Sinners

This is a story told through its music, and it's so well done.

Sinners is a redemption movie, a revenge movie with elements of Blaxploitation, and certainly a red-blood-soaked horror movie&#59; it’s also deeply romantic and has the rhythms and audaciousness of some of our boldest musicals.

Somewhere in this artful and audacious 137-minute horror/thriller is an even more phenomenal 120-minute film.

Yes, Coogler fluffs the ending, but by then all the heavy lifting has been done.

Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan deliver a vampire movie for the ages.

Do all the narrative and thematic threads come together? No. Sinners almost works better in parts than as a whole. But it’s always enthralling, as if you too is trapped in a spell, as if you’ve struck a bargain with the devil.

Vast, expansive and full-throated, this epic genre exercise from writer-director Ryan Coogler is a whole lot of movie, predominantly for the right reasons.

Sinners is thoughtful and wildly entertaining, sexy and haunting, gory and thrilling, lively and whimsical. It takes its sweet time to get where it’s going, but when it arrives at its biggest moments, the film delivers on spectacle of sweeping scale.

There’s an astonishing scene … where young Sammie is wailing on the guitar and causing the time streams to come together, … a dose of magical realism that elevates “Sinners” into something as thought-provoking as it is entertaining.

While often insightful about the way we’re tempted and how evil can be naively trifled with, Coogler’s movie doesn’t have a robust view of indwelling sin and moral culpability.