Coincidentally, maybe the best recommendation is the one that’s in theaters right this second. Sinners and South of Midnight feel like they’re in perfect dialogue together, with a few elements (hoodou, haints, music connecting to the ancestors) shared between them but approaching from different standpoints. For South of Midnight, it’s through the lens of healing and community and forgiveness for hurt people hurting people. For Sinners, though, it’s through a lens of survival, of the power the marginalized have even in times of powerlessness, and the ways that power reverberates through generations. As brilliant as South of Midnight is, as wonderfully as it uses music, Sinners one-ups it with its best, most beautiful sequence, where a virtuoso blues player’s music conjures the spirit of communal joy from our African ancestors all the way up to modern hip hop and metal.
Of course, that’s not to sidestep the fact that it also functions as a big, brutal period piece vampire movie that plays like a sexier, southern-fried From Dusk Till Dawn. It’s got something for literally everybody, but the broadest wavelength of this flick is speaking directly to BIPOC folks.
