★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
Audiences seeing “Sinners” for the first, second and even third time are probably wondering when the dynamite partnership actually started between actor Michael B. Jordan and director Ryan Coogler, who cast him as both vampire-killing Smokestack twins. No, it wasn’t 2015’s boxing drama “Creed” or 2018’s “Black Panther,” still the only Marvel epic to be Oscar nominated as best picture in which Jordan played the villainous Killmonger, a role he slipped into again in Coogler’s 2022 sequel “Wakanda Forever.”
You’d have to go back to 2013 to catch the moment Jordan and Coogler first joined forces. The film is “Fruitvale Station,” the less seen but hardly the least of their five collaborations to date. So far, Coogler has never done a movie without Jordan. No fool he. If you want to know when these two Black artists became forces in world cinema, the magic starts with “Fruitvale Station.”
My intro to this remarkable achievement, the only true story yet for Jordan and Coogler, came at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, where it was clear to festival goers that we were seeing a movie that matters. It still does. Rent it now.Below is my original review