Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.What does $2.2bn buy you in what is left of Hollywood? An answer comes with Sinners, the new firework display of a movie from Ryan Coogler. The last two he made were Marvel blockbusters Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which between them grossed that serious number. That now has allowed the director a large creative gamble: a period gangster/vampire movie with musical flourishes and heavy messaging, set in the US South of 1932.The star is Michael B Jordan. Make that stars. Jordan is cast in duplicate as twin brothers Smoke and Stack, newly returned to Mississippi from Al Capone’s Chicago. The underworld has been good to the pair, back nattily dressed with cash to hand. The first order of business is spending some, opening a local nightspot whose attractions will include their fresh-faced cousin, a gifted junior bluesman. Cue old friends and ex-lovers. Keen ears will hear several references to the devil. Stay tuned.For Coogler, the movie sees the legacy of Marvel both upended, and not so much. Smoke and Stack may be mobsters, but the characters we meet here are also smooth, magnetic and roguishly principled: super anti heroes. For all the music in the air, no character gets more than one note. More excitingly, though, the movie comes with a billion-dollar confidence in some big cinematic swings. The sense of scale has less to do with spectacle than grandly ambitious storytelling. Genres collide as fangs find necks. Jim Crow Mississippi is filled with Klan robes and cotton fields, but is also just one part of a heady fable of past and future.The modern audience will get much bang for their buck, often in the form of guns and oral sex. That the movie is made to be seen with a crowd fits a story about raucous nightlife. Yet a sting in the tail awaits. His script also hints that success has left Coogler vexed by the US entertainment industry, with a political subtext whose expression may raise eyebrows — and questions. But then the movie just cranks the volume. Amid the audacity, it feels like a loss of nerve.★★★☆☆In UK and US cinemas from April 18
