Over the last 13 years Ryan Coogler has directed one truly searing and formidable drama — the riveting, socially impactful, fact-based Fruitvale Station (’13) — followed by four urgent, high-octane exercises in glossy, unsubtle formula fare — Creed (’15), Black Panther (’18), Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (’22) and Sinners (’25).
There’s nothing wrong with being a director of audience-friendly, social-metaphor genre films that make money. Coogler is a bit like Don Siegel or Sam Fuller or Clint Eastwood in this respect. Or The Ox–Bow Incident‘s William Wellman. No shame in this.
If Coogler’s first four films had been Creed, the two Panthers and Sinners, and then he’d suddenly upped his game by directing and releasing Fruitvale Station in ’25, nobody would be be cheering louder or arguing more passionately for Fruitvale winning a Best Picture Oscar than myself.
I’m sorry but Sinners just isn’t an Oscar-worthy Best Picture thang — it’s a Arkoffian exercise in formulaic, manipulative, mass-audience Jiffy popcorn (Delta blues, paleface Irish vampires, cunnilingus, KKK yokels).
It’s obviously been impactful and has made a shitload of dough-ray-me, but it lacks the vibrational spirit and resonant, rock-solid integrity of a true-blue Best Picture winner. It’s basically a pricey exploitation film, and Academy POCs and wokeys don’t care. They just want to feel good about themselves, or they want their team to prevail or whatever.
God help us, but One Battle After Another, which I admire for the chops at least, might lose out to the mulchy Sinners.
I get the idea of Sinners, an allegory about the blight of rural, old-time racism and deep-fried African-American culture and the musical-spiritual tradition of Robert “Crossroads” Johnson…I get all that.
But it lacks an artful pedigree. It’s obviously powered by an undercurrent, but it’s basically a coarse drive-in movie. It’s not all that different from Jack Sholder‘s The Hidden (’87), one of the greatest action-driven, social-metaphor monster films ever made, only Sholder’s film (which is easily as important as Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers) is smarter and funnier.
Like I said on 3.3.26, Sinners could have saved itself if Coogler had gone with a darkly comedic attitude…if he’d had injected some Hidden-like humor.
Friendo: “I think the first hour of Sinners is great. The vampire half, less so. The last third…a mess. But I was never bored.”
HE sideview: There is irony in Sasha Stone, who is as anti-woke as they come (takes one to know one), pimping Sinners as God’s gift to cinema while excoriating the woke degradation of Hollywood movies that began eight or nine years ago.
The irony is that Sasha doesn’t seem to realize that Sinners — the movie itself, the critical acclaim for it, the apparent likelihood of it winning the Best Picture Oscar a week from today (Sunday, 3.15.26) — Sinners is the very quintessence of the malignancy that she’s been deploring since ’18 or ’19 or certainly since the Great Awokening of ’20.
Sasha replies at 1:30 pm: “What you’re saying applies to One Battle After Another. Sinners is not about wokeness. Its success is not about wokeness. Absolutely not true. Sinners made more money, and has earned better reviews, both from critics and audiences, than any other film in the Best Picture lineup. One Battle After Another is a box-office failure with an asinine, simpleton plot. Wokeness isn’t about black movies. It’s about white people using minority groups to elevate themselves through virtue signalling.”
A couple of hours later Sasha posted a lengthier response on awardsdaily.com. Here it is
Coogler-Jordan pic snapped by HE inside the Salle Debussy, May 2013:
