"Sinners" review — This hot and dusty Southern vampire tale is a blues-soaked treat
“We gonna kill every last one of you.” Under the oppressive heat of the Mississippi sun, which over the expanses of white cotton fields and dusty, unpaved roads, the infamous Smokestack twins — veterans of the Great War, former minions of the Capone Chicago crime circuit, and prodigal sons of the South — return home. It is a dark time for the South in the early 1930s. The Great Depression obliterates the agricultural economy, racist Jim Crow laws brutalize the African-American community, and cotton field workers are paid in plantation-issued “wooden nickels,” while the emergent music of the time is both demonized and appropriated by white America. Taking ownership of a deserted saw mill from a local white businessman, the Smokestack Twins are out to make it big with a juke joint for the local Black community, armed with a truck full of Irish beer and a particular penchant for blues music, to make its grand opening that very night. As the sun goes down, with the aroma of music, fried fo...
