With Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey and now Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, 2025 is already the year of dual performances. While Joon Ho and Perkins’ scripts couldn’t keep up with their films’ top stars, Sinners offers a complete package that — much in the way of S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk — transforms its B-movie premise to an instant classic.

After surviving World War I and thriving in Chicago’s criminal underground, twins Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan, Black Panther) return to their Mississippi hometown with a stolen fortune in tow. They quickly take their little cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) under their wings as they prepare to convert a dilapidated sawmill in a juke joint. The twins reluctantly reignite old flames, assemble a tight-knit group of employees and prepare for a party the likes of which Clarksdale has never seen or allowed. Meanwhile, an Irish vampire (Jack O’Connell, Ferrari) starts building an undead army out of anyone he can sink his teeth into, starting with a couple of Klan members.

Given the film’s primary location and bullet-ridden bloodsuckers, From Dusk Till Dawn comparisons aren’t out of the questions. Honestly, both flicks skew more action than horror, shifting into a gear that overrides terror with tension. But that’s where their similarities end. Sinners plants its own stake into vampire canon with a vibrant cast, an immersive attention to detail and music that will undoubtedly wind up on more than a few Spotify Wrapped lists.

More than a group of quirky, grizzled players thrown together in a life-or-death situation, Coogler invests a significant amount of time in his first act developing his characters. Slim (Delroy Lindo, 2015’s Point Break) and Annie (Wunmi Mosaku, Deadpool & Wolverine) are notable standouts, the former building the film’s historical and musical foundation, whereas the latter drives Sinners’ emotional and spiritual strength. The red-eyed antagonist is more than a run-of-the-(saw)mill vampire, but an assimilator seeking to devour Black culture, music and being.

In creating this monster, Coogler also raises a fascinating question: If the art a community produces is so compelling, what’s stopping someone from colonizing it, recreating it and ultimately perverting it to the point that its original source is basically lost, like the effect created by so much of Elvis Presley’s music. It casts a shadow over Sinners, and while vampire media has more than a few lame and overly convenient tropes, none of them take too much away from the film. Instead, it wields them in a way that illuminates a complex systemic process and makes it accessible. In other words, Sinners is just as much of an effective social examination as it is a high-octane blockbuster. And surprisingly, neither seems to work against the other.

Any doubt Coogler could direct a compelling original film ends with Sinners. While very much not for children, it feels like the kind of horror flick you could captivate anyone with, like Ron Underwood’s Tremors or John Carpenter’s The Thing. In an era of never-ending content and films that wind up on streaming before anyone knew they had a theatrical run, Sinners helps keep cinema’s blood pumping strong. —Daniel Bokemper

Get it at Amazon.

Between 2022’s Talk to Me and 2024’s Oddity, cursed-object flicks might not be back in full force. They are, however, resurging enough for the creepy old shopkeepers to flip the dim lights back on. Unlike the aforementioned films, Osgood Perkins takes a different and comical tact with his adaptation of Stephen King’s The Monkey.

After Petey (Adam Scott, Krampus) fails to return the titular toy due to a stringent return policy and a disemboweled pawnshop owner, he leaves the monkey to his twin boys, Hal and Bill (Christian Convery, Cocaine Bear). Then he walks out on their mom (Tatiana Maslany, TV’s Orphan Black). The boys quickly learn winding up the doll triggers a Final Destination-like series of events that kills someone close to them.

The two try to rid themselves of the monkey and drift apart. But as an adult Hal (Theo James, HBO’s The White Lotus) prepares for one final trip with his teenaged son (Colin O’Brien, Wonka) before forfeiting custody, he encounters a string of familiar and often explosive deaths. It seems somebody is making the monkey drum its sticks once again.

The Monkey sails through its brisk runtime, cutting through would-be lulls with quick vignettes of increasingly outlandish kills. James gives life to an otherwise flat character in Hal, breaking through the deadpan dialogue to produce a standout performance. His dual role as his brother lacks the emotional weight, but still carries its own compelling and maniacal charm. O’Brien compliments James well, grounding realism to the outlandish circumstances that surround him.

Unfortunately, Perkins’ attempt at real emotion doesn’t mesh particularly well with the film’s wackier side. It’s like he’s fighting against himself, bloating the film with gags when the premise is entertaining enough. The grossly unprepared priest and the borderline-creepy babysitter work presumably well in King’s universe, but they fail to jive well in Perkins’.

And that may be what this and the director’s previous work lacks: an artistic impression. While it’s not necessary for every filmmaker to make it painfully obvious they made something, Perkins doesn’t appear to leave any mark at all. For a director that has firmly rooted himself in horror — even to the point of putting his name front and center in The Monkey’s promotional material — he doesn’t leave a meaningful signature. There’s probably a director who has made a point to operate like this, and maybe even successfully, but for Perkins, it just feels uninspired and hollow. Hopefully he can use 2025’s Keeper to establish himself a bit more. Because as it stands, it doesn’t feel like he’s truly emerged as a director.

While it manages to earn a few solid laughs and deliver some — at the very least — interesting deaths, it still feels overly clinical in the wash. Perkins understand dark comedy, sure, but he lacks restraint and subtlety, unintentionally robbing his more poignant and frankly funny sequences of their power. Akin to the director’s 2024 film, Longlegs, The Monkey slips on the peel. —Daniel Bokemper

Get it at Amazon.