Hacker Cinema
Sinners
2025 · Film · 138 min
Directed by Ryan Coogler
Trying to leave their troubled lives behind, twin brothers return to their hometown to start again, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.
8 positive3 negative6 neutralfrom 17 commenters
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17 comments on Hacker News
> Major studios were too afraid to produce something fresh instead of numberless sequels and reboots in the last decade or so.
This is a perennial statement for the last 100 years of cinema. "Let's do that again" and "let's try our version of what they did" are effective business strategies in commercial art and always will be. That strategy had already been mature in publishing and theater and fine art and cottage art, and took about zero days to take hold in cinema when the medium emerged. And then again in gaming. And podcasting. And influencer / short form media.
The reality is that there are always a big audience who enjoyed something and want more of the same, and a tiny audience curious to explore the deeply avant garde and a tapering body of audience filling the spectrum in between. Through various deals and production company brands, big studios tend to build an engine that spans most of that spectrum, profiting off the big audience with "more of the same, but bigger" until the heat burns off while probing other opportunities to see if they can spot the next big thing.
Based on the last 10-15 years of projects, I don't think it surprises anyone in the industry that horror is ascendant and that a inventive horror movie broke out [again]. What to expect next is a lot more sequlization and reinterpretation of what people think worked about Backrooms (and Weapons and Sinners and Get Out and etc etc)
> I am starting to think that most of the stuff that gets awards at the Novel ( or Oscars ) level is at best mediocre.
Just skimming Oscars for what I know (music), your claim doesn't hold up.
Ludwig Göransson won Best Original Score for Sinners last year. Have you heard that score, or any of his music? He had a friggin' chorus of plastic recorders playing a Baroque dance at the end of one of the Mandalorian episodes. (Who else is doing stuff like that?)
Maybe you personally prefer other film composers, but calling his output mediocre isn't accurate.
BTW-- since this is off the top of my head I'd bet it took me less time and effort to dispute your claim. If so, I also broke Brandolini's Law here which was fun (and easy!).
I kind of have this, and part of this I think is just cognitive load. When something first comes out. There’s this like added mental pressure to like it, to think about how everyone else responds to it. I watched the Pitt because I already had language for it. I loved ER, and it’s basically a spiritual sequel to the 90’s show. I tried Severance, I don’t know if I would like it a few years from now but I think it would be easier to like without the feeling I was supposed to.
This is a bit overstated but I’m analyzing something mildly subconscious, not like a conscious anxiety - it just feels like a lot of work to engage. A few years later the pressure is off, there’s no expectations. You can choose what to engage with in peace.
There’s also in some cases the obvious - if you don’t like Sinners society implies you’re probably close minded and maybe even a little bit racist. And even if I don’t 100% reject that sentiment, I don’t want to consume art in that context, and I doubt the artist would want me to either(I mean aside from wanting the ticket sales) Better to wait a few years and consume it on your own terms. Have some space to look at the landscape and determine what you might really enjoy in the strength of the idea itself. Most of my favorite shows and movies I consumed in that context.
OBAA was technically well executed but, to me, pretty fucking soulless.
I haven't seen all the nominees, but the ones I did see -- Train Dreams and Sinners -- were, to our eyes, profoundly better films than OBAA. I'm in particular interested in seeing Hamnet soon; everything I read about it puts it in the same category as TD and S.
OBAA was the safe Academy pick, and so that's what they picked.
> Big budget films today don't take risks
It's hard to argue Sinners wasn't taking risks, or One Battle After Another (not my favorite this year, but it was a wild ride). Even Marty Supreme was a very weird and strange film that was very high budget (the CGI was in the background, but there's a lot).
Recent good movies, just going in release order off my letterboxd, although I have to be careful to include only "Hollywood" here:
- 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple - beautifully shot and a beautiful theme about what humanity is
- One Battle After Another - it's PTA, all his movies are good
- Bugonia - incredible dark comedy
- Weapons - fun little horror comedy movie
- Sinners - just won an oscar for the soundtrack, not a perfect movie but a fun watch with some incredible scenes
- Companion
- Nosferatu - incredibly atmospheric
- The Surfer - total trip with good old Nicholas Cage
- Love Lies Bleeding - just a fun, a bit crazy movie
- Dream Scenario - another trippy Cage movie
- Poor Things
- Oppenheimer ...
- Renfield
- The Menu
- The Banshees of Insherin
- Barbarian (same director as Weapons)
- Prey
- Bullet Train - fun action movie
- The Northman
- The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
- Everything Everywhere All At Once
- The Invisible Man - most effective horror movie I've ever seen
- The Gentlemen
- Joker -how close can you get to looking like Taxi Driver without being Taxi Driver ...
- The Vast of Night - some scenes that really draw you in and pretty nostalgic
in 2019 now, so I won't continue, but there are plenty of good movies made nowadays, and I won't say I've seen even a close amount of them from the past few years. Of course I'm watching these at home, not in theatres, so that's certainly an argument.
Why can’t we have original stories(I.e Sinners, Black Panther, White Lotus) and instead try to make White Snow black or whatever and paint people racist? I get that people want to make these stories more inclusive but the characters are just too powerful to change them and not expect a backlash.
People prefer new characters or “staying true to the original story/character” instead of lazy remixes.
Or you can create your own remix with AI now. Feed the movie and make the characters as you want. The result may seem a bit weird(i.e like a Snow White being a fat black gay male) for a fan of the movie/character but for you as an activist it will check the marks you are looking for. Just don’t invoke racism if people won’t like your AI slop.
If Sinners and One Battle After Another are up for movie of the year then it's no wonder no one is going. One is a fun but ultimately forgettable horror action movie. The other is a movie that just based on its major theme would attract less then half the country and even in those remaining is a very polarizing movie. It's up for best picture because to preach, not because it's actually good.
Tent-pole black movies? Basically anything Ryan Coogler or Jordan Peele are involved in. They're a case where the unfortunate stereotype might work out in your favor, if you're looking for a group experience that heightens with shared energy and a visual-and-sonic spectacle. (Well, assuming it's true.)
Or maybe it's just a horror/Marvel thing. Weapons and Endgame had a similar audience feel to Sinners and Black Panther.
Definitely not during Chris Nolan films. It's hard enough to hear his dialogue when it's dead silent.
Theatres don't just show new movies. There's something very special about being locked in a dark room with a big screen to watch Alien or Barry Lyndon. Older movies especially look great in a theatre and some of the magic is lost on a smaller screen.
90% of any content is crap but you're missing out if you like movies and you haven't seen Sinners, The Bone Temple, or NOPE (to name a few recent great theatre watches).
A few recent Warner Bros films / coproductions
Imagine if these had not had theatrical releases, or, had only had 1 week limited releases just to qualify for awards..
Tenet
Dune
The Batman
Barbie
Furiosa
Twisters
Minecraft
Sinners
Superman
Weapons
One Battle After Another
Warner Bros has had their best summer in years (Sinners, Superman, etc). HBO still makes highly regarded prestige TV series (The Last Of Us, Task, etc). This is just false.
Last night I rented the movie Sinners off of Google play and was beyond incredibly annoyed that the playback was 720p the entire time in chrome and Firefox, on both Linux and windows. I honestly feel like I got ripped off, and I got that 10 dollar Google gift card for free.
I had not seen a recent movie in quite some time. Recently I went to watch Sinners (2025, critically acclaimed). The movie starts with a voiceover saying:
"There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death; conjuring spirits from the past and the future..."
Not even an hour passes, and the same exact voiceover repeats word for word that music can conjure spirits from the past and the future, while the scene on screen literally shows music conjuring spirits from the past and the future. It threw me off a little.
Many commenters in this thread point out that on-the-nose-ness in Hollywood movies isn’t new. Personally, I can’t recall a voiceover being repeated verbatim, especially not during the very scene it originally seemed to foreshadow.
That's all really insightful! I agree. I'm also much better now - not willfully disregarding things because just they're popular. I was a punk and indie rocker in the early 00's, so I was able to get that out of my system. (and boy did we) Now, my tastes are just generally extremely non-mainstream. So I avoid it by default.
It's pretty straightforward really - for example I saw Fruitvale Station as a movie fan. I thought it was great and so Coogler was on my radar. I thought the Rocky franchise was ripe for a reboot, so when I heard he was doing it I was in. And the movie was fine. As was Black Panther (considering Marvel flicks for what they are, no judgment either way). So OF COURSE I was downright excited for Sinners. With no assumption that it had to be the best thing ever - and I had a blast.
Another good example is that I'm currently watching the John Wick series for the first time. I didn't know anything about them, but had heard them positively referenced on Kill James Bond. Well, if you meet it where it is and realize it's just "what if you made a comic book into a movie?" and don't expect more of it, you can appreciate it for whether it does that well or not.
> under ideal conditions.
I interpreted the claim as being under non-ideal conditions (which is fair, frankly—it's well-known that the visual and sound quality is better at the beginning of a run than at the end, and film quality doesn't matter if your local theater doesn't ensure it's preserved as best it can be).
Plus, I saw a film viewing of Sinners this past weekend (quite a fun movie, highly recommend it) and some visual artifacts were very noticeable—it was regular enough I figured there was a slice of the film roll that got damaged somehow.
Full article: https://archive.is/0cGOI
>As one studio after another began clamoring to pay Sinners’s $90 million-ish asking price, the director’s agents at WME notified them of a few strings attached. Coogler would retain final cut (a creative dispensation reserved for the industry’s crème de la crème), command first-dollar gross (that is, a percentage of box-office revenue beginning from the movie’s theatrical opening rather than waiting for the studio to turn a profit), and, most contentiously, 25 years after its release, ownership of Sinners would revert to the director.