‘Sinners’ Looks Likely to Win Oscar Nominations » Urban Milwaukee

Sinners was shown briefly in some US movie houses last spring, but is available on some streaming platforms and is also now scheduled to return to theaters in 2026 because it has made the Oscar short list. That’s the movie industry bible of films likely to win awards nominations.

Once again, commercial clout clashes with arthouse esthetics, splitting the audience between revulsion and praise. The current chaos and confusion in society and in the film industry put a new face on all this.

Sinners is a visual hoopla of voodoo vibes, blood-dripping vampires, race relations and grinding carnage. Raunchy jazz and shimmy dancing may be the traditional devil’s music, but here it is set in flattering opposition to the Irish jigs and country music of the all-white neck biters lurking in the woods outside a raucous black juke joint (a converted sawmill) – and there are plenty of necks to bite, jars of pickled garlic to fling and wooden stakes to toss around in defense and rage.

If nothing else, the film is an encyclopedia of musical influences and costumes from West African griot to Caribbean voodoo to primitive jazz to traditional mountain tunes.

To understate the obvious, the film has divided moviegoers, with some online voices furious that critics are treating it with depth and length while others applaud its freedom to mix horror genres with underlying social meanings.

My view? It is not among my choices for 2025’s 10 best films, but it sure is worth arguing about in a society that has lost any clear understanding of where it has been and where it is going.

Sharply dressed and menacing, twin brothers Smoke and Stack are back in the 1932 Mississippi Delta to open the juke joint. It’s their homeland after a profitable mob life in Chicago.

Things almost look pastoral as they drive back roads gathering the cast. Smoke and Stack are both played by budding superstar Michael B. Jordan with the help of a body double. A hard-drinking old musician (Delroy Lindo) joins the road trips, as does a young cousin (newcomer Miles Caton) who weaves guitar spells at his preacher father’s church and a burly bouncer named Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller).

Also encountered are Stack’s old love interest (Hailee Steinfeld) and Smoke’s old flame (Oluwunmi Mosaku), an expert in home remedies who once gave Smoke a mojo bag that still hangs around his neck for protection.

Some abrupt cuts in the middle of routine scenes do warn us of trouble to come during the early going – they are like a knife slashing through the screen. We are immediately on edge through an encounter with oily Jack O’Connell, who will turn out to be a key figure.

Writer-director Ryan Cooger has already struck box office gold and demonstrated technical prowess in FruitvilleStation, Creed and Black Panther, and he is clearly following and exceeding the blood and guts, adult-oriented trail laid by directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.

There is more than white vs black history involved here, though fascinating how you can envision some balancing of the scales now that black culture is treated equitably — and any of us who have spent some time in the old South will note interesting scholarship efforts to touch on the simultaneous plights of Indian tribes and Chinese immigrants.

That all leads to a frantic battle of writhing bodies and bloody wrestling, soon to be joined by a more specific Al Capone style shootout with the hovering Ku Klux Klan. Snip-snip cameras, explosions and muscular closeups are used in abundance against some dreamy memory moments.

This cast delivers almost as charismatically as the special effects people do, what with all the burning, fighting, crowded dance floors and sudden eruptions of neck wounds. The movie’s first half is also noteworthy for its language, what once was called black patois but relies on words muttered at the back of the throat and the quick-fire vocabulary that dominates rap and hip hop music. So it’s no surprise that early prints of the film included subtitles in BALS — Black American Sign Language.

Steinfeld (who has certainly grown up since playing the 14-year-old lead in the 2010 Coen brothers version of True Grit) fools us into thinking she is the sexy ingenue until she transforms into something quite different. Mosaku is an assertive earth mother. Lindo is a veteran scene stealer. Jordan’s battle to avoid becoming a vampire comes with an added twist.

Sinners may stand out more on television, since its technical quality and story make the current wave of zombie series look silly. But the popularity of zombie and vampire bluntness does explain a lot of what is happening in today’s movie world. It is confounding both the billionaires trying to own studios and the artists trying to survive in the middle of all this. That’s partly why films like Sinners are hurtling down paths of mixed genres once dismissed by industry awards.

As of this writing, only HBO Max is showing Sinners (and it can be purchased on Amazon), but it has gotten a lot of discussion – and traditionally awards talk brings new bookings since there are TV audiences for SAG, WGA, DGA, Oscars and Golden Globes ceremonies – and there sure is a market for vampires out there.

Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blog here and here. For his Dom’s Snippets, an unusual family history and memoir, go to domnoth.substack.com