Blues Travelers: “Sinners” and “The Wedding Banquet”

SINNERS

[Author's note: If you're unaware of Sinners' mid-film hook and genre bent, I'd recommend staying in blissful ignorance, and ignoring this review, until after seeing the movie. If you're in-the-know, by all means proceed.]

There's no point in burying the lede on this. Even though it's only April, I can't imagine seeing a more dazzling, thrilling, thunderously satisfying 2025 release than Ryan Coogler's Sinners.

It's said that the greatest movies give you a little bit of everything. This, however, might be first great movie that literally gives you everything, considering that most revered titles don't think to add bloody supernatural horror, original blues songs, and an American-history primer into the mix. Taking place, its coda excepted, solely within a 24-hour period in a Depression-era community in rural Mississippi, Coogler's fifth full-length feature is dramatic, funny, scary, sexy, weird, surprising (even shocking), and deeply, almost overwhelmingly moving, and at around its midpoint, it boasts what might be the most imaginative, dynamically directed musical sequence I've witnessed all millennium. Scratch that: The sequence in question needs no modifier, “musical” or otherwise. If the Academy Awards were held tomorrow, Sinners would win at least a dozen trophies and deserve every last one of them.

Yet the specific gut punch of Coogler's latest extends beyond it being the infrequent critical sensation (currently 98-percent “freshness” on Rotten Tomatoes) that's also a massive hit with audiences. (Although Sinners, which earned some $45 million domestic over Easter weekend, is in no way “merely” a horror film, it's the first in its genre to nab an “A” rating from CinemaScore over the polling firm's 47-year history.) This is also the writer/director's first original outing since Fruitvale Station – and even Coogler's script for that 2013 indie breakthrough was based on actual events. More recently, 2015's Rocky update Creed was superb, it's hard to overstate the effect of 2018's Black Panther, and 2022's far-less-worthy Black Panther: Wakanda Forever at least found its helmer, on occasion, doing his best amidst nearly impossible circumstances. Still, that was eight years of Coogler effectively stuck in The Franchise Zone, and despite the pleasures of the familiar IP, some of us were beginning to wonder if the artist had anything personal left to say, and any unique way of saying it. Hoo-boy. Did he ever.

For all of its additional pleasures, Sinners is the rare horror film that you can imagine working just (or almost) as well with the horror elements excised; during the first half of its never-dull 138 minutes, the movie is like Mudbound with more jokes, personality, and narrative urgency. An enticing, unsettling prelude set in a small Baptist church in 1932 is quickly followed by the previous day's dawn, as well as our official introduction to protagonist Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore (the affecting, exciting screen newcomer Miles Caton). An aspiring blues guitarist whose pastor father (Saul Williams) warns him that “the devil's music” is the gateway to Hell, Sammie is lured into a potentially lucrative, artistically fulfilling career with the arrival of his twin cousins Elijah and Elias, respectively nicknamed “Smoke” and “Stack” (both of whom are played by Coogler's cinematic muse Michael B. Jordan, who has appeared in all five of his director's films). World War I veterans and recent enforcers for Al Capone in Chicago, Smoke and Stack have returned to their native Clarksdale, Mississippi, newly wealthy and hauling crates of Irish beer and Italian wine, their plan to open a juke joint – that very night! – with Sammie as one of the featured entertainers. Over the course of the day's prep, they also reunite with a number of figures from their pasts, not all of whom are happy that the Smoke/Stack twins are back.

There's Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Smoke's estranged, occult-minded wife whom he left not long after the death of their child. There's Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), Stack's mixed-race, white-passing former lover who was similarly abandoned. There's Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), an aging, drunkard pianist; Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a married blues chanteuse for whom Sammie carries a torch; Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller), a burly field worker hired as juke-joint muscle. There are Grace and Bo Chow (Li Jun Li and Yao), the Chinese proprietors of the local general store and parents to the teenage Lisa (Helena Hu). And there's Hogwood (David Maldonado), the clearly racist landowner who provides Smoke and Stack with the defunct sawmill that will house the Moores' rural nightclub for Black patrons. Through hard work, community effort, and the twins' bankroll, their juke joint opens in record time, and despite some financial issues – chiefly most guests paying with money that isn't legal tender – a grand time is had by all. The party would've no doubt lasted longer if vampires hadn't shown up at the door.

Yes, folks: Sinners is a vampire movie, and as that synopsis and bevy of character descriptions likely indicate, it takes its sweet-ass time becoming a vampire movie. At no point, though, are you anxious for the setup to end or the carnage to begin, primarily because Coogler and his collaborators pull off such an exquisite feat of world-building. On a design level, Coogler's achievement is unerringly fine, the locations and costumes not looking simply period-appropriate but feeling genuinely lived-in. Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, meanwhile, lights the rustic images with a sensitivity to color and texture that's frequently flabbergasting; you can practically feel the temperatures shifting from early-morning cool to scorching afternoon to the somehow even-more-scorching interior temps when the juke joint fills with sweaty bodies and sweatier passions. As visually remarkable as Coogler's Wakanda is, it always suggests, perhaps intentionally, the 72-degrees-in-the-shade of southern California. This inarguably hotter-in-all-ways Mississippi-in-'32 seems both foreign and as recognizable as the yellowing images in a home photo album, and even though Coogler's characters are new to us, it doesn't take long to sense that we instinctively know them, too.

This really has been quite the year, so far, for actors acting opposite themselves: Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17; Robert De Niro in The Alpha Knights; Cristin Milioti and Jimmi Simpson in the Black Mirror episode USS Callister: Into Infinity. Now it's Michael B. Jordan carrying on the tradition, though nothing about his portrayals, here, reads as a stunt. Jordan's Smoke is the more taciturn, and sadder, figure, carrying the weight of immeasurable grief alongside bone-deep pragmatism. Like his brother, Smoke can revert to violence quickly – one of our first views of him on his own finds Smoke shooting two townsfolk for almost committing a crime – but he's also thoughtful and reasonably collected, his nature signified by the serene turquoise blue of his matching tie and chapeau. Stack, clad with red accessories, is the gregarious charmer of the pair, quick with a smile and wad of cash until confronted by Mary, when we understand the depths of his interior pain. These are stunningly complex, fully fleshed-out characters, and Jordan, who has always done his finest work with Coogler, distinguishes them both with such wit and confidence that they transcend the casting gimmick. Unlike with similarly bravura scenes involving Pattinson and De Niro, when Smoke leaned over to accept Stack's lit match for his cigarette, I didn't reflexively flinch at the jaw-dropping twinning effects.

That may have had something to do with Sinners being so rife with performance miracles that the visual ones barely registered. (The aural ones, however, most certainly did, with Oscar-winning Black Panther composer Ludwig Göransson contributing a phenomenal, genre-hugging score.) You could narrow down my list of favorite castmates simply by returning to any of the aforementioned parenthetical names, but I will make special cases for Mosaku, with her withering heartsickness and earthy sensuality; Li, her devastating maternal ache resulting in a hideously relatable decision; and especially the acting genius that is Delroy Lindo, whose heartrending Delta Slim also manages to earn an unanticipated belly laugh in a sequence of particularly high tension. I relished my time with the entirety of Coogler's non-vampiric ensemble, and by the time it became evident that bloodshed was on the horizon, I dreaded the prospect of losing any of their characters. Well, except for Maldonado's Hogwood. For obvious reasons.

Still, blood was always going to be on the menu – and when it comes, it lands through wonderfully strange, off-kilter means. The first appearance of our chief nemesis Remmick (Jack O'Connell) is unusual enough, as this head vamp makes his introduction as a tender-faced, badly hurt Southerner hoping to be let into a Klan couple's home for his own safety. (Sinners has extraordinary fun, and hurts our insides, with the conceit of vampires forever needing to be invited in.) It's when Remmick, now with the “turned” Klansmen in tow, visits the juke joint that the nefariousness of their mission grows increasingly clear … and in a fantastic touch, at least at first, they aren't invited inside. Instead, they use diabolical passive-aggression to get what they want, and when that trick doesn't work, they turn to something even more terrifying: Irish step-dancing. Were Coogler's film not as controlled as it is, there are times in which you might think the writer/director has lost his mind, and the loony bravado of O'Connell's scenes would be particularly easy to laugh at. Coogler, however, stays the course and all but dares us not to laugh, his brazenness resulting in something way more satisfying: an open-mouthed smile of sincere admiration for objective silliness rendered with such joyous swagger.

Seasoned horror fans will notch plenty of references: to Bigelow's Near Dark; to Carpenter's The Thing; to Kubrick's The Shining. (In that latter example, when a character is trapped behind a locked door, Coogler isn't even pretending to not be doing what he's doing.) Yet what makes Sinners feel like an instant classic, and a singular one, are all the ways in which it doesn't remind you of anything that preceded it. Even the vampire angle feels truly novel. Because vampirism can be, and has been, a metaphor for just about everything, it's staggering to realize that it hasn't been employed much (that I'm aware of) in regard to appropriation – one race feeding off another as a way to essentially eliminate cultural identity. It takes a while to fully comprehend the insidiousness of what Coogler's vampires are up to, and once you do, the film becomes less a monster flick than an aching tragedy for the very idea of America, its promise and dream forever out of reach. I mourned characters' deaths here – or, worse than their deaths, their “turnings.” I was even more inconsolable for what those violent endings meant.

Yet somehow, despite all the suffering, Coogler's fifth feature is still a testament to life – to the hard-won triumphs and determinism and joy that make time on this planet bearable. I felt it deeply in the brief, glorious appearance of blues legend Buddy Guy, who has evidently reached the Harry Belafonte apex of his career: You look at this astounding 88-year-old, and recognize what his existence means, and your eyes instantly well with feeling. (As was true with Belafonte, Guy's line readings are also inexpressively beautiful.) I felt transcendent happiness in the many, many blues and soul numbers – hell, even the Irish ballads! – performed with such astonishing grace and emotion, that sensation exemplified by Jordan's gleeful, wide-eyed expression, as Stack, the first time he hears his cousin sing.

And I felt it most pointedly in Coogler's mid-film tour de force in which the power of Sammie's music is enough to conjure ghosts of the past and the future. Without warning, yet with all the inevitability in the world, the bluesman and his revelers were suddenly sharing the same space, one after another, with African tribal people and pop artists and rappers – a divine coalescence of musical history that had me laughing and sobbing, and resulted in a figurative barn burning almost religious in its fervor. This seemingly expendable yet heart-stoppingly essential sequence is, without exaggeration, one of the most stunningly powerful individual scenes I've viewed in more than a half-century of moviegoing. Directors have won Oscars for far less than what Coogler accomplishes in these three-ish minutes, and it's one of myriad reasons I'll be returning to the resplendent Sinners again and again and again.

THE WEDDING BANQUET

Sitcoms posing as realism are dicey propositions. This was certainly the case when Ang Lee, in 1993, delivered The Wedding Banquet, his much-loved tale of a gay Taiwanese immigrant who marries a Chinese woman to get her a green card and get himself a beard for his homophobic parents. That film's sustaining, agreeably silly comic premise was elevated by warm performances and the sharpness of its presentation, and the same, despite the remake being slightly less savvy on both counts, can be said for director/co-writer Andrew Ahn's 2025 The Wedding Banquet. It's a daffy yet earnest rom-com-dram with a conceit that one character rightfully labels “preposterous,” and more energy directed toward its inherent slapstick-iness might've been warranted. Yet the film is also warm and winning, and if it doesn't quite transcend the goofiness of its conceit, that's no big deal. In this vanishing genre these days, “good enough” is pretty much the new “good.”

Our heroes are Seattle residents and romantic couples Lee and Angela (Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran) and Chris and Min (Bowen Yang and Han Gi-chan), and beyond these devoted pals' shared affection and domicile – the guys live in the gals' backyard “guest house” that's basically a refurbished garage – they're linked by the twinned pickles they're in. After two unsuccessful attempts at in vitro fertilization, Lee and Angela, desperate for a child, have run out of money for a third try. Meanwhile, with Min having spent seven years pursuing costume design in America, his über-wealthy grandmother Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung) has decreed that it's time for him to return to Korea and take over the family business. Min could stay in Washington if Chris agrees to marry him, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards for the loving commitment-phobe. That's when Min has his brainstorm: What if he and Angela got married instead, so that Min could get his green card and stay with his beau, and his inherited riches would pay for the IVF and, theoretically, a baby for Angela and Lee? What about his foolproof plan could possibly go wrong?!

Despite the humanist tenor of the original Wedding Banquet – which, like this new film, was co-written by Lee's frequent collaborator James Schamus – the previews for Ahn's version have leaned heavily into the inherent wackiness, and I'll admit that I wish the movie itself leaned into it more. Ahn's sitcom-ready guffaws land with the crackle they should, thanks largely to the sensational timing of Joan Chen as Angela's ally-to-a-fault mother. Too much of the film, though, is oddly slow and mopey and introspective in the Sundance-approved manner, and promising comic scenarios tend to fizzle out before we've even had proper chance to gauge their possibilities. There's a scene here, similar to one in Mike Nichols' The Birdcage (and the French La Cage Aux Folles before that), in which everyone has to effectively de-queer the house prior to grandma's visit, only to realize that just about everything in the place is some kind of gay. It would've been nice, if just for the comic mortification, had Ja-Young actually scanned the premises at the start – surveying the blandness of the terrain – and recognizing that this dwelling was so straight that only secretly gay residents must live there.

Much as I traditionally adore Bowen Yang, it also would've been nice, given the film's realist bent, had he dug deeper for some fundamental truth in the eternally waffling Chris. Though he gives his role a decent shot, Yang is all surface feeling, and seems far more confident in the overt zaniness than he ever does in the melancholy. (Chris is like one of Yang's SNL caricatures played straight … so to speak.) Ahn's other performers, however, fare a lot better, and while the excellent-until-further-notice Gladstone is beautifully understated and Tran weeps buckets of convincing tears, Han, whose every English-language reading is unpredictable, is the true revelation, so offhandedly hilarious and touching that you don't want to applaud him so much as adopt him. If The Wedding Banquet belongs to anyone, though, it's Minari Oscar winner Youn, whose role has been smartly devised as nobody's ninny, and whose forthright sensibility and reserves of buried emotion almost make you wish the film had ditched its comedic angle entirely. Almost. Youn, a screen dynamo at 77, is awfully funny, too.