Bonus: I should probably get out what’s in my head about Sinners

(I will spoil the movie beginning to end here, with the expectation that you’ve already seen it.)

Not that it’s just me, but Sinners has been stuck in my head the last couple weeks. I’ll get my word-of-mouth recommendation out of the way: go see Sinners. It is an delightfully indulgent and joyous and alive film that somehow packs in a little bit of everything that makes life worth living.

I don’t want to summarize the whole movie, but what hits me the hardest about Sinners is the joy. Everything in the film centers on this one ecstatic moment that everyone builds and inhabits together, unashamed, loving, exuberant, free, and so powerful as to call the spirits out to play. This burst of pure life is destroyed spectacularly by the forces of death, and from the very start it was doomed in so many ways. But when the characters tell each other in the far future that the party at the juke joint was the best night of their long (long) lives, you believe it.

And this is all inseparable from their circumstances as (mostly) Black folks in 1932 Jim Crow Mississippi, deep in the worst of the Great Depression.