Sinners’ Time-Traveling Juke Joint Still Rules 2025—No Set-Piece Comes Close

Ryan Coogler made a vampire movie, sure, but the scene everyone keeps talking about in Sinners is basically a four-minute thesis on love, legacy, and what music can do to a room full of people. It sneaks up on you as a party, then quietly turns the whole film on its axis.

The night the music blew the doors off

About an hour in, we land at the grand opening of Smoke and Stack's juke joint outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the 1930s. Miles Caton, playing guitarist Sammie 'Preacher Boy' Moore, takes the stage. Raphael Saadiq and Ludwig Goransson's track 'I Lied to You' kicks in — yes, the one that nabbed a Golden Globe nomination — and Coogler flips the movie from standard widescreen to an IMAX-friendly 1.43:1. The frame widens, the edges go soft like heat rising off the floorboards, and suddenly you're inside this packed, sweaty room instead of just watching it.

Delroy Lindo is in the back as Delta Slim, a hard-drinking Blues legend, tinkling the piano while the crowd sways. As Sammie closes his eyes and leans into the guitar, the party starts feeling uncanny in the best way. Coogler has talked about wanting to trap us in a time-stopping performance, the kind that knocks you out of your body for a minute. Mission very much accomplished.

How Coogler and company pull the trick

Wunmi Mosaku's Annie, a hoodoo practitioner, eases us into the supernatural idea with a calm voiceover about musicians whose sound is so true it can slice between life and death. Then the camera drifts through the joint like a memory you can touch. It plays like one long take, but cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw has said the sequence is actually three stitched Steadicam shots — each 76 seconds — seamlessly woven together.

As the camera floats, the room starts folding time. A West African griot plucks a ngoni along with Sammie. A flamboyantly dressed Hendrix type shows up to shred a Gibson Flying V shoulder-to-shoulder with him. Over there: an 80s-era vinyl DJ. Dancers twerk by the bar. A Zaouli dancer flashes through. A Sun Wukong performer from Chinese opera pivots past. Past, present, future — all nodding to the same beat. It should feel like a gimmick; it ends up feeling like a homecoming.

What the scene actually does to the movie

Literally, the music becomes a beacon. Jack O'Connell's Remmick — a vampire who's been lurking outside — catches the signal, storms the club, and starts picking off folks. Structurally, it's the hinge between two different modes: the first act has that grimy, street-level pulse you might associate with Scorsese, and after this sequence the film goes bolder and weirder. Coogler uses this one showstopper to tell you: whatever you thought this movie was, expand it.

Why it hits harder than a great needle drop

There is the brain stuff — and it matters. The National Institutes of Health has research (look up the 'Cognitive Crescendo' paper) about how music and memory are wired together: a song can snap open a whole scrapbook in your head, and the hippocampus lights up like a switchboard. Sinners takes that science and makes it cinematic.

But the scene is also a statement about inheritance. Coogler has said he'd never visited Mississippi, even though his mom's father grew up there before the family headed to Oakland. The Blues became his bridge back. The movie treats that history as sacred, and it says the quiet part out loud: so much of the sound and movement that shaped the last century came out of the African diaspora, and it keeps echoing forward. Delroy Lindo's Slim tells Sammie before he goes on stage that this music was carried with them, that it's sacred, and that it's big — not small, not disposable. The film believes him.

'Every movie should have its version of that scene, if it can hold it. All the choices we made had to commit to getting to it. We had to say, This is maybe the most important scene in the movie. Everything that came before and everything that comes after has to support that. Seeing it come together was one of the most rewarding moments of my career.'

Also worth shouting out

• The causeway sequence, 28 Years Later — Twilight sky, white-knuckle chase. Danny Boyle showing off.
• Escape from Sensei Sergio's apartment, One Battle After Another — Leonardo DiCaprio's Bob flailing around in a bathrobe is chaos as sport.
• Ghorman Massacre, Andor — Still gutting.
• Concert showdown, KPop Demon Hunters — Rumi, Mira, and Zoey vs. the Saja Boys, capped by a final banger. That is how you land an ending.
• Submarine dive, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning — Tom Cruise holding his breath while ours runs out.

Where to watch

Sinners is up for digital rent or purchase on Prime Video, Apple TV, and the usual suspects. Prefer discs? It is out on DVD and Blu-ray too — which, honestly, suits a movie this tactile.

If you're already caught up and want to look ahead, I have a rundown of the most interesting horror movies lining up for 2026.