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When Team Empire set about pulling together a list of the best movies of 2025, the votes revealed one film as a clear winner: Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. The director of Black Panther, Creed, Fruitvale Station and more proved that he was able to tell captivating stories all of his own. Sinners begins as a gangster hangout movie, as twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) reunite in 1930s Mississippi to establish their own juke joint. And then, on opening night, things get crazy when vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell) shows up. Beyond being a gangster movie, a vampire film, a horror story, Sinners emerges as a meditation on art, and the blues, and cultural appropriation – all wrapped up in a genre blast.
“That’s so cool, that’s crazy,” Coogler says when Empire tells him Sinners is our film of the year. “It’s been a fun year at the movies. I couldn’t have imagined ours being number one.”
Except, Sinners has been everywhere, its impact undeniable – even to the director. Over the months since its release, Coogler has witnessed firsthand how the film has “started many deep discussions as people have registered and broken down all the various themes: racial justice, generational trauma, morality, and more, to the smallest detail,” he explains. “The big one I’ve seen is people reflecting on their ancestors, sharing pictures of their great-grandparents that were from Mississippi, and have similar clothes to the characters and similar stories to some of the characters.”
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The cultural specificity of what Sinners brings to the screen has seen audiences around the world connect with the story of Smoke, Stack, and the people of Clarksdale. “Somebody’s grandma was a rootworker (a Hoodoo practitioner), who had her own shop,” says Coogler, by way of example. “I saw a poster of a woman whose grandmother was white-passing, and had to make the decision on where she was going to live her life. Folks with Irish ancestry being surprised to go to the movie and hear certain songs from their childhood. People talking about which family members that they lost would get them to walk right out if they showed up [as a vampire]. I’ve seen all that stuff.”
In Sinners’ standout sequence, a blues performance in the juke joint seems to break down the temporal boundaries of our world, depicting the past, present and future of Black artistry all existing concurrently. This connection that art can create – across time, across culture, across boundaries – has been evident in how Sinners has been embraced by audiences. “Somehow people are thinking about the things that we were thinking about when we were making it. Somehow, through film language, they got right to the place that we were at,” Coogler says. “It’s been incredibly rewarding.” This is cinema that hits like a stake to the heart.