Pecadores

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; 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.

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

It's both a wildly ambitious meditation on American history and a rip-roaring good time.

In combining the old genre tropes with a potent message - the eternal recipe for a great horror film - the ever-entertaining director again shows he has something forceful to say, be it with boxers, superheroes or blood-suckin' vampires.

It's fun and rowdy and suitably lurid.

There is a scene smack dab in the middle of Sinners where I felt my soul elevate to a new plane of existence.

If Sinners is messy, it's sometimes pretty glorious, too. Coogler is swinging wide and far beyond the boundaries of franchise fare.

Sinners had me cheering for every thrill and spill, all while mulling the deeper concerns threaded through it.

With Sinners, the director is playing a different game. He's forcing the broad mainstream audience he's cultivated to meet him fully on his own eccentric terms. That the results are imperfect doesn't matter because they're so often exhilarating.

Sinners is so atmospheric, richly textured and gorgeous to watch that it's almost a disappointment when it veers into supernatural territory. But if the horror beats prove a touch derivative, Coogler builds suspense with shivery assurance.

It is a phantasm of Black Southern delights.

An awe-inspiring ode to what music means to communities and cultures

Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler team for their best and most daring work yet, a game-changing vampire-gangster-western-musical that's divisive, dangerous and primed to explode. it's like nothing you've ever seen and the best movie of this young year

Coogler has delivered one of the best blockbusters of the year, and that it has a heart and brain behind all the blood-drenched thrills just makes it that much more satisfying. Open wide, and get ready to take a big old bite out of "Sinners."

The great sin of "Sinners" is that, for all the audacity of its conception, it finally collapses into the familiar.

Jordan is at his very best here, yet more proof that Coogler might be the only director the actor's worked with thus far who truly understands what makes him a star.

Coogler proves just as adept with horror tropes as he's been with music ones. At times in Sinners, he seems to be simultaneously channeling Jordan Peele and Quentin Tarantino to come up with something uniquely his own.

Although Coogler's film encompasses legend and mysticism, his manner is rationally extravagant; the action, even at its most fantastical, is underpinned by audacious ideas.