One Battle After Another vs. Sinners

 Two of the most acclaimed and beloved filmmakers working today, Paul Thomas Anderson and Ryan Coogler, released well received films in 2025.  Initially I was not too interested in seeing either film.  I do not naturally gravitate toward vampire films (in the past 30 years I’ve only seen Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and From Dusk Till Dawn).  When I heard vampires were the subject of Coogler’s new film I was disappointed that he had applied his superb talents to something that did not interest me.  The buzz and reviews of the film were superb though and I gradually came around to thinking that it might be worth checking out but by the time I had it had already left cinemas.  

I saw the trailer for One Battle After Another when watching another movie during the summer of 2025 (probably at Superman) and it did not grab me.  I felt it was probably a misuse of Anderson’s talents to do an action film and DiCaprio’s character just looked like a mess I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend more than two hours watching.  To be fair though Anderson’s films are full of nuance and longer scenes that is difficult for trailers to capture a fair sense of.  I was reluctant to pay to go to the cinema for a film I wasn’t sure I would like though the reviews were pretty strong. My son went to see it and really liked it.  

Both films were up for a lot of Academy Awards (Sinners had a record 16 nominations) and there was a general sense that Best Picture and Director would go to one of the two films.  One Battle After Another won both those awards as well as four others.  Sinners won four, including Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan.  I will note, I increasingly find the Academy Awards a little silly as the recognition is nice but there are so many politics involved one hardly feels any one film is necessarily better than another nominated film.  Ed Harris is one the best actors working today and has never won, nor has Signorney Weaver nor Annette Bening, but this does not keep me from always being intrigued by their work.  But I do enjoy the awards seasons since they bring to attention to films I would like to see.  As such, similar to the exercise I did a few years ago (where I felt 1917 was a better film than Parasite), I am going to put One Battle After Another ands Sinners against each other to see which one I liked better.  

Spoilers for both films below:

I finally caught up with both films on HBO Max and I found them both to be engrossing experiences completely worthy of their creators.  First I saw One Battle After Another and was utterly impressed by how confidently Anderson tackles this story (based in part on a novel called Vineland by Thomas Pynchon) that sadly today is more prescient than ever.  Anderson’s films are always visually impressive but here he breached new ground with an original presentation of movement in several action scenes, notably a desperate escape from a bank, a foot chase involving DiCaprio that ends in a comically unexpected way, and a climactic car chase that make superb use of a barren Western highway with hills.  As always, Anderson and his team present several intriguing characters with memorable names.

The prologue in One Battle After Another sets the tone and the driving of the plot with Teona Taylor’s Perfidia walking around a detention facility near San Diego.  Anderson and his cinematographer Michael Bauman introduce both the character in close up and then pull back to show the environment.  Anderson reshot this sequence when he didn’t feel the original location used was cinematic enough.  From her pose it is clear that Perfidia is driving the action.  DiCaprio’s Pat (later Bob) runs into the movie in his first shot but his first lines establish that he is in a subservient role.  This is not unusual for DiCaprio.  In films like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Killers of the Flower Moon he is the top billed star (and his clout allows these films to get higher budgets than they would have otherwise) but his characters are often reacting to what other people do and rarely take the initiative.    

The revolutionaries that Perfidia is leading (and Pat is providing weapons for) are assembled to liberate immigrants from the detention facility and it is fun to hear the logistics of the operation discussed.  When the scene starts we see that while they want to help the immigrants what they really want is to promote their brand and become a sort of Robin Hood band for the underprivileged. 

Perfidia’s first scene with Sean Penn’s Lockjaw is about sexual power.  Although Perfidia is in a relationship with Pat she enjoys intimidating this clearly very dangerous man who eventually we get to know well.  I haven’t seen Penn onscreen for awhile (the last film I saw him in was 2010’s Fair Game) and  I enjoyed being reminded of his talent.  As Lockjaw (a name seemingly inspired by some of the similarly outrageous names in Dr Strangelove such as Mervin Muffley and General Turgidson) Penn uses his intense stare and familiar scowl to menacing yet comic effect.  Lockjaw speaks in a hard but uneven voice and wears tight T-shirts to emphasize his physical strength (extremely impressive given that Penn filmed this at around age 63) but which really represents his insecurities.  Penn gives Lockjaw a funny walk, (he looks constipated with his back overly stiff and his chest puffed out) as if this is Lockjaw’s skewed idea of how a soldier should walk.  Like Penn himself, Lockjaw takes himself incredibly seriously and it makes his line delivery particularly funny.  He feels like a cartoon when in the presence of the more normal behaving Christmas Adventurers (though they are far more sinister).

Lockjaw becomes obsessed with Perfidia afterwards and Lockjaw’s many contradictions emerge.  He  tries to present himself as a hardened military veteran but eagerly avoids turning Perfidia in so he can have sex with her at least once.  While he unnerves Pat in the supermarket with his weird dominant energy he is submissive with Perfidia (which Anderson wisely does not show in great detail but is hinted at with Perfidia’s catlike moves), who is hardly an unwilling participant.  Lockjaw brings Perfidia flowers but when she does not answer the door he uses a battering ram to break it down, responding to rejection with violence since he does not want to be vulnerable.  Lockjaw accepts an award for stopping the French 75 but cowardly shoots many in the head.  The main thrust of the film involves Lockjaw trying to find and kill off his mixed race daughter with Perfidia so he can join the aforementioned Christmas Adventurers, a white supremacist group.  It feeds a theme of Lockjaw trying to be somebody that he is not.  Interestingly Lockjaw appears exactly the same in the prologue and the main body of the film despite the 16 year time jump.

Taylor also makes a strong impression as the driven Perfidia who only appears in the roughly 35-minute prologue.  Taylor and Anderson show her as constantly in motion which sells her driven and restless nature.  Perfidia sets the tone for the film by getting Lockjaw on her tail (and leading to her pregnancy-which is communicated clearly by a jump cut of her pregnant on a firing range right after leaving her rendezvous with Lockjaw) as well as by killing the security guard.  Perfidia goes through a postpartum depression which she deals with by abandoning her family (although Bob/Pat never gives any indication that he suspects that the baby is not his) and embracing the French Revolution 75’s cause even further, which leads to the murder of the security guard.  Although she thinks of herself as uncompromising when she is arrested she snitches on the group putting Pat and her daughter in danger and it leads to the deaths of many of the members.  Perfidia never reappears except via voiceover at the end of the film.  Yet despite all of these actions Taylor’s committed tone and strong body language keep the audience’s sympathies, which is probably helped a little by her ultimate rejection of Lockjaw.

Chase Infiniti as Willa combines the best qualities of both Bob (which is DiCaprio’s character’s name after the prologue) and Perfidia.  She is incredibly resourceful and performs realistically in a crisis, getting scared but rarely panicking.  Like Bob she also has a sense of humanity though she is far more responsible than he is.  Infiniti and DiCaprio only have a few scenes together but they are all memorable.  In the first she is tolerating his silly rants which sound like silly paranoia from a man who smokes too much marijuana, but they turn out to a prophetic.  In the second Willa does not know who to trust after all the events of the film and has a gun trained on him.  Although she briefly embraces him at the end of the scene Anderson wisely holds the big hug between them for the end of the third scene in which Bob shares Perfidia’s letter.  Willa’s emotional response to that is to rightly hug the parent who has always been there for her.  Willa’s rebellious reactions to Lockjaw play much better (and are much funnier) than if she was just afraid of him.  Willa sees how ridiculously insecure Lockjaw is and plays to it.

Benicio Del Toro is perfectly cast as the overly chill sensei who has been a more stable authority figure Willa and who has an operation that hides illegal immigrants from people who exploit them like Lockjaw.   Del Toro’s behavior in the final scene communicated to me that although the sensei is being arrested he will probably figure a way out.  

Regina Hall’s Deandra is a character who by design draws a little less attention than Perfidia,  Deandra is  also a revolutionary but she cares more about the people and helps Bob hide early on, protects Willa and is ultimately arrested and subjected to a cold interrogation which suggests she gave up her freedom to save Willa’s life.  The other characters would not have been able to have their happy ending without Deandra’s sacrifice hand so it bothers me a little that she is not mentioned again.

Jason Raterman plays Colonel Danvers (possibly named after the cold housekeeper in the movie Rebecca) who has a few uncomfortable interrogation scenes with captured members of the French 75.  Raterman gives Danvers an even tone as he skillfully gets information from the prisoners who are dedicated but untrained in how to resist this type of interrogation.

The Christmas Adventurers are presented in an almost comic way.  When Tim Smith goes to meet them he walks through an absurdly long underground tunnel.  Tony Goldwyn, who I always regard warily whenever I see him in a film since Ghost, (and amazingly still looks about the same over 35 years since that film), is a member with the name Virgil Throckmorton.  Kevin Tighe deliciously plays Roy More (which to me has to be a take on the almost identically named Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice who had two failed campaigns for the Senate in large part because of sexual assault accusations from young women), who is more crude than the others.  

Anderson takes this batch of characters on a fascinating adventure in which I could never predict what was coming next.  Wisely Anderson gives lots of grey colors to both sides of the issue.  Bob had a lot of growing to do and while at the end of the film he is dressed better and speaking more clearly he still finishes the film lying on his couch smoking a joint.  However Willa is taking up the cause and going to a protest, which sounds like a more healthy way to rebel against government policies.

There is one note that perhaps fits the story but does not hold up on further examination.  In Lockjaw’s final meeting with the Christmas Adventurers he has a ridiculous explanation as to why he has a biracial daughter.  Lockjaw (who now looks even funnier than when he first met with them- then he had a silly haircut but now he has a glass eye as a result of Tim’s attack on him) has clearly rehearsed this and it is pretty funny.  However I have two reservations with the scene.  First, Lockjaw never seems to suspect that the Christmas Adventurers put the hit out on them, of if he did then he just focuses on earning their acceptance.  In either case Lockjaw is either foolish or more pathetic than we even thought.  Secondly, while there is a certain poetic justice in Lockjaw being gassed to death just when he thinks he is being accepted, would the Christmas Adventurers really go to the trouble and expense of committing that type of murder on their own property instead of disposing of Lockjaw somewhere else? 

Coogler’s Sinners takes a lot of big ideas, including the folklore establishing a connection between evil spirits and music, the complex ties between extended African American families, life in Mississippi during the 1930s, interracial relationships during that period, twin brothers who have made some dirty money in Chicago, the damage that the loss of a child can do to a couple, the KKK, and places them all in a story set over the course of one day and night.  Structurally the film shares some common ground with From Dusk Till Dawn, which is also set mostly during one day and night, sets up its characters throughout the first half and then during the second places them all in a bar where they fight vampires.  But while From Dusk Till Dawn only exists to entertain Sinners goes much deeper.

Sinners opens powerfully with a shot establishing the setting and the theme of the film.  Coogler shows us Miles Canton’s Sammie (who is arguably the true protagonist of the film) who has survived a vampire attack and approaches his father’s church (which is in session) and his father tries to get him to disavow his music to save his soul.  As played by Saul Williams, Sammie’s father is not a firebrand preacher but a good man with strongly held beliefs whose main drive in the film is to keep his son away from bad influences (which is demonstrated earlier when he disapproves of Sammie going out with his cousins Smoke and Stack who have been involved in organized crime).  

Canton is in a more passive role throughout much of the first half of the film but after the film flashes back to the events of the previous day he impresses Stack in a scene in the car when we finally get to see how good a musician he is.  Jordan’s elated reaction mirrors the audience surprise but also shows his excitement as he knows it will be good for business.  Canton never tries to steal the scene and in some of the first half of the film he has almost no dialogue.  But in the second half when he is playing he is completely in his element and the film rightly closes on Sammie as an old man.

Coogler and Michael B. Jordan create a fascinating pair in Smoke and Stack and Coogler wises introduces a good color scheme for each of them (as well as different personalities) so we can easily tell who is who.  There is some foreshadowing as Stack, who eventually is turned into a vampire, wears a deep red (devilish) fedora and ties and is the more aggressive of the two.  Smoke, who stays pure, wears a light blue cap and is more pragmatic.  They both are smart and a step ahead of most opposition and have ripped off both the Italian and Irish mob (Stack was in with the Italian and Smoke with the Irish) and are laundering the money by setting up the joint in their home town.  Stack has an old flame played by Hailee Steinfeld (who I did not recognize for quite awhile) who is young and sexy and dresses in a short skirt and though she is married, has a lot of unresolved issues with Stack, who left her to protect her from being lynched by her white community (she is part African American but looks white).  Smoke left his wife, Annie, after the death of their daughter and she is wonderfully played by Wunmi Mosaku.  Moksaku conveys the processed loss (which she barely shared with her husband) of her child honestly and her anger on seeing Smoke gradually turns to a shared grief and old passion.  In the film’s second half, Annie is the one that is aware of all the vampire rules and the way to hurt them.

Delroy Lindo, an actor I have been enjoying since the 90s, gets a rich role as Delta Slim, a harmonica player who serves as a mentor of the blues world to Sammie.   Coogler gives Lindo a fun opening scene and sets up a motif about Slim’s unapologetic alcoholism, which is sometimes played for a joke.  Omar Benson Miller’s Cornbread is introduced working in a field but turns out to be a tough bouncer until he is turned.  Grace Chow is enjoyable as a hard negotiating business owner, and Jack O’Connell delightfully chews into his role as the head vampire.

The brothers buy the property, bring in all the players and somehow have the lighting and sound ready to go all in one day which is a bit of a stretch but it works for the sake of the story.  The first portion of the second half sets up the vampire threat which are represented by O’Connell’s Remmick and a couple who are try to get access to the bar (because they can only enter if invited) but are denied because Smoke and Stack want it to just cater to African Americans.  These leads to a lot of funny well written exchanges where people are turned as they come outside (Mary, Cornbread) and then try to manipulate their way back in and cannot.

Coogler’s best use of Jordan’s two characters is turning one into a vampire (after it wrongly appears he has had a bloody death) and forcing him to face off against his human twin.  Jordan as Smoke has one of his best physical performances as he draws both of his guns from shoulder holsters and fires several rounds from both hands into Mary who has just bitten Stack.  This occurs against the backdrop of the party (which has several terrific musical performances) breaking up as the focus on profits are quickly replaced by a need for survival.

Sinners has a lot of blues music scenes and except for the fact that they do not contain exposition, the film could be termed as a musical. Ludwig Goransson, who has composed all of Coogler’s films is an executive producer because he had to develop the sound from before the start of production.

Right before the vampires first attack there is a 3 1/2 minute tracking shot (highlighting Academy Award winning cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s fine work) that starts on one of Sammie’s performances and becomes a little surreal as we see performers and club atmospheres from different eras.  The shot ends outside as the vampires plot their attack, but even they perform three musical numbers.  I do not know when they had a chance to rehearse but perhaps vampires are born with an innate sense of rhythm.

The stage is being set for a showdown in the club but Coogler needs a reason for his intelligent characters to let the vampires in.  Coogler sets up how manipulative the vampires are which leads cleanly into Remmick threatening Grace’s daughter.  Grace had struck me as a little too smart to believe that she could destroy the vampires (and she does not last long once the fighting starts) but the Li Jun Li sells Grace’s desperation. The Smoke vs. Stack battle is of course the most dramatic and, unlike similar fights where there is built up resentment that feeds into the struggle in this the brothers love each other so much that it is extremely painful for Smoke.  I did notice that we do not see Smoke kill Stack but Coogler fooled me into believing it had just happened off camera.

The final showdown with Hogwood feels a little anticlimactic even though it is beautifully shot.  Hogwood has not really been established as a worthy antagonist (Smoke and Stack handle him just fine during the negotiations for the sawmill) and his plan to simply bring his KKK group to gun down everyone in the jukebox joint lacks imagination.  The whole episode feels like an excuse to give Smoke a heroic death using a period appropriate tommy gun (which looks cool onscreen).  

The mid credits scene, in which Stack and Mary are revealed to have survived and visit Sammie, who is nearing the end of his having lived out his dream as a blues musician (and is played by real-life blues singer Buddy Guy), is fun for seeing Stack and Mary dressed in 90s clothing (and apparently unable to keep their hands off each other after 60 years together) but it does lead me to question something.  Smoke agreed to let Stack live as long as he spared Sammie.  However Stack (and Mary) would have presumably attacked and turned many other hundreds of people during this time in order to survive.  Did Smoke think of that or did he tell Stack to just go after people who were bad?  

Sinners is the work of a brilliant filmmaker who tells a funny yet poignant story that is full of creative action.  I agree with the Academy’s decision to give the top prize to One Battle After Another, which I found a little more moving.  But I was just as happy to see the multitalented and ambitious Michael B. Jordan get a well deserved win for Best Actor.  Jordan’s characters always feel original, yet he can match toughness with vulnerability as well as anyone.  I enjoyed his work as a director in Creed III and am eager to see him in his own version of The Thomas Crown Affair.  But most importantly, Jordan and Coogler are a superb team and I hope they entertain audiences for many years to come.

One Battle After Another ****

Summers ****