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MEGAN THEE STALLION via Instagram (December 2, 2023)

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JAYME LAWSON as PEARLINE SINNERS (2025) dir. Ryan Coogler

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Best Cinematography: Sinners (2025) — cinematography by Autumn Durald Arkapaw

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I hate when people insist there would be no wars if women were in charge, because thats definitely not true. There's currently women in power who are just as warmongering as the men, they just happen to not be the President. To insist that women being primarily in power would suddenly fix everything is Bioessentialism and is incorrect

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Someone on tik tok said Stack got stuck coming into this world, ie the complications during his birth. And now, he’s stuck here in death, unable to move on 😭

Y’all have got to stop sharing insights about this movie. My heart can’t take much else!!

My sweet babies 😭 so much tragedy!!

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I’ve decided that my 20s are actually age 25 - 35

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I know Sinners is in the horror genre...but what if we fudged it a little and added some sci-fi/fantasy to the premise

What I'm trying to say is: the Smokestack Twins aren't just in sync, they actually have a telepathic link with each other

Imagine Smoke being able to sense Stack in his mind from birth. Finishing each other's sentences. Acting like 2 halves of a whole. Earning themselves a reputation around town that quickly turns from adorable to spooky as they grow up, especially among the superstitious folk. (Making their daddy think the devil's in them for the way they answer his questions for each other.) The 2 of them having whole silent conversations as they cook up their little schemes. The way Smoke will just say "No" without Stack having to open his mouth when the younger twin starts with his harebrained ideas again. The way they got each other's sixes in the German trenches without having to say a thing. Coming back from Europe with medals all on their chests for their kill count because they're so good at silent ambushes. Them applying the same tactics to Chicago gangs as they did in war, coordinating their robberies with uncanny precision. Making a legend of themselves in Chicago as they did back home, that's why they had to leave.

Now imagine how that connection stands up against the vampire hivemind. The moment Smoke stops feeling Stack in his mind when Stack's heart stops. Knowing that Stack is gone gone when Stack's breathing peters out not just in the body beneath his hands but in Smoke's own chest. Still asking Annie if there's some way she can fix the situation despite the deafening silence in his own head.

Can Smoke hear Stack in his mind when Stack comes back undead? If Stack is chained to the vampire hivemind now, maybe he can't tap into the frequency he shared with Smoke when he was alive. That's how Smoke knows - even if he tries to deny it - that that's not his little brother no more. He looks at Stack's dead eyes reflecting the light in the dark, hears nothing through their telepathic link and knows that there's nothing behind those eyes now.

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This is the worst time to give into apathy, to give into "compassion fatigue", to give into defeatism. Things are dire. So fucking dire.

Like did you know the International Court of Justice has dismissed the case against the UAE for being complicit in genocide because they lack jurisdiction? Did you also know that drones have attacked Port Sudan, where aid would enter the country? The main power station has been hit, leaving the city in a blackout!

So please make noise for Sudan. We need a permanent ceasefire and we need the UAE, along with other countries, such as Russia, Libya, Colombia, and Saudi Arabia to be held accountable. Make sure to boycott, protest, and of course, donate! How about you donate and share my friend's, Randa, @rnd8, fundraiser? She is a Sudanese living in Rwanda and she is raising funds to evacuate her family. Thankfully, her father and 3 sisters have evacuated and reunited with her, but her two brothers are still left behind in Southern Khartoum to this day!

Let's reach the 34K mark ASAP! There is €816 left to go! Plus, GFM has given an extension, but it has passed, which means the fundraiser can close at any moment! You can match me. I have given €10, but you are more than welcome to give any amount! ! !

Verification: Shared by Jin (@/jinforjustice on IG), and @/northgazaupdates!

€33,184 / €35,000

Tagging for reach. Please leave a reply if you wish to be removed. Thank you.

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"there should be some kind of test you have to take before having kids" -> wrong, extremely dangerous and highkey eugenicist and racist "the youth should have safe and effective legal pathways at their disposal to make sure their human rights are constantly protected and upheld" -> based, centers the youth, gives minors more power to fight inequality and does not reinforce the idea that parents are immune to scrutiny from their kids

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the thing about being nonbinary is that you really do start to forget that other people have such strict walls around what is and isn’t allowed for genders. i thought we all agreed that we made that up. could you climb out of the cave real quick and feel the sunshine for a minute.

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What really gets to me is Stack promising Sammie that he could drive the car on the way back—which Sammie does—but no one could’ve ever imagined that he’d be driving back alone.

There’s also the moment at the beginning of the movie, when Smoke and Stack pick up Sammie from the church, and Stack promises their Uncle Jed that he and Smoke will get Sammie back to him in one piece—which they do, more or less.

Even though it’s Sammie who physically gets himself back home, he does, in fact, make it back in one piece—thanks to Smoke making Stack promise not to hurt Sammie and Stack agreeing to let Sammie live out the rest of his life.

It’s beautiful—yet bittersweet—how, even if Stack doesn’t realize it, all three of his promises regarding Sammie were honored in the end.

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In general, Sinners has great cinematography, but I think this tracking shot that follows Lisa Chow across the street from her parents’ Black storefront to their White storefront is one of my favorites:

Look at how it immediately establishes the rules of the movie's setting.

This is Jim Crow Mississippi where Black and White residents essentially live in different worlds. The continuous take forces us (the audience) to experience that segregation in real time as we walk behind Lisa crossing the street. There are no cuts or edits to interrupt the discomfort of having to witness all those visual reminders of racism against Black Americans.

I think it's also significant that it's Lisa, an Asian American woman, who the camera follows. As someone who exists outside the Black-White racial binary, she’s able to traverse these two worlds but the bright red of her shirt still demarcates her as a conspicuous outsider amidst all the blue and brown on both sides, representing the uniquely precarious position of Asians in the U.S.’s racial hierarchy.

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I FINALLY bought a digital copy of Sinners and wanted to highlight a few other cinematography choices I really loved besides that tracking shot of Lisa Chow. The first is the camera language with which the White (and passing) characters are introduced and how it creates a unique sense of racial dread.

In her NYTimes article "The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning, poet Claudia Rankine pointedly describes the daily strain of anti-Black racism:

"Anti-black racism is in the culture. It’s in our laws, in our advertisements, in our friendships, in our segregated cities, in our schools, in our Congress, in our scientific experiments, in our language, on the Internet, in our bodies no matter our race, in our communities and, perhaps most devastatingly, in our justice system. The unarmed, slain black bodies in public spaces turn grief into our everyday feeling that something is wrong everywhere and all the time, even if locally things appear normal."

This quiet but unrelenting feeling that something is wrong and could go wrong hovers over Sinners, the movie playing with our (visual) expectations of the many ways racist violence can suddenly strike at the whim of its White characters.

From the establishing shots of Sammie's sharecropper home to the plantation fields to the prison chain gang, we know that this a world where White characters can act without impunity. The violent legacy of slavery continues well beyond its official end, which we can see from the endless white rows of cotton in the foreground and background connecting each scene to the next, the overseers' silhouettes haunting the edge of the frame.

So when a White character physically enters a scene, we immediately feel dread, hyperaware that they could choose to be dangerous and mete out violence at any time just because they can. The introduction of Hogwood and Mary are good examples of this.

As Smoke and Stack wait for Hogwood to arrive to sell them his property, the camera stays trained on a narrow road that snakes behind the bend. There's low visibility because of the use of a wide shot and its duration is a beat too long. The Twins aren't sure how the interaction will go with this White man, and we the audience are forced to sit in that uncomfortable (but routine) tension with them.

And their wariness is justified because look at how Hogwood gets out of the car, his gun front and center. He's a threat on arrival and flaunts that power (e.g., that intentionally placed "boys").

Side Note: I might be stretching but that utility pole is almost cross-like, no? Possible reference to a KKK burning cross?

And despite Mary's deep connection to Stack and the rest of the Black community, she too chooses to be a danger and we can see this based on how she's visually introduced.

Her figure stands in the background, blurred because of the depth of field. There's something ghost-like about her appearance, which I'd interpret as symbolic of how as a White passing woman her past sexual relationship with Stack can still haunt him given the South's anti-miscegenation laws.

The tension of the scene ramps up as Mary approaches, the intimacy of the close-up shots anxiety-inducing. Although she is justified in how upset she is at him, this move is completely reckless given the optics. As @mosaic-briar observes in their analysis of Mary:

"White women have some of the most historically violent relationships to Black men that goes from before Emmitt Till to the data surrounding discipline in schools...Mary's incapability to recognize how much danger she was putting Stack in by yelling about their sex in the middle of the street telegraphed for us everything we'd need to know about how far she had processed her own identity."

This is a meeting between former lovers who care about one another but Mary's White femininity is still lethal even if she doesn't mean it to be. What a smart way to communicate the capricious but destructive power of Whiteness.

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The repeated emphasis on cunnilingus in Sinners...eating as an act of service, selfless and loving and genuinely intimate vs consumption to fill the void within, false community, selfish and hollow (vampirism)