Ryan Coogler made a 1930s Mississippi vampire blues epic about race, land, faith, and the hunger to own another person’s story.

Sinners isn’t just a horror film; it’s a meditation on who gets to live, who gets remembered, and who gets consumed along the way.

In this episode of The Sacred Frames, Jeff Cook, Sean Palmer, and Movie Mike Yeager finally sit down with one of 2025’s most talked-about films. We trace the story from Clarksdale cotton fields to blood-soaked juke joints, from hoodoo altars to bleached churches.

We dig into how Sinners holds together a lot at once—race and cultural theft, Black joy and pain, war trauma, code-switching, sex, faith, and the American obsession with consuming what it refuses to honor.

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Jeff Cook, Sean Palmer, and Movie Mike Yager dive into Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest—part revolution thriller, part political satire, part mirror held to 2025 America. We wrestle with the film’s big swings: the “Christmas Adventurers” as villains, whether satire trivializes white supremacy, how Black women’s bodies and sacrifices are depicted, the generational handoff at the end, and the perennial “Does art owe us a way forward—or just a clear-eyed look at now?”

Along the way: DiCaprio vs. Penn, the robe discourse (!), why Sensei Sergio quietly steals the movie, and a spicy sidebar on who gets to make “unprofitable” art in Hollywood.

Listen order tip: If you haven’t seen the film, pause after the intro and circle back—this one works best post-screening.

Chapter Marks (HH:MM)

00:00 Cold open & mea/wea-culpa

02:05 Spoiler warning & quick plot frame

06:40 First takes: form vs. meaning

13:10 The “Christmas Adventurers” problem (satire or trivialization?)

22:45 Power, sex, and Lockjaw

32:00 Pería, Willa, and the generational handoff

42:10 Sensei Sergio & small-scale courage

50:05 “Art owes us what?” (mirror vs. map)

58:20 Industry/box-office inequities

1:05:10 Closing thoughts + streaming recs

Streaming Recs from the episode

Adolescence (Netflix) — one-shot storytelling that stings

The Death of Stalin (Hulu) — political satire with teeth

Punch-Drunk Love (Criterion) & Phantom Thread (Netflix) — PTA context pair

Point Break (original) — Friday-night fun

Alien: Earth — Episode 5 for a self-contained banger

Schindler’s List — rewatch notes for our present

New York (Rick Burns doc) — race, power, and a city’s soul

Dexter: Resurrection — “top-tier Dexter” comfort chaos

Join the conversation

What did One Battle After Another get right—or miss entirely? Drop your take (and your favorite scene) in the comments. We’ll read a few on the next episode.

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Stephen King’s The Long Walk hits the screen, and we dig into what it says about power, violence, and how we walk with each other toward the end we all face. We compare King’s novel to the film (3 mph vs. 4 mph, book’s crowds vs. film’s bleak roadsides), weigh the “prophetic horror” label, and ask whether this story critiques dehumanization—or risks feeding it. We track Ray Garrity and Pete’s bond, the Major’s face of authority, and the finale’s turn from vengeance to mercy. Along the way we name the pull of spectacle over dignity, the economy-over-people creed, and why friendship may be the only way to keep our humanity on the road.

We cover

* Book-to-film shifts and what they change

* Dystopian rules, “choice” vs. coercion, and the lottery

* Spectacle, reality TV, and the cost to the young

* NFL/OnlyFans analogies: risk, poverty, and “tickets out”

* Spiritual read: perverted pilgrimage, memento mori, mercy over revenge

* Violence on screen: numbness, outrage, and discernment

Plus

* Where it ranks among King adaptations

* A nod to 28 Years Later and why “forsaken worlds” keep calling us back

* Content note: frank talk about violence and death.