Sinners is a great movie, with terrific music, acting, dancing, and camera work. I suspect it will get a bunch of Oscar nominations, which would be somewhat unusual for a movie released early in the year. It’s one of those interesting horror movies where the setting and the characters are far more interesting than the horror part. Prey (2022) is like this – a wonderful sketch of native plains life in the 1800s, painstakingly researched with extensive consultation with tribal experts, and then the alien predator shows up. Don’t get me wrong, Prey is the best predator movie ever made, and the predator parts are awesome, and Sinners is a great vampire movie with awesome vampire parts, but I found myself almost wishing I could see this without vampires and just keep going in 1930’s Mississippi with all these wonderfully drawn people. That movie would no doubt be even massiver Oscar bait.

One kind of embarrassing note – I was sure that Smoke was Michael B. Jordan, but then I started thinking that Stack looked really familiar, and then I started wondering if I wasn’t remembering what Michael B. Jordan looked like and if Stack wasn’t Michael B. Jordan, but if that was true, then who the hell was Smoke? Turns out he played both roles, and both performances were different, emotive, and noteworthy.

Definitely worth seeing on the big screen if you still do that – visually striking, from sets to costumes to cotton fields, and it just feels like a big movie.