Sinners (2025)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on April 25, 2025

I can’t tell you what genre Sinners belongs to.

Often, that’s a problem for a movie; it’s a sign the film lacks cohesive vision, that it doesn’t know what it wants to be, do, or say. But Sinners, while ambitious and chock-full of ideas, has no such struggles. Ryan Coogler’s latest work is a supernatural musical historical horror-drama, which sounds like too much but is instead much too startling, moving, and entertaining to falter. There’s something in Sinners for everybody, but without ever feeling rounded off or broad. It’s tight, it’s intense, it’s an original sensory feast.

It’s the best movie so far in 2025. I’m not sure anything else is close.

After absconding from Mississippi to work for gangsters in Chicago, twins Smoke and Stack (both Michael B. Jordan) return with money, liquor, and a vision: to open a juke club at the old saw mill. After purchasing the property, recruiting the transcendent musicians Preacher Boy (Miles Caton) and Slim (Delroy Lindo), and rallying support and interest around town, the community joins forces and has the place hopping on opening night. But when Preacher Boy’s performance draws in malevolent forces, a war breaks out between the townsfolk and folk-singing vampires hell-bent on destroying what Smoke and Stack aim to build.

I’m serious when I say there’s something in this for everybody. Sinners is a period piece, and the costumes and hairstyling both are marvels. The Ludwig Göransson score, like his from the Black Panther movies and Oppenheimer, evokes time and place despite modern sensibilities, and the musical performance by Caton really does play like it might disentangle the fabric of reality. Jordan’s performances are sharp and separate, while Coogler and his team vividly render the world of Clarksdale, presenting its thriving and collaborative community while always keeping the Jim Crow tension and bigotry visible in the frame.

With that incredible foundation established, Sinners is free to be so many seemingly disparate things. In one scene, Jordan somberly visits a grave and attempts a reconciliation; in the next, he drives burning stakes into a snarling vampire. Both work. Coogler engineers incredible horror sequences, timing cuts for maximal dread, but he renders loving glances and heart-wrenching anguish with the same precision. When Sinners momentarily melts into a time-bending music video, there’s spellbinding technical achievement afoot; when it becomes a shoot ‘em up war film, the combat is clear, the rage palpable, and the action gripping. I’ve mentioned the impressive cast already, but Sinners features superb performances up and down the card. Saul Williams, Wunmi Mosaku, Hailee Steinfeld, and Jayme Lawson all play secondary roles wonderfully and memorably, and I especially loved Jack O’Connell as Merrick, the folksy vampire who preys on the community with promises of a better “life” and a small guitar.

At just over two hours, Sinners does incredible things within its reasonable runtime. That Coogler’s film drew a diverse spectrum of emotion out of me, everything from over-the-shoulder fear and fist-pumping thrills to three occasions of earned tears, says it all. Whatever you could want from a film, Sinners has it—and probably has it in spades.

At the end of the day, what Sinners is might be elusive, but who cares? What matters is this: it’s awesome.

 

Mamma Mia Here We Go Again (2018)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on April 18, 2025

Mamma Mia Here We Go Again begins in bold fashion: by killing off its main character.

In the opening scene, we learn Donna (Meryl Streep) has died, leaving daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) and her three fathers to grieve. Although the movie made nearly $400M at the box office, many audiences found this jarring. They expected a Meryl Streep movie. Some never forgave the film. 

Their loss: this frothy, ridiculous jukebox musical of ABBA songs is a glorious slice of cinema. Armed with hilariously on-the-nose pop songs sung and danced with earnest maximalism, Here We Go Again is sugary-sweet eye- and ear-candy padding two low-stakes stories…until it pops in a mouthguard, punches you in the heart, and slurps up your tears with a crazy straw. 

Daughter Sophie (Seyfried) wants to fulfill her mother’s dream by opening a cozy island hotel, but she and her partner Sky (Dominic Cooper) are struggling. While working to launch the resort, Sophie imagines her mother’s fateful summer when a trio of steamy flings led to her conception. 

This premise is…slight. The first Mamma Mia exists, so we know the trajectory of all those earlier romances, and a hotel opening in gorgeous Croatia-pretending-to-be-Greece offers sumptuous scenery but humble drama. There’s never a moment when you doubt all will work out for everyone involved; even when ABBA’s music dips into legato, it explodes into a peppy number four measures later. It’s a jukebox musical! There’s a ceiling on the intensity when stitched-together Swedish pop blankets the film.

But Here We Go Again has two aces hiding up its sleeve that make it magical. The first is Lily James, playing the young Donna while she canoodles through Europe. James glows in every scene, physically and musically; she’s doing an impression of Streep’s character (who wasn’t exactly deep herself), but she plays the role with radiant cheer and unblinking conviction. You end the movie in love with James and wholly convinced she’s destined for stardom. 

The second thing the movie has is intense, huge-hearted emotion. Underneath all the costumes and choreography, Mamma Mia 2 is about motherhood, and it lands its reverence for moms with devastating precision. In the second half, when Sophie’s life changes dramatically, her and her late mom’s stories pull up in parallel. It’s then that Streep appears, ushering in the waterworks. I saw this in theaters with my mom, and though each of us had seen it already, that viewing together meant so much more. This is a movie I think about on Mother’s Day. 

Even if the emotion doesn’t get you or you’re some mom-hating curmudgeon who finds Bambi hilarious, everyone’s having so much fun on screen I dare you not to tap your foot. I’m not a huge fan of ABBA’s music, but I know this soundtrack by heart and may have even dabbled in a dance number inspired by it. The movie offers less nuance than birthday cake, but I love birthday cake.

And I love this movie.

 

Longlegs (2024)

 Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on April 11, 2025

When I watched Longlegs on opening night last summer, I sat in an invested audience. All of us were in sync: gasping in unison, lurching in our seats as though tandem marionettes. Psyched for the latest “scariest movie in years” contender, this crowd paid rapt, anxious attention from the oddly aspect-ratio’d opening until the bitter end.

Directed by Osgood Perkins, the son of the star of Psycho, Longlegs works because it builds on the serial killer story made famous by The Silence of the Lambs. Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is our Clarice, an aloof FBI rookie with a knack for patterns, and she’s hunting a ritualistic killer (Nicolas Cage) who goes by Longlegs in coded missives left at the scene. The case is tricky—Longlegs seemingly induces gruesome murders—and it hits close to home for Harker, but the pursuit of the man responsible proceeds as you’d expect.

What elevates Longlegs is that it’s in conversation with Silence of the Lambs but never settles into tired homage. Perkins litters his film with unsettling elements, leaving audience members spinning a roulette wheel of fear. In one stretch near the midpoint, Harker and his boss (a stately Blair Underwood) explore an abandoned farmhouse, unearth an uncanny valley doll, and interview a child-like woman corrupted by shadowy forces. Across its runtime, you’ve got three or four incredible jump scares, gorgeous Dutch-angled cinematography, and a game-for-it Cage dialed up to eleven as Michael Jackson-meets-Freddy Kruger. The whole time, you feel this throbbing dread because you know Longlegs is going somewhere, and even though you have no idea where that is, you’re confident it’ll be bad.

Granted, this kitchen sink cookie approach to horror has its drawbacks. Longlegs is a busy movie; none of its threads disrupt the twisting tension, but not all perfectly line up on closer inspection. The artistry of the elevated horror breaks the immersion at times, scratching my cInEmA itch when it aims for my adrenal gland, and Cage at eleven is really more like seventeen, which some viewers reasonably find grating. I love the result—this made my top ten for 2024—but I know that it’s not a perfect movie, even setting aside that some simply can’t stomach horror’s nightmare fuel in the first place.

My best sales pitch for Longlegs might be this: I think the film plays like a great rollercoaster. When you watch it in a dark room, absorbing its every rise and fall, your breaths quicken. You leap when Harker leaps; you shield your eyes when the heavy axe swings. But when the whole thing’s over, you’re energized. You survived a tightly calibrated, harrowing thrill ride. That’s only possible with fantastic filmmaking.

I’d call Longlegs fantastic filmmaking.

Longlegs is available to stream on Hulu and rent on most platforms.

 

Draft Day (2014)

 Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on April 4, 2025

 

Draft Day is among the worst movies that I love.

The script is clunky, cliche-ridden, and borderline nonsensical. Costner’s performance is among his least charismatic. The romance and workplace dynamics have aged poorly, football’s most moribund franchise centers the thing, and the entire plot collapses if you throw a minimally critical eye at it.

And yet, I love Draft Day. I adore the ridiculous fan-fiction lunacy of this glorified NFL marketing device.

Sonny Weaver Jr. (Costner) is GM of the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, and he’s got personal and professional conflicts colliding on the biggest day of his year. One week after losing his father, Sonny receives an ultimatum from the Browns’ owner: “Make a splash” at the NFL Draft or find alternate employment. Pushed to the brink, Sonny starts wheeling and dealing, leading to chaos as the first pick he’s just acquired approaches.

While I stink at March Madness, I know the NFL Draft. I’ve been a late-April diehard since middle school, and I even won the NFL’s Predict the Pick contest in 2008, meaning the league flew me to NYC for the NFL Draft one year later. The film evokes my experience: I’ve sat in Radio City Music Hall, I’ve watched the colorful screens, and I’ve waved to Mel Kiper Jr. Draft Day is, for me, nostalgic—for the place, for the event, for the era when I knew so much about sports I could actually win a contest.

Alas, that special connection is a gift and curse for the movie: I love what it harkens to but also see through the artifice. Draft Day is a sincere movie portraying the event with epic import, but it’s silly, half-baked fan fiction. While diehards like me devour the drama of the Falcons picking Michael Penix after signing Kirk Cousins, Draft Day’s writers know they need human drama to reach everyone else, so they tell a thrilling story…that violates so much of how the event works that it offends me, the only person who would eagerly watch the thing.

Still, there’s something satisfying about Draft Day. It’s a comfort movie that sounds like an event I love, and it delivers a madcap final act of sheer lunacy that induces eye-rolling chills. I know I’m watching something with the intellectual richness of Cool Ranch Doritos, but I’m obsessed with an event where 22-year-olds get hats and sign contracts for more than I’ll make in my entire career. Perhaps the delirium of Draft Day is, secretly, just right for the occasion?

Draft Day is a ridiculous head-shaker, but it’s my ridiculous head-shaker. I love the thing, warts and all.