During Black History Month, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners feels especially resonant. At this year's Oscars, the film leads with 16 nominations, the most in Academy Award history. And yet, despite its acclaim today, Sinners feels older than just this moment, reaching backward into Black music history, the Delta blues, and the mythology of the American South. 

Set in 1932 Mississippi, deep in the Jim Crow South, the story follows identical twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) returning home after years with the Chicago Outfit and as they attempt to reinvent themselves by opening a juke joint for the local Black community. Their younger cousin Sammie, played by breakout star Miles Caton, becomes the young musician whose blues talent draws everyone into the juke joint’s orbit. To inhabit his character, Caton trained intensively on blues guitar, practicing for hours with a guitar coach to master the fundamentals and slide techniques.

Sinners continues one of the most productive director-actor partnerships of the last decade between Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan. Together, they’re responsible for the Creed franchise, Black Panther, and Wakanda Forever. Across those films, Jordan plays men navigating systems that have abandoned them. With Sinners, Coogler expands that dynamic. The film has no tricks to differentiate the twins; Jordan’s own posture, pacing, and emotional temperature do the work. One brother carries the weight of consequence, and the other the energy of someone who still thinks he can outrun it.

Visually, the film’s most striking moments belong to its cinematography. Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who with Sinners became the first woman of color nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, built the film's most ambitious sequence, now widely known as “Surreal Montage.” 

Midway through the film, Sammie plays at the opening night of the juke joint, and the camera drifts through the crowd in a seamless long take. As the shot expands, performers representing different musical traditions begin to appear: Mississippi blues, rock ‘n’ roll, gospel, hip-hop, African tribal music, and Xiqu (Chinese opera), a nod to Southern Chinese history in the Mississippi Delta. Watching the movie again for this review, I kept coming back to one question: does the continuity of a shot express the unity of its content?

In classical montage, meaning comes from cuts. One image meets another, and the gap between them produces an idea. The cut protects the difference between things, the fact that two images were recorded at different times and then deliberately linked.

Generative AI threatens to dissolve those boundaries altogether. It can blend images that were never filmed together, infer the world outside the frame, and smooth over the gap between shots that once gave editing its meaning. AI is increasingly good at blending sounds and images from different places and times. What actually coincided before a camera, and what was typed into a prompt by someone hoping a machine would handle the hard part?

These times make Sinners both a homage to Black history and a product of our spectacle culture that loves a single dazzling image. Should some things remain distinct, or is their fusion now the point? Look at the endless crossovers of the Marvel Universe, Gen Z’s “-maxxing” internet culture, the maximalist Oscar-favorite and 2023 Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All at Once, or even the Metaverse. Each compresses entire worlds of reference into a single overwhelming thing that remains instantly recognizable and easily consumed. 

The challenge, and the achievement, is that the Sinners scene still preserves the integrity of those traditions. Blues becomes gospel, gospel becomes funk, and funk becomes hip-hop. Instead of montage linking separate shots, the film proposes continuity. Shot on IMAX 65mm film, the aspect ratio literally expands as the sequence begins, opening up vertically to accommodate the growing crowd. They don’t call it IMAX for nothing; the format itself is part of Sinners’ maximalism.

So even while the movie threatens to become too much by the end of its 2-hour-and-17-minute runtime, with ideas, genres, and histories colliding in one space, that ambition is also its strength. To tell the fullest truth, Sinners hold everything at once: music, myth, terror, and the long memory of Black culture.

Editor’s note (March 16, 2026, following the 98th Academy Awards): This review was written before the ceremony; since then, Sinnerscapped its historic run with four Oscars, including Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan, Best Original Screenplay for Ryan Coogler, and a landmark Best Cinematography win for Autumn Durald Arkapaw, the first woman ever to win the award.