After one Creed and two Black Panthers, Ryan Coogler has stepped off the franchise treadmill and delivered something truly rare: a passion project with soul. Sinners isn’t simply personal — it’s thunderous. Large in scope, bold in vision, and cinematic in the most sacred sense of the word. A once-in-a-lifetime film that reminds you why theaters exist in the first place. It doesn’t merely justify the theatrical experience — it exalts it.

At a time when major releases are increasingly engineered for streaming algorithms and background viewing, Sinners demands your full attention. It doesn’t move like anything else out there. It breathes, swells, and pauses when it needs to. This is a film made by someone in total command, unafraid to swing for transcendence. Coogler isn’t just making a movie; he’s preaching, and the sermon is celluloid.

Performances

Michael B. Jordan delivers not one, but two knockout performances—not variations on a theme, but radically different embodiments of the spirit. Challenging not only his range, but our perception of him as an actor. One performance is interior, wound tight like a clenched fist. The other is all heat and charisma. Together, they’re electric. Jordan doesn’t play against himself so much as he opens two separate dimensions. You never confuse them, there’s not a false moment in either, it’s simply the best work of his career, twice.

Then there’s Hailee Steinfeld, lord have mercy. It’s not that she looks incredible on camera (but she does), it’s that Coogler photographs her like he knows it’s going to become iconic. She moves through the frame like it was built for her. The kind of presence that doesn’t just dominate a screen — it owns it. Every costume, every glance, every flicker of light that bounces off her cheekbone feels handcrafted by the gods themselves. You could mount an argument that no one has ever looked better in a movie, and it would be hard to disagree. That is, until Jayme Lawson walks into frame.

She doesn’t enter scenes so much as command them, often with little more than a glance or shift in posture. There’s a kind of regal gravity to her—something deep in the eyes that suggests she knows more than everyone else in the room and is too gracious to say it. Coogler, to his credit, gives her space; he lets the camera linger. Her role might be smaller on the page, but her impact is seismic. She has the kind of stillness that speaks louder than shouting, the kind of fire that burns slow but sears deep. If Steinfeld is the sun of this movie, all brilliant heat and blinding aura, Lawson is the moon—cooler, quieter, but just as powerful.

Music

If cinema is the marriage of image and sound, Sinners might be the best example of that union. Ludwig Göransson is gunning for his third Oscar here, and if there’s any justice, he’ll get it. The score doesn’t accompany the film — it inhabits it. This isn’t background music or mood-setting atmosphere, it’s infrastructure. Beats rise like blood pressure, vocals slice like wind, basslines linger like ghosts. It’s one of the most vivid uses of music in any film this decade — maybe longer.

There’s a moment—three strikes of a match timed perfectly to a drumbeat—that lands so precisely, so viscerally, it bypasses your brain and plugs straight into your soul. This isn’t just soundtrack and score, but an ambient, omniscient presence within the film. It breathes with the characters, punctuates silences, and haunts even the quietest corners of the story. But the film doesn’t rely on moments like this; it builds.

The musical language here is hybridized, borderless. Gospel bleeds into trap, synth pads melt into string sections, percussive blasts crash against moments of stillness like waves hitting concrete. It’s rhythm as narrative. A story told not through plot or character, but through vibration.

Coogler’s always had a gift for music. He didn’t invent the “curated soundtrack as narrative layer” idea (Tarantino and Cameron Crowe might have something to say), but with Black Panther, he elevated it, and with Sinners, he perfects it. This is not merely songs over scenes—it’s composition as architecture. It’s not about taste, it’s authorship. A soundscape packed with memory, violence, grief, and transcendence.

It’s not just the best film score in years; it’s the film’s bloodstream. Every needle drop, every transition, every ambient swell is placed with intention. It’s not about selling an album — it’s about sculpting emotion.

Format

To watch Sinners in IMAX is to see the format war laid to rest. This is what cinema should look like. There’s a now-viral behind-the-scenes promo where Coogler walks through the different kinds of film: Super 8, 35mm, and 70mm IMAX, which was used for the film. A fun little glimpse at the kind of thought that goes into something like this. It’s informative, sure, but no video can prepare you for what it feels like when the image actually grows—not only in size, but in presence. There’s something sacred in that transformation. The frame expands, and so does your pulse.

The screen grows during key moments, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes dramatically. When it does, your breath catches. You realize this is what the medium can do. This is what all those flat, over-lit, under-composed streaming films can’t give you. Scale, detail, and intimacy at six stories tall.

Every puff of smoke, every bead of sweat, every shard of light slicing through a window—it all shimmers in the grain. Grit literally embedded in the image. It’s textured, physical, tangible. The format isn’t just a vessel—it’s a character, baked right into the screen.

The glowing sunset painting the sky in rich, impossible colors—oranges, reds, and deep violets swirling like a Turner canvas—practically begs to be seen tall and wide. On the big screen, it doesn’t even feel like watching a movie; it’s like being swallowed by one. The film doesn’t just play—it expands and contracts with the emotion of the story.

While only ten theaters in the world have a true 70mm print, don’t let that stop you. If you’re on the fence about driving an extra hour to a full-screen IMAX theater, I implore you: go. The difference is night and day. It’s not about prestige or checking some cinephile box. It’s about feeling the film the way it was meant to be experienced. It’s the difference between listening to a song through a wall and hearing it live with the speakers shaking your chest.

Conclusion

Sinners isn’t just Coogler’s best film — it’s his most complete. A passionate rejection of smallness, a reclamation of scale. It’s bold, mythic, and sharply modern. Utterly sincere in a way few films even attempt anymore. A gauntlet thrown at the feet of an industry that’s forgotten the power of images on a massive screen, accompanied by thunderous sound, shared by a crowd. It’s a film that understands the sacred alchemy of cinema. This is not merely plot and dialogue. It’s rhythm, light, texture, mood.

In lesser hands, this could have been a confused, indulgent mess. But Coogler is too precise for that. Sinners is a lot of things — visionary, operatic, intimate. At a time when theatrical releases feel like softened compromises or streaming leftovers, Sinners feels like a shot across the bow. A filmmaker in full command, reminding us that cinema isn’t content, it’s ritual. It doesn’t beg to be seen in theaters; it requires it. We come to this place for magic. This is why we go to the movies.