Writer/director Ryan Coogler understands that, just as every language has words that are untranslatable or very hard to express any other way, there are things that cinema can say like nothing else.

Such was the case with a sequence from the earliest drafts of “Sinners.” Coogler wrote what he initially referred to as the “surreal montage.” It was a musical sequence set in the film’s fictional rural Mississippi juke joint, where a live performance by young bluesman Sammie (Miles Caton) conjures the spirit of Black musicians past and present, ranging from West African drumming to hip hop.

Only cinema — its specific combination of movement, composition, color, choreography, music, rhythm, on top of speech, writing, and expression — can really pull off the connection across time and space that Coogler intended for audiences to feel in that moment: a reflection of how important Mississippi blues had been to the history of music,...