What Else I'm Watching: 'Sinners,' 'Poker Face' Season 2, 'Strange Days,' 'Once On This Island' & More Of 'Andor' Season 2

Also, some notes on the Walton Goggins episode of 'Saturday Night Live'

The last two weeks have been busy, so while I was excited to finally share that I’ve seen Sinners (in IMAX), it’s been hard to find time for this latest viewing diary entry. If you’re a parent in Georgia, especially one whose kids are in baseball and dance, you know that May is a doozy. Plus, I’ve been occupied with all the nonfiction new releases, including my two most recent picks of the week, Pavements and Hung Up on a Dream: The Zombies Documentary, and anniversaries, such as The Gleaners and I.

Here are some quickly scribbled and chopped thoughts on what else I’ve been watching, ranked in the order in which I liked them best:

Sinners (2025)

There’s not much that I can say about Sinners that hasn’t already been dominating the buzz around the film, but I can confirm that it’s the moviegoing experience of the year (sorry, A Minecraft Movie). I managed to find time to see it in IMAX on its final day on the biggest screen nearby, and despite my window only allowing for a 1:15 pm show, the theater was completely packed. I hate sitting between strangers, but there was no other option. Anyway, it was great to see a Wednesday matinee in the middle of the OTP Atlanta suburbs so crowded for a genuinely worthy film.

Sinners is the kind of movie that could very easily fail in the hands of most directors. Ryan Coogler already showed with Black Panther that he can effectively pull in different influences and mash together a multitude of ideas and images, and make something that is both highly entertaining and deeply culturally significant. Sinners does the same, only with American history and vampires instead of African tradition and superheroes. He’s terrific at world-building, but he’s even better at creating four-dimensional landscapes that fill the time and space of his worlds.

There is a musical sequence around the midway point of Sinners that, on paper, had to sound undoable without seeming corny. Coogler executes this sequence brilliantly for one of the most memorable moments in cinema in years, as we become unstuck in time watching everything everywhere all at once in terms of Black musical heritage. Speaking of music, though, I want to confess that I felt guilty enjoying the bluegrass and Irish folk songs of the evil white vampires in a similar way that I feel guilty loving “You’ll Be Back” as much as I do within the whole of Hamilton. I’m totally this meme:

Poker Face Season 2 (Episodes 1-3)

The year of the dual performances continues, and if you thought Michael B. Jordan was great as Smoke and Stack in Sinners, wait’ll you see Cynthia Erivo as septuplets. The first episode of Season 2 of Rian Johnson’s Poker Face is a lot of fun. That’s not a term I like to use for television entertainment (“fun” is for activities), but the fun Erivo and others clearly had making that episode (“The Game is a Foot”) is infectious, and you’ll feel it second-hand. The fact that Erivo gave each of the sisters she plays different personalities and, in some cases, different accents, is particularly delightful. Johnson puts her in a lot of comedic mistaken-identity (some of them intentional and duplicitous) situations that she pulls off beautifully Also, I love a good mid-story twist like the one that the murderer encounters here.

The second episode (“Last Looks”) is a bit thin by comparison, but guest star Giancarlo Esposito is always enjoyable, even if he seems to be redoing Gus Fring as a mortician. It’s hard to buy his character being married to the over-the-top Katie Holmes, and some other elements don’t quite come together. Still, Natasha Lyonne anchors the episode as hilariously as ever. If it’d just been a standalone Creepshow-type installment, it’d be skippable. The third episode (“Whack-a-Mole”) is more Lyonne-centric than most, but talk-show buddies John Mulaney and Richard Kind steal it away from her. Rhea Perlman also does a great job. The Departed-esque FBI mole plot is pretty unbelievable as scripted, but again, this series isn’t about realism.

Strange Days (1995)

It’s taken me 30 years to watch Strange Days because at the time of its release, it just looked like another bad VR-themed thriller. Thanks to The Criterion Channel highlighting early Kathryn Bigelow movies this month, I finally gave it a chance, and it pulled me in immediately. I might dare to say that this is one of the best movies of the ‘90s. Not unlike Coogler with Sinners, Bigelow gives us a fully realized and lived-in setting, only her build is all about the near future rather than the not-so-distant past.

Strange Days follows a rather simple yet convolutedly told, and ultimately unconvincingly concluded, noir-ish narrative, but it’s the backdrop of that story that makes it so engaging. It’s familiar but also not (sorta like Blade Runner). This is a quintessential ‘90s L.A. film pushed to unrecognizable extremes, as Bigelow delivers an immersive cornucopia of sci-fi tech, elevated social chaos, commonplace cop conspiracies with then-timely relevance, wild music, and brilliantly absurd costuming.

One more thing: hearing Angela Bassett say “right here, right now,” I instantly recognized it from Fatboy Slim’s song “Right Here, Right Now,” and yet I hadn’t ever known that was a sample. Watching Strange Days finally has totally changed something I’ve already enjoyed for more than 25 years. I love that.

Once On This Island (1990)

No, Disney hasn’t made their announced adaptation of Once on This Island yet. I saw the musical at my local community theater, and wanted to share, even if it’s something I watched live instead of on a screen. The show is technically an adaptation of The Little Mermaid, though aside from it being an even more substantial Caribbean take than Sebastian singing “Under the Sea,” the connection is hard to see. It’s more your typical star-crossed lovers plot in which a peasant girl from one side of an island rescues and falls for an upper-class light-skinned boy of partial French ancestry.

The musical incorporates a mix of historical and cultural themes, from colonial drama to mythological fantasy, as four of the characters are gods/demons who steer much of the narrative. Most of the dialogue and storytelling is conveyed in song, and there are a lot of dance numbers that made me feel like I was transported to its time and place. It was hard to stay still in my seat. One thing I really appreciated is the true fairy tale ending, which is not exactly happily ever after in the Disney tradition (wonder if they’ll change it). It’s actually an ending that aligns with the original Hans Christian Andersen version of The Little Mermaid.

Saturday Night Live Season 50, Episode 19: “Walton Goggins / Arcade Fire”

I’ve been watching Saturday Night Live with my older child lately as it airs, which I hadn’t been doing in years, and this past weekend’s episode had me laughing the most throughout. Walton Goggins was a great host, seemingly willing to do anything asked, no matter how humiliating or self-deprecating. Arcade Fire… meh. They used to be good. They were surprisingly boring.

The parts of the show that I wanted to highlight, though, were both during Weekend Update. Firstly, Marcello Hernández, who has been to this section of the show what Adam Sandler was to Update when I watched as a kid, is killing it in general. In this episode, his “Movie Guy” character had me in stitches again with his verbal blunders. I realized he’s basically like if Chico Marx was back from the dead, talking about awards films and summer blockbusters… and Gatorade Zero.

Adding to the classic comedy shtick in this segment was Mikey Day using the subject of tariffs and the idea of walking into a spiderweb as an excuse to show off his talent for slapstick. His pratfalls were top-notch. It just goes to show that old-fashioned physical comedy and wordplay are still enough, and probably make more sense as alternatives to topical humor when the real world is so ludicrous that satire and political parody can’t possibly hit as hard.

Andor Season 2, Episodes 4-9

Maybe I’m just not in the right headspace for it, but I’m still not enjoying this season of Andor anywhere near as much as I liked the first season. There’s not enough going on, yet at the same time, there are too many threads battling for our attention. I don’t care about any of the characters — in fact, I might dislike Bix more than any Star Wars character ever. I’m glad Forest Whitaker finally showed up as Saw Gerrera, but he’s still not in it enough. Funny enough, I thought this season was only nine episodes, so I was confused about how it seemed to end. We get three more episodes this week, and I hope they’re worth it.