SINNERS is the first original story from writer/director Ryan Coogler. Not that it matters. After the true story of FRUITVALE STATION he added to fictional worlds and characters created by other people – CREED, BLACK PANTHER and BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER – but he sure seemed like a visionary to me. Working in such worn-out modern formats as “the legacy sequel” and “the MCU” didn’t stop him from constructing crowd-pleasing but deeply personal movies that transcend those categories.
So shit yeah I was excited for him to do a vampire movie. Say no more.
It’s set in the Mississippi Delta, 1932. After some years of infamy working for Al Capone in Chicago, “the Smokestack Twins,” Elijah “Smoke” Moore and Elias “Stack” Moore have returned to their home town of Clarksdale. Both are played by Michael B. Jordan (WITHOUT REMORSE), and they’re introduced passing a cigarette back and forth. Later one tosses his knife for the other to stab a rattlesnake through the throat with. After that they’re often separated, but the illusion has been established seamlessly.
I like that it takes its time getting to the vampires, instead making me really invested in the twins’ plan to set up a new juke joint (with the generic name “The Juke”) in one day. They buy an old saw mill from a very iffy white man (David Maldonado, CAT RUN 2), then split up and go around to people with the resources and talents they need, friends from way back who seem a little bitter or suspicious and hesitate before they see how much it pays but still seem to love them. Family, basically. Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller, HOMEFRONT), for example, just wants to stay picking cotton on the field he share crops, but seems very happy once he’s there watching the door. (read the rest of this shit…)
O’DESSA is a pretty cool dystopian musical that Searchlight Pictures released straight to Hulu last month. The story involves love and music in the face of fascism – probly not anything anybody would be interested in these days. It’s pretty slick mainstream entertainment, but kind of a cousin to 
Recently I rewatched 
URBAN VENGEANCE, not be confused with Seagal’s 
HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE (2022) is about a group of young people who have determined, quite reasonably, that the only voice they really have in stopping an oil company from poisoning their communities and exacerbating climate change is if they figure out how to sabotage their infrastructure enough to disrupt their business and make it less profitable. So that’s what they’re ready to do. They all rendezvous at a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, West Texas, some meeting for the first time, but they all know the plan, and they get to it.
G20 is not a DIE-HARD-on-a-______ movie – it’s an 
MEMOIR OF A SNAIL is a stop motion movie, not trying to be edgy but not appropriate for (most) kids, kind of like a pretty dark indie comedy, except done with clay figures. I haven’t seen MARY AND MAX, the previous feature from writer/director Adam Elliot, so I don’t know how similar or dissimilar they are, but from my experience this is a very unique use of the medium, constantly narrated, and full of quirky novelistic detail and digressions.
Y2K is a 2024 horror comedy that’s the directorial debut of Kyle Mooney. You may or may not know Mooney as a Saturday Night Live cast member from 2013 to 2022, but he also co-wrote and starred in a weird movie called BRIGSBY BEAR (2017) and I would highly recommend Saturday Morning All Star Hits! (S.M.A.S.H.!), an eight episode parody of ‘90s children’s programming he co-created in 2021. This shares with those a surface appearance of millennial nostalgia but with such specific pop cultural observations and such weird comedy ideas that it never feels like “Hey, remember that!?” in a bad way. The joke isn’t ha, we used to have VHS, it’s that an evil VCR kills somebody by ejecting a dubbed and hand-labelled VARSITY BLUES at their head.
Watching 
JADE is a 2025 indie action movie that’s pretty derivative and very messy but kinda fun. It’s clearly made by a bunch of stunt people having a good time and not taking themselves too seriously, so it’s hard to be mad at. It’s a vehicle for Shaina West, who was in 
