Tag: Sinners

The 2026 Oscars

I saw no more tthan 3 out of 5; 5 out of 10 films

My viewing of the 2026 Oscar-nominated movies has been rather pathetic. On Washington’s Birthday weekend in 1998, I saw five films, four of which were nominated for Academy Awards (Afterglow, The Apostle, LA Confidential, Mrs. Brown). But in all of February 2026, other than some shorts, I’ve seen exactly one, and it was at home on the 27th.

Part of it was the busyness, but also, many of the films I really wanted to view in the cinema were gone by the time my wife and I had time to see them. A couple are currently on Netflix, which I don’t have, and a few others are on other platforms. I may join Netflix for a month if I can figure out how to expand time.

Moreover, we haven’t watched much television of late. We STILL have Ken Burns’ American Revolution, a half-dozen Great Performances, and about a dozen Henry Louis Gates programs on the DVR. 

The * means I saw it. 

Best picture

Bugonia – I stalled at the chance to see this collaboration of director Yorgos Lanthimos and actor Emma Stone after the mediocre reviews of the 2024 film, Kinds of Kindness 
F1 – this one I saw, and I liked it better than I expected to
Frankenstein – missed it
Hamnet – I saw it and wished I could understand the dialogue better; For Your Consideration 
Marty Supreme  – I saw it, admired what it was trying to do, but didn’t particularly  like it
One Battle After Another – I missed it. My baby sister saw it and liked it a lot. 
The Secret Agent – missed it
Sentimental Value – ditto
Sinners – my favorite movie of the year; a record 16 nominations 
Train Dreams – I was looking forward to seeing this

A brief word about the movie Blue Moon

I’m mildly obsessed with the composers Rodgers and Hart. I know (and I bet you do too) many of their songs, although not necessarily the shows they came from. The Supremes Sing Rodgers and Hart is still in my record collection. And the Mamas and the Papas had three of the duo’s songs on their albums. 

So I needed to see the movie Blue Moon and the relatively tall Ethan Hawke’s transformation into the diminutive Lorenz Hart. Hawke was excellent as the talented, wordy, and alcoholically deludedlyricist on the night of the opening of Oklahoma! after Richard Rodgers had partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II.

In some ways, it was very much a play, with one set, the bar. Hart interacts with the bartender (Bobby Carnavale), writer E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), the pianist, and eventually Rodgers (Andrew Scott), as well as the young woman of his dreams, the 20-year-old college student (Margaret Qualley).

ACTING

Performance by an actor in a leading role

Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme
Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another
Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon (+)
*Michael B. Jordan, Sinners – playing TWO characters must be challenging
Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent

Performance by an actor in a supporting role

Benicio del Toro, One Battle After Another
Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein
*Delroy Lindo, Sinners
Sean Penn, One Battle After Another
Stellan Skarsgård, Sentimental Value

Performance by an actress in a leading role

Jessie Buckley, Hamnet
Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Kate Hudson, Song Sung Blue – the last full-length movie I saw in a cinema was on January 19
Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value
Emma Stone, Bugonia

Performance by an actress in a supporting role

Elle Fanning, Sentimental Value
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value
Amy Madigan, Weapons
*Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners
Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another

Best animated feature film

Arco
Elio
KPop Demon Hunters
Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
* Zootopia 2 – here’s the script

The rest of the categories

Achievement in visual effects

Avatar: Fire and Ash
F1 – I felt as though I was in the races
Jurassic World Rebirth
The Lost Bus – we saw this at home in the fall, which may have been to the film’s disadvantage. Still, we felt as though we were in the fire, especially in that antepenultimate scene.  
*Sinners – impressive throughout

Achievement in casting (a new and long-overdue category)

Hamnet, Nina Gold
Marty Supreme, Jennifer Venditti – the use of the non-actors was quite creative
One Battle after Another, Cassandra Kulukundis
The Secret Agent, Gabriel Domingues
*Sinners, Francine Maisler – my favorite, especially picking newcomer Miles Caton as Sammie Moore

I’m inclined to root for Sinners for most categories, including cinematography, costume design, directing (Ryan Coogler), original song (I Lied To You), and original screenplay. Its film editing was great, though F1 worked very well. I think the F1 sound effects were grand. 

I’m hoping to get a post out about the shorts I saw on February 28 before the Oscars on March 15. If I see One Battle After Another and/or Bugonia soon – they are both streaming – I’ll mention them as well.

Movie review: SINNERS

Michael B. Jordan and Michael B. Jordan

Admittedly, I was wary about seeing the movie SINNERS.  I can be a bit squeamish when it comes to a film described as vampire horror.  My friend Steve Bissette had recommended it when he saw it in April, but that type of film is more in his wheelhouse.

Then my daughter, likewise squeamish, viewed it in Cape Town, South Africa, in June, just before returning to the States. She said I had to see it because it was about the black experience in America, and it was about music.

So I went to the Madison Theatre near my home on the hottest day of the year, Primary Day – they have $5 films on Tuesdays! – while my wife, the most squeamish of the three of us, saw another flick at the same venue.

How do I describe this film? The IMDb notes: “Trying to leave their troubled lives behind [in Chicago], twin brothers (Michael B. Jordan) return to their hometown [in 1930s Mississippi] to start again, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.”

That doesn’t tell you much. Bissette wrote: “A rip-roaring fusion of masterful visual storytelling and toe-tapping music, writer-director Ryan Coogler’s first original blockbuster reveals the full scope of his singular imagination.

“Wildly primal, big and bold, fueled by pain and rage, by community and family, throbbing with love and sex and joy, infused with magic. A sumptuously textured, unmissable howl of a passion project.”
It’s about time
Someone named Corey Creekmur commented on Bissette’s Facebook page: “It’s such a rich sequence. It seems to be drawing upon African models of time, occult notions of time (such as the way vampires move outside of human time and share memories), and rich notions of musical and cultural continuity across eras. (It seems evocative of Sun Ra and George Clinton’s mystical, time and space traveling visions.) It’s dazzling in any case.”

Oh, it’s Afrofuturism, at least in part, which does not become clear to me until near the end.

It was well-acted by all involved. The scenes with the twins, Smoke and Stack, looked realistic. Special kudos to Miles Caton, who is all of 20, for playing the pivotal role of Sammie. And the music is excellent; I have, of all things, Rocky Road to Dublin, stuck in my head.

The Rotten Tomatoes reviews were 97% positive among critics and 96% positive among audiences. Some suggested that at 137 minutes, it was about 15 minutes too long. But I think the time built up the tension and better established the characters.

An audience reviewer on a site thought the vampires were silly, rather than scary-looking. I thought that was the point. The vampire’s life was alluring at some level.

Bissette is right about this: “if (and oh, you should) you catch SINNERS in the theater, be advised NOT to leave when the first of the final credits appears…

“The real ending to the film is mid-way through the final credits” (at least three of the dozen and a half folks in my theater left too early and missed Buddy Guy!), “and after the credits crawl conclude, a sublime post-credits sequence that sent me out of my seat positively elated follows” (I was in an otherwise empty theater.)
Ramblin' with Roger
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