Sinners

A bloody, muscular, barrelhouse of a vampire movie that throbs like the neck of a blues guitar on fire, Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” might be the first story the “Creed” director has ripped straight from his own guts, but it thrillingly continues his post-“Fruitvale” tradition of filtering real and imagined Black histories through the prism of blockbuster entertainment, and of doing so in a way that recognizes genre as a living connection between the past and the future, as opposed to seeing it as a necessary evil of funding his art in the present. “Sinners” is nothing if not a film about genre, and the distinctly American imperative of cross-pollinating between them to create something that feels new and old — high and low — at the same time. It’s a heartfelt and viscerally well-researched historical drama that introduces the blues as the devil’s music before fighting to reframe it as a kind of fourth-dimensional magic in its own right. It’s also a ridiculous and horny-as-hell creature feature that leverages Coogler’s enduring love for multiplex favorites like“The Thing,” and “From Dusk Till Dawn” in order to convey the hope, heartbreak, and humanity of Mississippi sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South.