By Michael Marano

It takes spine to mash things up this boldly, and the bravery of auteur director Ryan Coogler’s storytelling is breathtaking.

Sinners, directed by Ryan Coogler. Screening at AMC Assembly Row, ACM Boston Commons.

There are a lot of factors in Ryan Coogler’s body of work that make him an auteur director of the 1970s mold.

The main factor?

He fucking LOVES movies.

That seems like such a weird thing to say. But the fact is, in today’s algorithm-driven movie business, there’s a huge divide between “content” made by hired guns for mega-conglomerates run by big-business dipshit Corporate Assholes and … y’know … movies made by people who actually like movies.

How great is Coogler’s love of movies?

To answer that, let’s take a look at the incredible filmmaking talent that has worked on tentpole movies, of late.

Bill Pope, one of the greatest cinematographers of our time, shot Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. And it looked like utter shit. Lifeless. No vibrancy, despite the comic book color palette. Anybody who shoots toothpaste commercials could have shot what is actually on the screen for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. And Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was directed by James Mangold, a hell of a director and a great storyteller who broke the franchise mold when he made Logan, which, like Dial of Destiny, was a Larger Than Life hero’s swan song. Logan was a real movie, made with a love of movies, that shamelessly proclaimed Mangold’s worship of Shane and got a pass for that cinematic shamelessness because Logan was made with love. So much so, that Logan, a fucking comic book movie, landed Mangold an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. No such love is present in Dial of Destiny, which, due to Corporate Assholery, was a rote and lifeless exercise that should have been a grand send-off for one of the greatest pop culture heroes of our time. Mangold has bounced right back with A Complete Unknown, so the Corporate Mediocrity Monster didn’t completely devour him.

When was the last time you enjoyed a Jurassic Park movie? Despite all the skill and expertise that goes into the crafting of those movies, nothing compares to the sense of wonder that was achieved by those thundering dinos more than 30 years ago.

There hasn’t been a Star Wars movie since 2019’s utterly wretched The Rise of Skywalker, which was created by committee and incel rage Tweets. The last Star Wars movie before that? The clusterfuck that was Solo, the original directors of which were fired for being too … well. .. original. Their replacement, Ron Howard, could have made a good Star Wars movie, but suits are gonna suit.

Now, look at what Coogler managed to pull off when he made the truly fantabulous Black Panther.

Working within the ruthlessly rigid Marvel Machine, he made a movie that glowed with his adoration for James Bond movies, 1970s Blaxploitation movies, Hong Kong action flicks, science fiction flicks, urban dramas, fantasy movies, and, yes,  even comic books. Fer Chrissakes, in 2015 he took his Fruitvale Station indie cred and used that capital to make Creed, which completely reinvented and resuscitated the Rocky franchise, which up to that point had been bled dry.

Corporations are talent vampires.

Coogler’s love of movies is a cross, keeping the vampires at bay.

Which brings me to Sinners, his vampire movie that dares the Corporate Asshole movie-making machine mentality to make anything one-tenth as good.

How does Coogler’s infectious love for movies fang-proof his vampire film against Corporate, By-the-Numbers vampirism, that sucks the joy out of most big genre releases?

Let me put it to you this way — I caught whiffs of The Godfather in this movie, because it’s about gangsters, brothers, trying to overcome the legacies of their family’s past, firmly rooted in the 19th century, in order to grab a slice of the 20th century American Dream. This distinctly African-American, Coppola-esque meditation on gangsterism, like Coppola’s The Cotton Club, glories in the legacies and contributions of Black music to the point that Sinners becomes a full-on musical. In fact, it’s the best goddam musical I’ve seen in ages. Through the tropes of the musical, Coogler can dive right the hell into magic realism, and give us a rip-snorting Night of the Living Dead siege story with a side-step into an O Brother, Where Art Thou?-ish meditation on the origins of American folk music and a critique of colonization and cultural appropriation.

In lesser hands, Sinners should have imploded under its own weight. The seams couldn’t possibly hold.

But Coogler’s love for the movies he riffs on gives him the permission to mash up these disparate elements into something solid and unique. His love doesn’t just make him fearless, it makes him ferocious. It takes spine to mash things up this boldly, and the bravery of his storytelling is breathtaking.

And as for the storytelling? The sweltering mugginess of the Mississippi Delta in which Sinners is set is palpable. Backstories and characters are presented with grace and ease, giving us a freighted sense of personal and local history as the story moves forward. This earned sense of the remembrance of times past, the domestic resonance of connection makes the Night of the Living Dead-ish structure of the movie’s second half as much a family drama as it is a siege story.

There’s a musicality to the mayhem that Coogler stages in Sinners. The violence and the action scenes are rhythmically cut with the precision of a master choreographer. Yeah, lots of directors pull that off. But violence like this has never been executed so musically for a movie in which music is the thematic and narrative backbone.

Sinners is a statement of African-American history coming out at a moment when African-American history is being erased from our history books. This is a historical movie that focuses on a siege at a time that history itself is under siege. This erasure of the past is a kind of vampirism, a predatory, soulless cruelty. There is a promise of “fellowship and love,” but it comes at the cost of homogenization and assimilation. Sinners, in short, couldn’t have come out at a more volatile time, and thank God it is coming out now to counter these times.

By the way, when you see Sinners, do NOT even think of leaving until the theater lights come up and the very last credit has rolled. Sinners doesn’t have postcredit scenes. It has postcredit mini-sequels.

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Horror writer, personal trainer, writing coach and editor Michael Marano has been reviewing films since 1990. www.BluePencilMike.com