THE ROAD TO "SINNERS"

Ryan Coogler’s vision of music, race, family, religion—and vampires.

- JELANI COBB

The decade-long dominance of Marvel Studios in American popular cinema has insured that, among other things, we all recognize an origin story when we see one. To the extent that such neat inception points exist in real life, an afternoon at an aging movie palace on the corner of Lake Park and Grand Avenues, in central Oakland, California, provided one for the filmmaker Ryan Coogler. The Grand Lake Theatre, which opened in 1926, to showcase vaudeville acts and silent films, still retains a neoclassical majesty—a crystal chandelier, frescoes, a Wurlitzer organ that is played on Friday and Saturday nights—that’s a holdover from the era when theatres were meant to project the grandeur of Hollywood itself.