1. Sinners, dir. Ryan Coogler
I saw Sinners three times in 2025. That does not happen for me. Usually I see these movies once, if they're lucky twice, and there's a good chance I never watch them again regardless of my opinion. At the time of writing, I want to go home and watch Sinners for a fourth time. Now, I don't really put much stock into how often you can watch a movie for rankings. Personally, I don't want to watch the same movies over and over, I want to see new things and new great things, or old great things that I haven't seen. If rewatchability were all that mattered, I would just make Tales From the Crypt Presents Demon Knight the best movie of every year, because Demon Knight is near-perfect and extremely watchable. Looking back to my Best of 2025 List, I haven't thought at any point, "yeah, I gotta watch I Saw the TV Glow right now". It is something of a heavy meal.
With Sinners though, I need to rewatch this... right now.
Remember when Ryan Coogler's last movie was Black Panther 2 and it was terrible? And it looked terrible and muddy? In retrospect, that issue seems to be on Disney, not Coogler, not on his DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw. Sinners looks incredible. If you had the privilege to see it in IMAX, it was the most gorgeously-shot movie of the entire year. Day scenes are huge and sweeping like the rural Mississippi Delta of the 1930s was infinitely huge, the sky never-ending. At night Sinners is warm and sensual and also full of deep black depths from all corners of the Juke Joint. It is a night where anything is possible, for good and bad. Come back of the year, clearly.
Okay, so what if you took From Dusk Till Dawn and turned it into a period-piece blues musical? You had me at the Blues, you didn't even need to add vampires that sing Celtic folk music. Sinners is already a masterpiece by the conclusion of the first act when we have a full IMAX montage of all our heroes preparing for the opening of the Juke Joint, and then a Satanic figure literally crashes in the movie. Note he crashes from above, not below, we'll get back to that.
The great heroes of this movie are two brothers, Smoke (Michael B. Jordan wearing blue) and Stack (Michael B. Jordan wearing red) coming back to their home town after adventures in war and gangland crime, ready to live their dream of opening the ultimate night club for the sharecroppers. They're living on borrowed time already, having ripped off Chicago, buying their land from a racist good ol' boy, and having based on a business model on making a profit from the poorest of the poor in the United States. They have to know this is a good time, not a long time.
Just they could not imagine how good of a time it would be. Or how short.
Ryan Coogler's previous smash hit was Black Panther, one of the greatest Marvel movies thanks to consciously being a work of mythmaking. Superheroes are often about nothing but punching. Or they could be symbols where ones are desperately. There was no Wakanda, there was no magical space in the heart of Africa where native culture held out against colonization and could be a beacon for repression everywhere. (And the near-Wakandas that people have relied behind, Dahomey or Ethiopia were all deeply flawed places with uncomfortable histories of slavery themselves.) Smoke and Stack are not real, there was no twin pair of broad-shouldered cool guy action heroes who could march into town and scare the Klan during the height of Jim Crow. But Sinners is a myth, not reality. Why not conjure another dream of a time when you could fight back? When you could have something when the world demanded you be happy with nothing, even for a moment?
There's much more on Sinners' mind than merely sharecropper vs White Supremacists. This movie recognizes the full breath of the racial caste system in the United States. We have a Chinese couple (Li Jun Li and Yoa) who operate two separate grocery stores in the town, one on the Black side of the street, one on the White side, and we travel between these places in one long take. They get to be the "racial neutrality", fulfilling a key economic role that the color lines choke off. Then there's the question of "what are you?" when it comes to Stack's one-time-lover, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld). She can pass for fully White and could live in that world, in safety. But she's not, she's multi-ethnic, and merely existing makes her a bomb ready to go off. You can't have a beautiful woman who looks White talking to a very dark-skinned Michael B. Jordan in public. Everybody knows what happens next. Meanwhile, in the darker spaces of our myth, there is a creature that passes for human.
Wait, a minute. I'm this deep into Sinners and I have not mentioned the main character yet! That would Smoke and Stack's precocious teenage cousin, Sammie "Preacher Boy" Moore (Miles Canton), a talented young guitarist and soulful singer who is the secret weapon of the Juke Joint. We open Sinners in media res, with a bloodied, terrified Sammie walking into his father's church, his mind flashing back to the night of horrors that he has just barely survived. His father (Saul Williams) demands that his son put down his guitar, or what's left of it, rejecting the life of sin and music it represents, and returning to the faith. Then Preacher Boy has flashes of the Devilman, Remmick (Jack O'Connell), his mouth full of teeth and eyes aglow with evil. Uniquely amongst vampire movies, Christianity fails to banish the undead in Sinners. The Devil fell from heaven after all. Also, Christianity is the magic of the Europeans, imposed on their slaves, so how could it work here? There needs to be some other power.
That power ends up being music, and the conflict of Sinners is who gets to own it. What Preacher Boy does when he sings for the crowd is unleash mysticism more powerful than any other force in this film's mythology. He can transcend time and space, instrumentalizing the entire history of African and African American music traditions into one single moment of religious ecstasy. And not for nothing is the song he's singing, 'I Lied to You', about rejecting his father's church and embracing a new path of "sin". Historically, there has been no stream of culture more heavily fought over than the ownership of Black music. As generations pass, it all gets absorbed into neutral, colorless "American music". In genres like rock or country, you'd never from where it started. You can trace the path of Delta Blues across a century from obscure Black artists like Robert Wilkins or Bo Carter to eventually James Dolan, the White talentless owner of the New York Knicks. We can't quite murder James Dolan in a movie (yet) so for now, Remmick will represent the consuming force of integration gone wrong, integration as erasure.
Remmick can quote the Lord's Prayer right back at you. However, he cannot sing like Preacher Boy. The man can sing very damn well: he comes with his own Irish ballads and can make his ghouls dance along. "The Rocky Road to Dublin" has never been so terrifying. Sharecroppers and even the White people Remmick converts are singing songs they would not know, in accents they do not have. One wonders if perhaps Remmick is not even Irish, if there was a Sinners prequel where he devoured that folk tradition first. If Sinners goes one way, you'll have a vampire with a White face singing with a Black voice. And maybe that doesn't sound so horrible, I like Rick Astley, Elvis is Elvis, I don't even hate Snow. There is the promise of the Melting Pot, or some colorless future where we can all be one people, as one vampire says. But also, we won't be one people, it won't ever be equal. It will merely be a great tradition, a great people, digested and destroyed.
Sinners has a chance of being my favorite movie of this entire decade. It is great fun, the songs be them Blues or Irish hit every dang time, you got vampires riverdancing. The script is fantastic. The screen drips with eroticism, be it Preacher Boy's bold first experience with a married woman or Hailee Steinfeld drooling into Michael B. Jordan's mouth. "I want to taste you." It's sweaty, it's raw, it's glorifying liberation. There's great gore. One vampire spends much of the movie with his face torn off and he's still dancing along. There is not a weak link in the cast. I have not had time to mention Wunmi Mosaku or Delroy Lindo or Jayme Lawson or Omar Benson Miller, and they're all perfect in Sinners. The ideas Sinners has on its mind are really interesting and complicated. It would be good enough to just be a big dumb movie about sexy people killing vampires. May nobody say that From Dusk Till Dawn does not rule! Then Sinners just does it better, with deeper ideas, and music that will be eternal.
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So 2025 is not quite over. Stand up this week for the Honorable Mentions and Other Stuff. Don't think I won't find a space to talk about Frankenstein.
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