Director: Ryan Coogler

Ryan Coogler has directed five features and Michael B Jordan is in all of them, which is one of the closest actor-director partnerships currently working. Fruitvale Station, made for almost nothing, established the interest in institutional violence that runs through everything since.

Creed rebuilt the Rocky series by shifting the point of view, and Black Panther used a superhero budget to stage an argument about diaspora, obligation and what a nation owes people outside it. Killmonger remains one of the few genre antagonists whose position the film does not dismiss.

Sinners moved him into horror with an original property, which at his commercial level is a genuinely uncommon choice.