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 ‘Sinners’ Review: Ryan Coogler’s Southern Horror Fantasia

 The director goes boldly out there in his fifth feature, a genre-defying, mind-bending shoot-em-up that stars Michael B.  Jordan as twins.

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 B. Michael Jordan plays twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, in “Sinners,” set in 1930s Mississippi.Credit... Warner Bros.  Pictures

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 Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” is a big-screen exultation — a passionate, effusive praise song about life and love, including the love of movies.  It is a genre-defying, mind-bending fantasy set in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era, filled with great performances, dancing vampires, and a lot of ideas about love and history. Here, when a Black musician plays the blues at a juke joint, he isn’t just performing for jubilant men and women.  He is also singing to the history that flows through them from generations of ancestors to others not yet born.  The musician, like Coogler, is a time traveler who flies off into endless possibilities. Few American filmmakers in recent memory have risen with the dizzying speed of Coogler, who a decade ago vaulted to attention with “Creed,” his franchise rethink that took the “Rocky” series off life support.  With his ensuing “Black Panther” superhero movies, Coogler rose higher still, proving that he could retain both a distinct aesthetic sensibility and a sense of human proportion (and stakes) even in the Marvel movie factory.  His vision of Wakanda, the otherworldly country that the Black Panther calls home, works in part because of its far-out visions and technological wonders.  Yet if it’s persuasive it’s because in Coogler’s Wakanda, you are also never far from the reality that’s roiling right outside the cinematic frame.

 That reality is even more vividly present in the dusty roads and bustling vibrancy of “Sinners,” which takes place in 1932 in and around Clarksdale, Miss., a Delta town tucked in the northwest corner of the state.  There, amid endless fields of cotton,  (the appealing newcomer Miles Caton), a sweetly sincere son of a preacher man, yearns to play music.  He gets a break when his cousins, the identical twins Smoke and Stack — both played with luminous feeling by Michael B.  Jordan — transform a derelict building into a juke joint.  There,  all but burns the place down with his resonant voice and twangy dobro, a guitar with a 

as devilish as that of the bluesman Robert Johnson.