Hannah, a half-white and half-Chinese teenager, meets her 100% Chinese half-sister for the first time at an event to celebrate her birth, forcing Hannah to question where she fits in.
At first glance, Black as Night is a strange title choice for a film about vampirism in post-Katrina New Orleans. However, the title alludes to the world's anti-black and colorist messages.
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.
I suppose you could argue that the story wasn’t what Director James Cameron was aiming for, it was the visuals. The spectacle of it all was the point, and it certainly shows.
Overall, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is plagued by numerous flaws, both from a quality and from a diversity standpoint. The film relies on gore and loud sounds to drown out its flat script, flatter dialogue, and one-dimensional characters.
Shadow & Bone excels in natural story representation with powerful centering of culture. Jessie Mei Li stars as Alina Starkov, the feisty cartographer with kindness, innocence, and integrity, who comes to be revealed as the legendary summoner of light.
Considering the runtime, I expected each scene to hit harder as opposed to a series of montages and vignettes.
