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‘Sinners’ Review: Ryan Coogler’s Deep South From-Dusk-Till-Dawn Vampire Film Is a Lavishly Serious Popcorn Movie, With Michael B. Jordan in a Dual Role as Criminal Brothers

Michael B. Jordan, playing two criminal brothers, anchors a '30s Deep South from-dusk-till-dawn vampire film about the wages of sin in Black America.

Jordan makes the differences quiet and subtle and bone-deep, the way Robert De Niro did in his criminally underrated double performance in “The Alto Knights.” The Smokestack twins are the crooked version of a good and bad cop, though with spirits joined at the well-dressed hip. Robert Johnson doesn’t appear in “Sinners,” but one of the film’s main characters, who would have been born around the same time (in 1911), is Sammie Moore (newcomer Miles Caton), known as Preacher Boy, and he’s got a singular talent — his twanging guitar and lyrical voice seems to swing the blues right up to the sky. I’ll confess I was so enmeshed in these characters that it hit me with a twinge of disappointment when Remmick (Jack O’Connell), a pesky varmint of a vampire, shows up at the home of a farm couple (they have a Klan sheet and hood crumpled against the wall), and before long all three are sporting pinpoint glowy red eyes and bloody fangs.

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