Heads of State (2025)

Amazon Prime’s new pirate flick, The Bluff, starring Priyanka Chopra, is a damn good movie. And that’s right - it’s a pirate movie! It’s been more than 20 years since the magic of Pirates of the Caribbean, and in a media landscape of reboots and sequels where the people cry out for something, anything original, this sweeping swashbuckler was like a tall glass of water after a marathon of schlock.

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.