Sinners (2025)
Ryan Coogler's Jim Crow-era vampire film uses the genre to explore Black art and cultural memory. It establishes the stakes of everything that follows.
Delroy Lindo worked with Spike Lee across Malcolm X, Crooklyn and Clockers, and his West Indian Archie in Malcolm X is a small performance of considerable authority.
He then took a run of studio villains, in Ransom, Get Shorty and Romeo Must Die, playing men whose menace is entirely calm.
Da 5 Bloods, again for Lee, is the late performance, a Vietnam veteran with a long direct-to-camera monologue, and its omission from the Academy nominations was widely criticised.
He was born in London to Jamaican parents, trained at the American Conservatory Theater, and works regularly on stage.