In the last two weeks, I saw three films on the big screen that all left me very impressed. I haven’t done a year-end movie list in a while; still, I’m pretty sure these three will be at or near the top of it. So here are some quick thoughts on all three.

SINNERS; written and directed by Ryan Coogler

There’s a moment in this film’s first half where Coogler shows Jack O’Connell’s primary antagonist Merrick on the run from a group of Choctaw vampire hunters. The latter group only makes a brief appearance in the film; I’ve seen a few reviews that have — understandably — lamented that they weren’t in it more. And that makes sense. But a few days after seeing the film, I started thinking that maybe the brevity of their appearance was the point.

Specifically: there isn’t a traditional hero in Sinners. Michael B. Jordan’s Smoke and Stack are morally complex antiheroes; Miles Caton’s Sammy is the film’s protagonist, but his ultimate decision in the film, as the film’s first scene tells us, is about the future of his own art. Sinners is a vampire movie, but the traditional heroes of a vampire movie are off doing something else. And it’s in that absence that Sinners becomes a much more interesting film.

That then got me thinking about Ryan Coogler’s last film, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which begins with the offscreen death of the title character. And while Wakanda Forever has several storytelling hiccups in it, Sinners has me rethinking it — in part because that makes two films in a row where Coogler has taken the elements of a familiar story and removed one crucial piece. What happens in a heroic narrative when the hero is off the table? Sinners is a fantastic example of how talented artists can create something utterly enthralling from more familiar bones.

WARFARE, written and directed by Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland

I watched this and Sinners in the span of 24 hours. While the two films are radically different, I felt a whole lot more optimistic about the current state of large-scale filmmaking than I did beforehand. It’s been interesting to read wildly different opinions on this film and what it has to say (or doesn’t have to say) about military power and U.S. politics.

For me, the work that this most reminded me of was Karl Marlantes’s novel Matterhorn. Both Marlantes and Mendoza are drawing upon their own experiences at war (Vietnam for Marlantes; Iraq for Mendoza), and there’s a matter-of-factness to the storytelling here that stands out. For novel and film alike, it’s easy to see two different readers or viewers encountering these and deeming them pro- or anti-war works; depictions of war tend to have that effect. That Mendoza and Garland repeatedly emphasize the destruction of the home of two Iraqi families suggests that this isn’t a viewpoint-free film; still, it’s also the sort of film that I think will become something of a litmus test for its audience. 

BLACK BAG, written by David Koepp and directed by Steven Soderbergh

I ended up watching this in close temporal proximity to Koepp and Soderbergh’s Presence, which I also dug immensely. I’m pretty sure, at this point, that I’ll watch anything this writer-director team does; Presence was fantastic and their earlier collaboration Kimi was also thrilling throughout. Spies, secrets, monogamy, Michael Fassbender looking dour while fishing; what’s not to like?
It also got me thinking about Soderbergh and James Bond. Daniel Craig was still playing Bond when he appeared in the director’s Logan Lucky, but the trailer’s use of “Introducing Daniel Craig” sure makes it feel like the kickoff to the post-Bond period of Craig’s career, where he’s taken on increasingly interesting roles, whether in the Benoit Blanc films or the screen adaptation of Queer. Given that the cast of Black Bag includes two actors — Pierce Brosnan and Naomie Harris — who have spent time in that part of the cinematic world, there’s some interesting metatextual stuff going on here.

[Also posted on the Substack.]