Sinners (2025) review

Twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return to Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1932 - after making some money in Chicago working with Al Capone - and purchase a sawmill which they convert into a "juke joint," with their guitar-playing cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) hanging around them at all times, but then a group of Irish folk singers, led by Remmick (Jack O'Connell), want to come in ... and it just so happens that they're vampires and intent on stealing the "stories and music" of the African-American community.  While this was a box office success and received a lot of hype, it's another example of Liberal Bait in which the "villains" are all "Caucasians" - notice how the first "infiltrator" to the "private" club is mixed-race Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), Stack's ex-girlfriend - and it "borrows" from Rodriguez's From Dusk till Dawn for the third act.  Coogler's too slick to allow it to get truly gnarly like a significantly smaller-budgeted blaxploitation movie from the 1970's, and he really could have used help rewriting most of the terrible dialogue.  The final scenes are nice, however: the Ku Klux Klan is mowed down (which is always a positive) and then it flashes forward to 1992 where blues legend Buddy Guy, playing a much older Sammie, is jamming out and sipping on whiskey.