Film review: Sinners is one of the most entertaining movies of the year

Plus review of Warfare and The Penguin Lessons...

Good and evil are flip sides of the same coin, at least according to Sinners.

Sinners

Michael B Jordan in Sinners.

Good and evil are flip sides of the same coin, at least according to Sinners (16s), which opens in Mississippi in 1932 with brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B Jordan) returning to their old stomping ground after learning the gangster trade in Al Capone’s Chicago.

Smoke and Stack plan to use their ill-gotten gains to open a juke joint in the town’s old sawmill, a scheme the local white folk, and particularly the resident Klansmen, don’t look too kindly upon.

Embittered by their experience in Chicago, and armed to the teeth, the brothers are more than happy to take on the racists in the white sheets — but even the battle-hardened Smoke and Stack couldn’t have imagined they’d find themselves at war with an army of the undead.

Written and directed by Ryan Coogler, Sinners is a wildly imaginative genre mash-up that fully delivers. The bait-and-switch is deftly managed: when Stack and Smoke first arrive in Mississippi, we find ourselves immersed in a Jim Crow world where the historical detail is beautifully observed.

Anticipating a bleak tale of socio-political realism and de facto apartheid, we instead get a full-throated celebration of Black culture as a variety of musicians cut loose with blues and gospel (we even get some Irish-influenced bluegrass and folk) while the juke joint takes shape.

Enter Remmick (Jack O’Connell), stumbling out of a cornfield with smoke rising from his burning skin: a charismatic vampire, we quickly realise, who has the good fortune to be invited into a Klansman’s home.

From that point on, all bets are off: as the vampires lay violent siege to the juke joint, we’re free to enjoy the gore-soaked spectacle or muse on the metaphor of a vampiric society sucking the life-blood from Black culture.

Or — why not? — both, because Ryan Coogler’s ambitions are sky-high with Sinners, which features excellent performances from Michael B Jordan, Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O’Connell, and Miles Caton. The soundtrack is superb too. All told, Sinners is one of the most entertaining movies of the year to date.

• Theatrical release

Warfare

★★★★☆

Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland's latest release is Warfare. Picture: A24

Told in real time and set in 2006,

Warfare

(15A) recounts the experience of a platoon of Navy Seals who requisition an Iraqi home as an observation post, only to find themselves trapped and under attack when an operation goes wrong.

Based on the experience of former Navy Seal Ray Mendoza, who co-writes and co-directs with Alex Garland, the film brilliantly recreates the brutalising physical impact of violence at close quarters. 

The gunfire and explosions are deafening and disorientating; in the claustrophobic setting, we often find ourselves lost and half-blind as the fog of war swirls and sensory overload descends.

There’s a fine cast in play here — Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Joseph Quinn — and the technical detail of the Seals’ attempt to survive their mini-Alamo is expertly executed.

The caveat, of course, is that while it’s difficult not to be moved by the plight of the besieged young men, it’s equally difficult to ignore that they are invaders terrorising an innocent family. A tough, thought-provoking watch.

• Theatrical release

The Penguin Lessons

★★★☆☆

Steve Coogan in The Penguin Lessons

Based on a true story, The Penguin Lessons (12A) stars Steve Coogan as Tom Michell, an Englishman who takes up a post teaching English in an Argentinean boarding school in 1976 just as a military coup becomes an inevitability.

‘Not a man who gets involved,’ Tom averts his gaze until the political becomes personal; meanwhile, he finds himself reluctantly adopting a little penguin, and gradually finds a still centre in the midst of the chaos.

Coogan is well cast as the bluff, diffident but amiable Michell, while Jonathan Pryce and Vivian El Jaber provide solid support as Peter Cattaneo directs a low-key but charming account (adapted by Jeff Pope from Michell’s 2015 memoir) that eschews the grimmer aspects of the period’s history.

The penguin, almost inevitably, steals the show.

• Theatrical release