a review of

this is SO packed with ideas in its script and direction and sets and lore and it damn near buckles from its own weight and yet it never does even as its (very) few shakiest moments. but the fact it spends a whole hour building? beautiful. this could've been 4 hours and i would be even more in love. i was sold 15 minutes in and was already fed by midpoint. and then you hit the "I Lied to You" number and you understand that's why movies are undefeated as an artform. why movies are fuckin magic. miracles.  it really felt like the one film ryan coogler wanted to make if he got to make nothing else before or since and i mean that in the best way. It's really a uniquely personal work of art. extremely tickled that the film that defines 2025 is From Dusk Til Dawn, sampled and remixed into a sweatier and bolder story about racial and generational trauma-- and the unsteady bond colonized people around the world inevitably share... AND sweaty sexy vampires making blood squirt all over the place... AND art as a universal language and unifying force. like Coogler understood that so-called "elevated horror" is itself a nonsense term meant to separate taste and flavor into othered spaces. You can't have an "Us" without a "C.H.U.D.". You can't have a "Sinners" without "From Dusk Til Dawn".  the comparison doesn't lessen one or the other, the conversation and connection IS part of the magic.  the thoughtful and the macabre and the thrilling and the sweet and the sexy and the silly and the uncomfortable can all coexist and are in fact each all better and more effective for sharing that space.