Sinners vs. One Battle After Another: Race, Power, and Who Gets Centered in Hollywood

A Messy Liberation podcast episode hosted by Becky Mollenkamp and Taina Brown.

What this episode is about

This episode is a layered, messy, and necessary conversation about storytelling, race, motherhood, power, and who gets centered when Hollywood tells stories that claim to be “political.”

Using three recent releases as our jumping-off point — Sinners, One Battle After Another, and His and Hers — we unpack what happens when art positions itself as subversive, and whether it actually disrupts power or quietly reinforces it.

This episode is for you if…

You want to hear a raw, unfiltered critique of two major films that goes beyond the surface to ask the uncomfortable question: Who is this movie actually for?

Discussed in this episode

• Why Sinners feels intentionally campy, unapologetically political, and rooted in Black culture and collective survival
• How One Battle After Another leans on harmful tropes about Black motherhood and revolutionary violence
• Why “satire” isn’t a get-out-of-harm-free card
• The racial reframing of His and Hers — and how Black women as leads change the stakes
• Who gets empathy, who gets invisibility, and who carries the labor
• Why representation alone isn’t enough
• Why who tells the story matters as much as what story gets told

A note before you listen

This is a spoiler-heavy episode that assumes you’ve either watched these films or are okay hearing the full critique. It’s also an honest conversation about discomfort, trigger warnings, and the exhaustion of watching lived experience turned into “prestige art” for someone else’s enlightenment.

Resource mentioned

• Dr. Michelle Taylor (Feminista Jones) on One Battle After Another