Best Pictures #124: 2025 (98th) Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee: Sinners

by A.J.

Best Pictures #124: 2025 (98th) Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee

Sinners

"A sinner like me, I can't ask for more than that."

I used to say that a genuinely good horror movie only comes along every 5 years or so. Thankfully, the last few years have proven me wrong. 2025 was a good year for horror movies, but the clear stand out was writer-director Ryan Coogler's Sinners. It was a box office and critical hit, a rare combination for a horror movie. It is also rare for the Academy Awards to recognize a movie released in the first half of the year. It is even rarer for the Academy to recognize horror movies. So, it is very remarkable and exciting that Sinners not only received Oscar nominations, but received 16 nominations including Best Picture, the most of any film in Academy history. This is fitting because Sinners is a most remarkable and special film. 

In his 5th collaboration with Ryan Coogler (after Creed and the Black Panther movies to name a few), Michael B. Jordan plays gangster twins Smoke and Stack in 1932 Mississippi. After 7 years in Chicago they return to their hometown loaded with cash, Irish beer, Italian wine, and a secret trunk to set up a juke joint, have a good time, and watch the money flow in. They reconnect with friends and lovers, not all of whom are excited to see Smoke and Stack return. They also take in their teenage cousin, Sammie (Miles Caton), nicknamed Preacherboy, who is supremely gifted at the guitar and playing the blues, which sets him at odds with his stern preacher father. 

There are two halves to Sinners and any film with this kind of structure, especially one where the tone and even genre shift drastically, risks being uneven or a letdown in one way or another. From Dusk Til Dawn is a perfect example of this: the general consensus is that the first half of the movie with the gangster brothers is superior to the vampire action second half. The two halves are so distinct that they seemingly have little to do with each other and many people wished the whole movie was just about the gangster brothers. Sinners does not suffer from this problem. It does not feel uneven or disjointed. All of the character work and relationships of the first half of the movie are not thrown out for the second half. The actions and fates of the characters are informed by everything that has come before. Coogler’s Oscar nominated original screenplay never goes on autopilot. 

The marketing was secretive about just what specific type of horror faced the characters. Yet, it was never meant to be a secret, and certainly isn’t now, that this is a vampire movie. The film itself only speaks of evil and devil in vague terms at first. Aside from some quick imagery at the beginning, nothing supernatural happens for the first 40 minutes, but Sinners is not hiding that it is a horror movie. It takes its time getting to the horror but it does not waste that time. 

A prologue tells us how there can be people so gifted at making music that it conjures spirits of the past and the future and it can also attract evil. Sammie “Preacherboy” is such a person. The film's signature sequence of has Preacherboy’s music fulfilling the promise of the prologue in a dazzling and transcendent scene that should not work, that would be silly and pretentious in a lesser movie, but all of the right notes are hit in just the right way and the result is movie magic. 

Preacherboy is also the lynchpin between the story of the brothers and their nightclub and the assault of vampires who are drawn by his music. The mysterious party crashers are led by Remmick (Jack O'Connell), who also plays and enjoys music and speaks about equality and unity, about relieving pain and saving people. The best villains never see themselves as villains but Remmick only barely conceals his sinister and monstrous nature. More than victims and blood, he seeks to consume an entire person and their gifts and background and culture. The vampires have a collective mind, but it is clear that Remmick’s clan is not a round table.

Michael B. Jordan makes playing twins seem easy. It helps that they are dressed similarly but distinctly (Smoke wears blue; Stack wears red) and after their introduction they spend time apart allowing their personalities to grow. Jordan’s performance is what distinguishes the twins. It is no surprise he has earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination. It is also no surprise that the other standout performance comes from Delroy Lindo as Delta Slim, a drunken blues musician whose drunkenness and weary face show the pain and tribulations he has endured. Lindo has earned a Supporting Actor nomination, surprisingly the first of his long and impressive career. 

Sinners fits nicely under the pretentious term “elevated horror” that gets applied to arthouse horror films that receive awards and are liked by serious, scholarly critics. This is an “elevated horror” movie in the same way that Leonard Maltin describes the Astaire/Rogers musicals of the 1930’s as escapism that elevates the soul. The truth is that Sinners is a great movie whether you want to analyze it for themes and subtext or want to watch a tense, bloody vampire movie. Ryan Coogler made a horror movie that exceeds all expectations, as a horror fan I can’t ask for more than that. 

Sinners is streaming on HBOmax.

Nominees: Zinzi Coogler, Sev Ohanian, Ryan Coogler

Director: Ryan Coogler Screenplay: Ryan Coogler Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O'Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Delroy Lindo Production Company: Proximity Media Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures Release Date: April 18th, 2025 Total Nominations: 16, including Best Picture Other Nominations: Actor-Michael B. Jordan; Director-Ryan Coogler; Original Screenplay-Ryan Coogler; Supporting Actor-Delroy Lindo; Supporting Actress-Wunmi Mosaku; Cinematography-Autumn Durald Arkapaw; Production Design-Hannah Beachler (production designer), Monique Champagne (set decorator); Costume Design-Ruth E. Carter; Editing-Michael P. Shawver; Makeup and Hairstyling-Ken Diaz, Michael Fontaine, Shunika Terry; Original Score-Ludwig Göransson; Original Song-"I Lied to You", music and lyrics by-Ludwig Göransson, Raphael Saadiq; Sound-Chris Welcker, Benjamin A. Burtt, Felipe Pacheco, Brandon Proctor, Steve Boeddeker; Visual Effects-Michael Ralla, Espen Nordahl, Guido Wolter, Donnie Dean; Casting-Francine Maisler