As a child, Yu Xin loved riding in her father Zheming's taxi—the Apollo 11—feeling like she was on a space voyage through the city. After her father's death, Yu Xin discovers that he adopted a boy named Lin Si Liang. Driven by curiosity, Yu Xin decides to drive the Apollo 11 on one last space mission. When she reaches a desolate wasteland resembling the lunar surface, a strange boy's voice suddenly comes through her father's old radio. Just as the moon always shows the same face to the Earth, Yu Xin sees a different side of home.
On the Road captures the bleak, hyper-masculine world of long-haul trucking in Northern Mexico, where anything can and will happen. A hard-boiled, neon-noir romantic thriller, it shows the gritty reality of roadside diners, truck stops, and truck cemeteries alongside the expansive, breathless beauty of the Mexican desert highways.
Hulu continues its Summer releases with The Princess. This film follows the princess (yes, she is unnamed) as she attempts to escape her tower, refusing to be wed to a cruel man vying for the throne. Action-packed and snarky, this is a decently fun film if you need a fighting fix.
The Bluff unravels its mystery slowly, opening on the capture of a ship captain named Bodden (Ismael Cruz Córdova) and the swift execution of his entire crew. Then, viewers are treated to a tranquil British settlement in the Cayman Islands in the 1850s, where a mother bakes a coconut birthday cake for her son in a house suspiciously rigged with makeshift tripwires and burglar alarms. As it turns out, that mother is Priyanka Chopra’s quick witted and resourceful ex-pirate Mrs. Ercell Bodden, and her husband’s captors are on the way to the island to hunt her down for abandoning them and stealing their loot. The pirates of the Libertas land on the beaches of Cayman Brac, and the scenes that follow show a Viking-esque slaughter of half the island.
This showcase of Hollywood’s finest talent will certainly be around come awards season, and much deserved
Set in a future dystopian United States in which water is running out, Julia Hart’s Fast Color (2018) is a refreshingly different take on the superhero film.
The gentle, emotional nuances of Evan’s coming-of-age story would have been so beneficial to have incorporated into the life of a POC character. Showing a Black, Asian or Latino young man that is afforded the space to be vulnerable, flawed and sensitive while driving a compelling and widely-loved narrative would have been a game changer.
