On 'Sinners'

Who are the sinners in the title of Ryan Coogler’s astonishing new film? Early scenes offer us a few good suspects. There’s the local white grandee, Hogwood, a jovial, jowly menace who agrees to sell his mill to Elijah and Elias Moore, local Black twins better known as Smoke and Stack. The film takes place over a single day in October of 1932, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and most of its characters are impoverished Black sharecroppers still living on plantations. So it’s tempting to see Hogwood, in a tan Stetson hat and a wolfish grin, as the embodiment of America’s cardinal sin, racism. But Hogwood conducts his transaction without too much trouble and departs, leaving the twins in possession of a fine piece of property.