Sinners (2025) | The Almost Certain Oscar Winner I Don't Recommend

This review will be short.

Sinners (2025) boasts a remarkable 97% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, an 84/100 on Metacritic, and a 7.6/10 audience rating on IMDb. I promise you this film will sweep the Oscars this year. And yet, I can’t recommend it.

I usually engage with films based on three categories: craft, content, and impact, and unfortunately, it scored poorly in all three for Megan and me. Neither the quality of the film nor the storytelling stood out. The worldview felt very much like something from Quentin Tarantino—fueled by revenge and hatred. The movie did impact us emotionally and intellectually, but only because of its strong criticism of Christianity.

I wanted to like it, especially since the director, Ryan Coogler, is excellent, and the lead, Michael B. Jordan, is one of my favorites. It's also a music movie! But the genre was an odd mix of period piece and vampire-film, and horror isn’t my go-to genre. The characters were neither noble nor interesting, and like so many films, it pointed us to “freedom” opposed to how Scripture describes it. While Megan and I appreciated discussing its subversive, anti-Christian worldview, we skipped several scenes that were gratuitous in violence and sexuality. 

In the end, I recommend you and your family pass on this movie—unless you’re especially interested in understanding what the culture thinks about the Church. It does ask some valid questions, but I don't think it's worth wading through the muck to get to them. 

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Dane Bundy is President of Stage & Story and Director of Fine Arts at Regents School of Austin.