If good artists borrow and great artists steal, what does that make of the character of a great artist? Do they sell their souls? Writer-director-producer Ryan Coogler explores this in Sinners. The film explores how Black music was stolen and appropriated through the lens of a period vampire story. Blues guitarist Sammie Moore's singing and playing is so good, he attracts the devil in the form of a vampire. Through this narrative, Coogler demonstrates that the theft of Black music is cyclical and predatory, using time travel, the supernatural, and racial dissonance to expose the systems of inequality that enable it.

The film starts with the Smokestack twins opening a juke joint in order to make money after returning home to Mississippi from Chicago. In the juke joint, their cousin Sammie starts playing the blues, and he burns the house down. The audience sees all of the different types of Black music and dancing come into the joint. These genres, including Blues, Rock and Roll, Jazz, and Hip Hop, are central to American culture and have all been stolen from the Black community. Coogler's decision to show all of the different genres of Black music connects them as evolutions of each other, all rooted in Black culture.

The devil arrives in the form of an Irish man, Remmick, who claims to just want to play his music. The Smokestack twins turn him away at the door, but Remmick is persistent. He sits outside the juke joint with two other white people and plays an old Irish song. It turns out Remmick is a vampire, and starts to infect everyone as they leave the joint. When they become vampires, Remmick gains their knowledge, including their music and culture. The vampires are there to rob Sammie of his blues and turn him into a vampire, offering everyone else safety if they can just take him. The hive mind, symbolizing the music industry, strips the music from others, taking what it did not create or earn.

The original vampires who prey on the juke joint are white men, coming to rob the musician of his music, which symbolizes the theft of the music industry. Yet, Coogler pushes further. At the end of the film, the KKK comes to kill everyone in the juke joint in the morning. Smoke puts on a last stand, killing every clansman, dying to protect what is left of his juke joint. Even after Black culture is stolen, the music industry and other institutions try to go further and kill the spirit of Black culture, attempting to rebrand it as white.

In Sinners, time travel, the supernatural, and the racial tension and inequity of the 1930s paint the picture of music and culture being stolen from Black people. Sammie Moore's music is the impetus of the supernatural attack in the film, yet in reality these attacks look more like predatory record deals, bad contracts, and uncleared samples from which so much modern music comes. Coogler answers the question "Do great artists sell their souls?" with his own: "Did they steal someone else's?"

Set in Oslo, Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value explores the theme of paternal relationships and how they shape one's life, even when one is avoidant. Nora and Agnes's father, Gustav, comes back to town following their mother's death. Gustav pitches Nora an acting role in his newest film, a film he wrote for her. Nora, resenting her father, refuses. Through Gustav's film, Trier argues family bonds endure, despite disappointment; Nora bridges the divide after decades of failure by giving her father a second chance and making his film.

Nora's refusal to forgive Gustav makes it impossible to give him a chance, even as he tries to reach out. Sentimental Value starts during Nora's childhood, in the home that both she and her father grew up in. Nora grows up to be a successful theatre actress, influenced by her absent father, the successful film director. Gustav shows up to the house after the funeral unbeknownst to Nora, and they meet for dinner. He tells Nora he has been writing a script for the last 15 years, and that he wrote it for her. Nora refuses the role, citing his absence without even opening the script. She wants to be close with him, but to do that is to trust him, and trust that he won't leave again.

Later in the film, once Nora's part has been cast as someone else, Gustav tries to convince Agnes to let her son play himself in the film. Agnes puts her foot down. Gustav leaves a copy of the script at her home. Agnes reads it in a single sitting. She connects the dots. It's a film about a woman who carries incredible sadness, like her sister, and their grandmother. She takes the screenplay to a depressed Nora. Agnes has one scene highlighted, which she forces Nora to read. It hooks her. Nora says, "it was like he was here during my suicide attempt." Gustav's script was his way to connect with his daughter.

The actress Gustav hired to play Nora's part quits before principal photography, not because she doesn't want to do it, but because it doesn't feel right. Nora takes her place. Sentimental Value concludes via a single long take that signals the shot is from inside Gustav's film. Nora, playing her grandmother, kills herself. But instead of their house, it is in a replica, on a soundstage, signifying their need to move on from the place that brought them great sadness. After the take, Gustav smiles at her, and Nora smiles back.

Without showing the vulnerability and opening herself by opening the script, Nora would never have been able to work with Gustav and start to repair their relationship. Trier demonstrates that second chances are the way to overcome familial strife, but is what one gets in return enough?

Eva Victor's Sorry, Baby is a poignant account of recovering from sexual assault by the writer-director-actor. Starting in the present, and jumping back through the years, before ending up back in the present, Victor creates a compelling personal narrative regarding the struggle and strife of sexual assault. Eva Victor's four major time jumps in Sorry, Baby are a unique device to explore Agnes's struggle to overcome her sexual assault.

"The year with the baby" shows Agnes at a time in her life where she has just gotten a big job as a full-time professor at her university. Her best friend Lydie comes back into town to visit. It becomes clear that something is haunting Agnes. Victor creates a character in Agnes that isn't just stuck, but is the platonic ideal of stuckness, and the subsequent time cuts she uses provide much more insight into this.

"The year with the bad thing" is an account of what happened to Agnes. Years before, Lydie and Agnes are grad students working on their theses. One day, instead of giving her notes in his office at school, her thesis advisor tells Agnes to come to his house a few blocks away. The camera follows Agnes as she walks down the street and into his home. The camera stays outside, time lapsing. The sun sets. When it is dark, Agnes finally leaves, pushing her way out of the door desperate and exhausted. The juxtaposition of Agnes years later, still haunted by her rape, and the circumstances surrounding it, drive the story and make it very emotionally raw.

In "The year with the questions," we see Agnes in court for jury duty, at voir dire. The attorney asks whether a crime has ever been committed against her. Agnes raises her hand, but still cannot say what it was. She says she has never told anyone out loud before. Agnes is just starting to wrap her mind around what happened, but has not processed the attack herself.

In "The year with the good sandwich," Agnes has a panic attack behind the wheel. A stranger calms her, gives her a sandwich, and space to talk. It is here where Agnes acknowledges that she knows what happened is bad because everyone she has told reacts a certain way. This is the turning point. At the end of the film, she meets Lydie's baby and tells it that bad things happen to good people, and promises to be there for it. Recovery isn't linear, and Eva Victor manages to capture that great nuance of life in Sorry, Baby.