Sinners (2025) Reviews: What Critics Said

Editorial note: This is a roundup of published criticism of Sinners. Celluloid has not screened the film for this piece, and it carries no Celluloid rating. The critics are named and linked under Sources.

Is Sinners worth watching?

Most critics say yes: Ryan Coogler’s 1930s vampire story was widely received as an original, ambitious and handsomely made genre film. The praise gathers around Michael B. Jordan’s double role, the blues music at the film’s centre and its large-format photography. The main reservations concern a slow first hour and a sprawling length, and one prominent dissenter found the whole thing muddled.

What is Sinners about?

Twin brothers Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan, try to leave their troubled lives behind by returning to their Mississippi hometown to start again, only to find that a greater evil is waiting to welcome them back. Ryan Coogler wrote and directed the film, which was released in 2025 and runs 138 minutes. The cast also includes Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Jayme Lawson, Omar Benson Miller, Delroy Lindo and Li Jun Li. More details, including where to watch, are on the Sinners film page.

What critics praised

In Empire, Helen O’Hara called it wildly original and gorgeously made. She was taken with Coogler’s reading of vampires as colonisers, forever hungry for the spark in other people, and with the way Ludwig Göransson’s blues-soaked score is sometimes allowed to carry a character’s story on its own, with no flashback images at all. She found the device jarring but effective.

William Bibbiani of TheWrap was among the most enthusiastic. He argued that Coogler films the story like an old-fashioned historical epic, with outsized characters on an outsized canvas, and he credited Jordan with two excellent performances. He also singled out Miles Caton, whose singing voice he found haunting, and the effects work that puts Jordan opposite himself, which he placed among the best of its kind.

For Time, Stephanie Zacharek found the film chilling, hypnotic and at times grimly funny. She admired how economically Coogler tells the story and noted that, for all its gore, it suggests more than it shows. She praised Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Mosaku and Caton, who makes his film debut here, and valued the film’s sense of music and dancing as a form of communion across the lines of the segregated South.

Writing for The A.V. Club, Jesse Hassenger described a wholly original feature that is unusually relaxed about mixing genres. He thought the 65mm photography by Autumn Durald Arkapaw brought out the beauty of the Mississippi landscape, and that the film grows richer and more compelling the further it sprawls.

Where critics were divided

Pacing was the most common complaint. O’Hara compared the sun-drenched first hour to a prestige television drama in no hurry to reach the bloodshed. She also found Jack O’Connell’s vampire Remmick unconvincing as a villain and felt some characters were underserved by the end. Bibbiani, though he loved the film, conceded that it can feel as if it will never end and that Coogler serves up more than one sitting can comfortably hold.

Hassenger’s reservation was about the twins. In his view Jordan does little to separate Smoke and Stack by voice or manner, leaving costume to do much of the work, and some characters’ choices seemed baffling rather than suggestive of hidden history.

The sharpest dissent came from Nick Schager in The Daily Beast, who called the film a disappointment. He granted Jordan’s magnetism and a few indelible moments, notably a musical sequence filmed in one long, snaking take, but found the early stretch thin and slow. He thought the film’s ideas about white appropriation of Black music were raised and then left undeveloped, and he judged the climactic battle sloppy and full of convenient solutions. He also argued that the twins are so alike that the dual-role conceit hardly justifies itself.

Who is it for?

The film suits horror viewers who want period drama, music and social history alongside the bloodletting, and who do not mind a slow build. It is rated R in the US and 15 in the UK, and the critics above note plenty of gore. Readers who prefer a more straightforward vampire action film might compare it with Blade II, and more titles are collected under horror.

The critical verdict

Most of the critics gathered here regard Sinners as a bold, original piece of popular filmmaking, rich in atmosphere and carried by Jordan, Caton and a strong ensemble. Even its admirers found it long and slow to ignite. Schager’s review stands as a reminder that not everyone thought its ambitions were fully realised. On balance, critics considered it well worth the time for viewers drawn to genre films with something on their minds.