SINNERS

Here's the decision plain: skip this one. SINNERS is a genuinely strange, sometimes striking piece of filmmaking — half period drama about Black entrepreneurship in the segregated South, half vampire horror about white bloodsuckers literally trying to steal a young bluesman's soul and his music. Ryan Coogler shoots it with real craft, and the musical thread running through it is its best idea.

But the film uses that vampire metaphor to make a historical claim that simply isn't true: that white musicians have always stolen Black folk music wholesale. That's a serious charge to dress up as entertainment, and it's built on revisionist history that ignores how genuinely intertwined American music has always been.

Layer onto that at least 82 obscenities, extremely bloody violence, and two sex scenes, and the case against a theater trip gets easy. A closing vision of heaven and a gospel song at the credits offer a little light, but not enough to outweigh everything around them.

The practical answer: skip it.

Twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan, playing both) return to rural Mississippi in 1932 with money earned running liquor for Al Capone in Chicago. They buy a barn, recruit their talented young cousin Sammie as house guitarist, and open the best juke joint the county has ever seen. Opening night is going beautifully — music, dancing, drink — until three strangers arrive at the door asking to be let in. What happens next, we'll let you discover for yourself.

Three stars means real craft, undercut by real problems. Coogler pulls off a genuinely odd tonal high-wire act, opening as a rural drama about Black ambition and community — including a subplot about a local Asian grocer folded into that world — before swerving hard into horror. The musical throughline, anchored by Sammie's guitar and his father's warning that the blues opens a door to the devil, is the film's most interesting idea, and it mostly holds the two halves together.

Where it falters is in what that music thread is ultimately used for. Once the vampires arrive, the story's spiritual question about one young man's soul curdles into a political argument about cultural theft, and the film never earns that pivot — it just asserts it. Ambitious, well-made, and thematically hollow where it counts most.

SINNERS wants to be a parable, and its central claim is this: that white musicians have systematically stolen Black folk music, embodied here by pale, hymn-singing vampires literally trying to consume a young Black artist's soul and talent. That's a serious accusation to make through art, and it isn't true. American popular music — ragtime, blues, jazz, rock and roll — has always been a genuine mixture: Black spirituals and rhythm and blues alongside Appalachian ballads, Celtic melody, and country and western forms, developed and cross-pollinated by artists of many backgrounds working, often together, within a free market that rewarded originality wherever it appeared. A film willing to invent history to fuel racial grievance is doing something worse than getting facts wrong; it's manufacturing animosity where reconciliation is actually available.

That said, the film doesn't leave you with nothing. A closing vision of heaven — a dying man reunited with the girlfriend and infant son he lost — gestures at real hope beyond the grave. A post-credits scene has Sammie singing "This Little Light of Mine," a hymn drawn straight from Jesus's own words. And one character's self-sacrifice to save others echoes something true, even if the film doesn't trace it to its source.

Scripture answers the film's divisive premise directly: God "made from one man every nation of mankind" (Acts 17:26). The gospel doesn't sort people into thieves and the robbed by race — it makes them one family, in Christ, with one song worth singing.

Our answer is the same one we opened with: skip it. There's real filmmaking talent on display in SINNERS, and even a flicker of Christian hope at its edges — but a movie willing to rewrite history to stoke racial grievance, wrapped around extreme profanity, bloody violence, and explicit sex, isn't worth your evening or your conscience. Looking for something better to watch this week?