Some movies have a narrative vastness. They tell big stories, sprawl across decades, or bound around the globe. Ryan Coogler makes movies with thematic vastness. The stories can be summarized with relative ease, but the ideas contained within the frames are so enormous that they are like theses within theses. Sinners is his grandest, greatest, most intellectually audacious work yet. It’s a horror movie and a musical and a heated drama of the bigotry that has stained the soul of the United States since the nation’s founding. The twin brothers known as Smoke and Stack (both played, expertly, by Michael B. Jordan) are veterans and entrepreneurs, thugs and Romeos, powerful men and persecuted people. They are the totality of the American experience. No part of Coogler’s restlessly alive vision is simply one thing, and that includes the supernatural threat that comes calling in the middle of a juke joint’s opening night. These threatening beings seem to represent the insidiousness of forced assimilation, at least until it’s revealed that they, too, were once treated with contempt by the ruling class. Rescue of the kindred oppressed is the real goal. Coogler’s impeccable cinematic craft is a wonder on its own most fundamental terms — Sinners is one of the best looking films of the year, in every way — but his film is special because of the way it makes so many compelling arguments that it sometimes circles around into a thrilling point-counterpoint skirmish with itself.