The auteur director behind Fruitvale Station deliriously detours from his Wakanda and Creed franchise universes for an original passion project: Sinners (A) is Ryan Coogler unleashed, a polished and imaginative production of a writer/director at the peak of his powers. There’s an extended sequence – and you’ll know what it is when you encounter it – of such accelerating atmosphere and transcendent beauty and surprise, you might feel like your mind just played tricks on you. Think “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by way of Edgar Allan Poe. Coogler’s slow-burn place making of the American South in the 1930s lends both specificity and spellbinding other-worldliness to his mystery box of a genre-hopper. The filmmaker’s man-muse Michael B. Jordan is terrific in the dual role as twin brothers Smoke and Stack, former soldiers and Chicago gangland fixtures with something to prove as they return to their rural hometown origins to ostensibly stand up a juke joint and mentor their musically gifted cousin, a sharecropper and preacher’s son played by R&B prodigy Miles Caton, one of the film’s exquisite sonic discoveries. Incidentally Jordan’s two characters are two sides of an unlucky penny and splendidly rendered, high on the actor’s double star wattage. Some other ensemble members are blissfully reborn in their roles, namely Hailee Steinfeld and Wunmi Mosaku as feisty connectors between cultural worlds. Delroy Lindo is a welcome veteran portraying the town drunk trope with Shakespearean panache, and Jack O’Connor gives lulling lift to a character conjuring cinematic spirits in what feels like nothing short of a battle of the bands in its undercurrent. Coogler applies his eye for epic storytelling in a film marked by characters with preternatural abilities colliding with supernatural scope. Ludwig Göransson’s blues and bluegrass fusion music is intoxicating, as is the sound design underscoring each dramatic line of sinister and sometimes sexy dialogue. The film’s characters are wily magnets for fascinations of the flesh, with world building in pursuit of pulpy ambitions. Autumn Durand Arkapaw’s superb cinematography, shot on 65mm film using a combination of IMAX 15-perf 70mm and Ultra Panavision 70mm cameras, with alternating aspect ratios, provides the perfectly shape-shifting proscenium for a night out like no other. Suffice it to say this film is a no holds barred powder-keg of cinematic excellence with layers of sly subtext fit for decoding and an entertaining surface to simply be relished. Experience this communal discovery in as colossal a theatre as you can access.
Ari Aster’s suspense drama Hereditary (B+) is a stunner, upending many expectations of typical horror movies for something even more raw: delving into the experience of losing loved ones, exploring compartmentalization of pain and unearthing abnormalities lurking in one’s family tree. The film deserves comparisons with The Shining and The Exorcist and showcases a master performance by Toni Collette as the troubled mother of two (Milly Shapiro and Alex Wolff, really effective). Gabriel Byrne is ho-hum as the family dad (someone needed to be the straight man, I suppose), and Ann Dowd is superb as a neighbor in grief. The film is a slow-burn downer of the first order but splendidly cinematic, and it builds to quite a crescendo. The production values, from art direction to music, build a brooding mood. The film relies heavily on Collette to sell some far-fetched sequences of spiritualism and to take her character way out on a limb. She delivers in spades. From the first moments set in miniature dollhouses to an epic denouement, the film gets bigger in its ambitions. Fans of the original Friday the 13th may even find echoes in its origin story. This is recommended for aficionados of great drama, and I hope horror fans will like it too.