Sinners (2025)

Walking out of Sinners, I thought: human creativity will never be exhausted. Yes, we’re surrounded by a bland artistic landscape shaped by algorithms that attract and desiccate human minds. The tech companies are carnivorous pitcher plants and we are flies…and then a film like Ryan Coogler’s Sinners restores perspective. There is a reservoir of beauty and intellect and pain and awe inside our species that is deep, deep. Even more reassuringly, the combinatorics are invincible. Trillions of idea- and emotion-fragments can be remixed into an effectively infinite number of works of art. There is a scene in Sinners in which space and time collapse; no single element in that scene is original, but together it’s one of the most moving few minutes in film history. If anything, Sinners might have benefited from leaving some ideas on the cutting room floor. The Irish and their music have a complicated and mournful story to tell, for example, which Coogler only grazes. But the abiding feeling is of art restoring what politics has destroyed. 9