DANCE WITH THE DEVIL.

After surviving the gang wars of Chicago in the early 1930s, twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan) return to their Mississippi hometown, intending to open a juke joint… but evil is stirring.

You could say that Ryan Coogler has created a classic genre piece, a vampire movie. But that wouldn’t cover all that’s going on here. It’s also a film about Southern tall tales, the Black experience of Jim Crow and the spirituality of blues; a highlight is an awe-inspiring scene covering the history of music from that point on.

Great cast; bursting with ambition, the movie gets off to a slow start but ends with deliriously bloody mayhem. 

2025-U.S. 137 min. Color. Part Widescreen. Written and directed by Ryan Coogler. Cinematography: Autumn Durald Arkapaw. Music: Ludwig Göransson. Cast: Michael B. Jordan (Smoke/Stack), Hailee Steinfeld (Mary), Miles Caton (Sammie Moore), Jack O’Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Jayme Lawson, Omar Miller, Delroy Lindo. 

Trivia: Co-produced by Coogler. 

Last word: “For me, the movie started with my relationship with my uncle who is from Mississippi. He was the older male figure in my life. The only music he would listen to is the blues, bro. We was listening to everything from Too Short to Tony! Toni! Toné!, but he would only listen to the blues. I would sit there with him and he would talk about Mississippi and how he came up and how that influenced everything that we was on now. When I was working on Creed in 2015, he passed away. I had already made a film about the Bay with Fruitvale, I was making a movie about Philly, I made a couple of movies about Wakanda, and now I’m coming back home in a different way. I’m looking at the American South, which is, outside of the continent of Africa, where Black people call home.” (Coogler, Interview Magazine)