Awards Season Rivals Sinners and One Battle Another Are Both Very Good, Very Fun, and Very Overrated
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Hammer Film Productions
16 min read
The article directly references 'Hammer-style horror' and compares Sinners to actual Hammer horror movies. Understanding this British studio's Gothic horror legacy from the 1950s-70s provides essential context for the genre filmmaking being discussed.
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Blaxploitation
12 min read
The article discusses Black-centered genre filmmaking and the tension between entertainment and political messaging in Black cinema. Understanding the blaxploitation era of the 1970s illuminates the historical precedent for films like Sinners that blend genre thrills with racial themes.
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Thomas Pynchon
15 min read
The article mentions One Battle After Another is a 'Thomas Pynchon riff' based on a 1990 novel. Understanding Pynchon's distinctive literary style—paranoid conspiracies, countercultural protagonists, labyrinthine plots—explains the film's approach and why critics might attach political profundity to it.
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Spoilers for both films follow.
If you listen to the consensus - and lord knows it’s hard not to when it’s being screamed at you from every Letterboxd review and Substack post and Guardian longread - we’re going to be witnessing a clash of the titans this awards season. In one corner, we have Ryan Coogler’s Southern Gothic vampire extravaganza Sinners, a massive spring-season hit and a film being treated as a profound meditation on the intergenerational trauma of the Black experience and a radical reclamation of American roots music. In the other, we have Paul Thomas Anderson’s Thomas Pynchon riff One Battle After Another, which is being hailed as a generational masterpiece, a bracing portrait of an America coming apart and a kind of prophetic pre-autopsy of the MAGA era. These are movies that sold a lot of tickets, earned stellar reviews, and which thrilled me as cinematic experiences… and they’ve both achieved rare heights in the world of commentary, analysis, and debate. In the 21st century, beyond profit, beyond critical commendation, important movies are defined by their ability to generate discourse.
And look, I want to be clear that I liked both of these movies, very much. I really, truly did. I had a great time watching both. I don’t dispute that they’re excellent, riveting movies; I’m not wearing my hater hat today. But I think that both have been the subject of a particular kind of overheated praise that you see a lot these days: they’re fundamentally fun-but-shallow exercises in action filmmaking that are being hung with implied depth they don’t contain. And, worse, they each seem to be playing for that kind of recognition, and to their detriment. Both Sinners and One Battle After Another are very good movies that would be even better if they didn’t take unnecessary swipes at profundity that they can’t achieve. Which is a shame! The world needs this kind of exceptionally well-crafted fun movie, built with vision and profound seriousness. Not every movie has to reach for artistic depth if such depth doesn’t emerge from it organically.
In Sinners, twin brothers return to 1930s Mississippi to open a juke joint, but their attempt at building an artistic space for their community (that is, a Black Southern community in the depths of Jim Crow) turns into
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