider this a million and one.
In 2013, months before I moved to Los Angeles, I lived in San Francisco as a freelance journalist. I interviewed a new much-talked-about director at the time. His name was Ryan Coogler, a Bay Area native, and I was chatting with him for the local “hip” magazine 7×7. He recently received tons of buzz from his film Fruitvale Station out of Cannes and Sundance and it was about to be released in theaters.
Everyone knows who Ryan Coogler is in 2025, but back then, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was barely a thing and Black Panther was a glimmer in his eye. And if I would guess, the concept of Sinners was probably at a steady simmer in Coogler’s mind during this time.
When I walked into the room, Coogler complimented my saddle shoes from Barneys and I immediately knew he had good taste. He also noticed I was writing in a Moleskine journal and he said, “It feels like what you write in there is important, right?”
Fruitvale Station follows the real life and ultimate murder of Oscar Grant, a death that sparked protests against police violence — specifically towards the Black community. The movie won the Audience and Grand Jury Award at Sundance as well as the Prix de l’Avenir d’Un Certain Regard at Cannes. And nearly 12 years later, Grant’s death still reverberates as we continue to fight the same fight, and progress moves at a glacial pace.
“It was my goal that [Fruitvale Station] could be shared with people who would never come in contact with somebody like Oscar Grant,” said Coogler in the 7×7 interview. “We focused on the human relationships. Everybody knows what it’s like to have a mom, everybody knows how it is to have somebody they love, a lot of people know what it’s like to have a daughter and a lot of people know what it’s like to be 22 years old.”
He added, “We hope that in making it specific to Bay Area culture that people could see a bit of their own culture in it.”
One thing Coogler does well is foster humanity in his characters and story to create a strong community-driven narrative. He not only creates characters we can invest in, but he also creates an appealing world we can invest in and experience. He creates a world that, no matter where you are from, seduces you and makes you want to be part of that world. But in particular, he makes sure the world knows that it is for the Black community. He’s done it in Fruitvale Station as well as Black Panther, Creed, and now Sinners.
Sinners is an indie film on a studio budget that only Coogler can do — add in his partner in crime, Michael B. Jordan, and you got yourself one helluva of southern fried, genre-bending, socially-forward, vampire period piece dripping in blood.
Serving Tia and Tamara realness, Jordan plays twin brothers Smoke and Stack. The film also features a beautifully curated cast that includes Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Mosaku, Hailee Steinfeld, Li Jun Li, Yao, Jayme Lawson, Omar Benson Miller, Jack O’Connell, and the film’s breakout star, Miles Caton, who is destined to join Coogler’s revered Proximity collective of talent. We also get to see the icon, Saul Williams!
Coogler establishes the lay of the land as soon as Smoke and Stack return home to open a Juke Joint. One by one we learn the characters, their place in the story, and more importantly — say it with me, folks — their place in the community. Again, Coogler, builds this community, better yet, a family. He paints a portrait of the importance of family, chosen and otherwise through a wild lens of cultural appropriating vampires.
I went into Sinners blind and have, for the most part, avoided anything detail-heavy about the film. And since Warner Bros. has seemed to forget to invite me, a member of GALECA and the Critics Choice Association and a consultant for GLAAD, to advanced press screenings (I could have gotten this article out earlier, but here we are), I was more than happy to spend my hard-earned money on the film to put some coin into their box office numbers.
There’s a lot to unpack and in anyone else’s hands it would be a mess, but when a filmmaker can illustrate what he is thinking so vividly and with universal appeal. Coogler manages to curate what could be a chaotic story into modern cinema because I have never seen anything quite like Sinners before.
There are multitudes of layers to pull back on Sinners, a very personal story for Coogler. In an interview on the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast, Coogler talked about how the movie is rooted in his relationship with his Uncle James, who loved the blues and told stories about his time in Mississippi during the ‘30s. Coogler said that Sinners is about why people “chose to stay”.
“To understand the Great Migration is to also understand for a long time our people’s home was the South,” he said on the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast. “To migrate means to leave something behind..Very often, and rightfully so, that part of time and that physical location in the United States, is a place that’s associated with a lot of pain, a lot of shame, a lot of discomfort, but to completely look away from it is to not look at what else was there. The resilience, the brilliance, the fortitude, and also the art, the artistic wonder, the cultural wonder.”
Sinners has a way of being about identity without leading the narrative with identity. It’s about character and circumstance first which makes for better storytelling — which is why Coogler is a great filmmaker. Because he knows how to craft an excellent narrative.
To put it bluntly, this movie should not work. In the wrong hands, it could go off the rails fairly quickly but Coogler brings in an even hand. He inserts so much humanity, history, emotion, and cultural relevance into the bones of this family drama vampire period thriller fantasy. It’s a mad scientist mash-up of From Dusk Till Dawn, The Lost Boys, Get Out, andHBO’s Lovecraft Country series. It’s totally giving Seven Samurai with that showdown at the end.
The movie as a whole is fantastic. I love how it blatantly says, “White people can be evil — watch your back.” Or in better context, “Stay woke” — and not in the corporate white way.
From how he writes and fully sculpts female characters in his movies (love how Wunmi Mosaku’s Annie took control in that scene) to how he brilliantly folded in Chinese culture at the right time for Grace and Bo Chow (Li Jun Li and Yao), there were specific moments in this modern cinematic opus that just reverberated in my soul.
The scene where Preacher Boy (Miles Caton) finally performs and his music invokes the spirits of Black and Asian musicians and performers from the past and future. The result is a celebratory and hyper-dynamic acid trip of a sequence that is giving one-shot energy (reminiscent of this Black Panther scene), but in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he said that it was impossible to do the film in one take with IMAX cameras. “They can only film for about a minute and a half — maybe it’s a minute and 45 — because they rip through film at such a speed that you can only shoot for so long. So we basically broke it up into sections that were as long as we could film per reel.”
Another moment that feels right is the scene where Sammie has a drink with Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who has a history with Stack. She is also white-passing in a majority Black space. That said, Sammie asks her, “What are you?”, a question many POCs often get.
The scene is so intentional and doesn’t make the conversation uncomfortable because it’s not supposed to be. Turns out that Mary’s mother is half-Black, but the moment itself probably rings so true for Steinfeld whose grandfather was half-Filipino and half-Black. So when Annie tells the demonic troubadour Remmick ( Jack O’Connell) “She’s family!” when he asks why they won’t let him into the Juke Joint but allowed Mary in — it’s true.
As an original film that could very well be the start of a franchise, Sinners is doing more than freshening up modern cinema. It’s putting butts in movie theater seats. Tickets to watch it in 70MM IMAX at Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles have been difficult to get unless you want to sit in the first row. It’s making people want to return to movie theaters again — and all this shortly after the bolstering of the moviegoing experience at CinemaCon.
Sinners has served as a launching pad for Coogler to get what’s his. He struck a deal with Warner Bros. which, according to Puck, included final cut of the film and a percentage of the box-office gross from the beginning of its theatrical run — not many people get either. And the biggest part of the deal that has the studios shaking in their boots is that ownership of Sinners will return to Coogler after 25 years. In an interview with Business Insider, this was a symbolic move representing Black ownership — which is exactly what the film is about. “That was the only motivation,” he said in the interview.
As a film and TV journalist, I get the privilege of meeting new filmmakers and artists at the start of their careers or right when they are about to hit it big. Seeing Coogler’s rise after Fruitvale Station was inevitable. I’ve also had the opportunity to chat with Wunmi Mosaku during my last days at Deadline for the New Hollywood Podcast. I’ve sat down and interviewed Li Jun Li when I was having some weird allergic reaction to something and, of course, Michael B. Jordan was also part of my New Hollywood journey. It’s just so dope to see cool people do dope things.
Sinners made me excited for movies again because I can’t stop thinking about it and I want to unpack so much more, but I have another deadline to meet and Substack has a word limit. Nonetheless, my obnoxious level of “think piece” energy for Sinners is a sure sign that I loved this movie and I want more — and with that ending, I am praying for a ‘90s period piece with a stellar ‘90s Bay Area R&B/Hip Hop score from Ludwig Göransson and new original tracks from E40, Too $hort, and Kendrick Lamar.
