Shot and marketed with IMAX cameras akin to something only Christopher Nolan would do, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners plays big and tall as it spans both centuries and genres to tell a story you’ve never quite seen before. Gangsters, musicians, preachers, conjurers, and vampires collide on one hot summer night, all of them ready to shake away the demons under the power of liquor, the blues, and sweat. Vampires, you say? Yes, those bloodsuckers that have ruined pretty much every protagonist’s day since the birth of cinema are in the Deep South too, and they possess just as much bark as they do bite.

Although they live in the shadows very literally, those demons also represent themselves metaphorically through Coogler’s rotational use of the Ultra Panavision 70mm 2.76:1 aspect ratio. Normally reserved for epically scoped projects like The Hateful Eight and Ben-Hur, Coogler and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw flip the technique on its head, the black bars heavily weighing down on our mortal characters as the grainy photography captures the humid restlessness. Many of them fear that their lives are being drained away by the society that keeps them down, the chains of slavery from just a few generations ago replaced by the invisible shackles of Jim Crow in the 1930s.

For Sammi (Miles Caton), the son of your usual movie preacher who warns about the dangers of sex, drugs, and rock & roll, there's a world of opportunity outside of Mississippi. But for the Smokestack twins (Michael B. Jordan as both Smoke and Stack), they know that those promises of a land of milk & honey where all men are created equal is just a bunch of fool’s gold. They’ve seen a thing or two to know a thing or two, which is that Jim Crow is a worldwide recipe, the only variable being the intensity of the flavor. The best strategy in a world set against you is to plant yourself where you know your enemy best. That means they’ve returned to their birthplace of Clarksdale, Mississippi after nearly a decade of ripping off gangsters in Chicago, a city that everybody asks them if it is as good as the legends say it is. The twins leave that question mostly unanswered, as they know the preciousness of hope and that they never were set on honest work to begin with.

Fortunately for them, everybody in Clarksdale is a sinner, filling themselves up on liquor and fleshly desires. What’s the point of the future when the outlook is just more of the same shitty present? For as much as the marketing team has cranked up the promise of death and destruction, Coogler spends a large chunk of the first act examining the death and decay of the American dream. “The Klan doesn’t exist no more,” says the heavily assumed racist white owner of the sawmill the twins buy to refurbish into a juke joint. It’s a line that elicited uneasy chuckles from my audience, everyone knowing underneath that’s as much a lie in 2025 as it was in 1932.

Between his two Black Panther films and Creed, Coogler has illustrated a near-masterful skill for diffusing incisive social commentary into the muscular frame of a popcorn blockbuster. Jack O'Connell’s vampire Remmick spins a yarn of a vampire world where everyone lives together in harmony, although his appearance signals that the only thing that will change is the ownership of those at the top of the social hierarchy. Without spoiling its specific contents in fear of robbing you of the experience of witnessing it with a clean palette, there’s a certain long take that merges the past, present, and future in an exhilaratingly fresh way that I didn’t think was possible for a $100 million studio film.

Even if, for some odd reason, you’re coming into Sinners looking to turn your brain off, Coogler supplies more than a sizable portion of R-rated gnarliness. This is still a horror movie down to the bone, filled with characters who make dumb decisions and moments that will make you jump out of your seat. That long take also shows off the immaculate craft of his production crew: Hannah Beachler’s rich sets, Ruth E. Carter’s snazzy costumes, and Ludwig Göransson’s banjo and electric guitar layered score. Each of them is able to both open and rip out your heart at the drop of a hat, something the cast also replicates.

If I had a nickel for every time a 2025 Warner Bros. film had its lead actor play multiple identical-looking characters, I’d have three nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird it happened thrice. Luckily, this nickel goes to the top dog that is two Michael B. Jordans, and not the multiple clones of Robert Pattinson from Mickey 17 or the double De Niro in The Alto Knights. As twins, Jordan doesn’t play two totally different personas, just a closely overlapping Venn diagram. Hailee Steinfeld, who, believe it or not, hasn’t been in a live-action feature film since 2019, showcases why we shouldn’t have let that fact come to fruition and kept her on the path of being a full-time movie star.

In a time when America is having an identity crisis (then again, when aren’t we?), Sinners looks back and ahead with the gumption that only a wild premise such as this could achieve. Coogler has shown you on multiple occasions a new path as part of a well-worn map, so now let him redraw the whole thing in blood and brimstone.