‘Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves’ Review: The Role-Playing Fantasy Game Becomes an Irresistible Mash-Up of Everything It Inspired

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Murder Mystery,” a cheeky pasteboard detective thriller-meets-middle-aged-romance that became a huge hit for Netflix four years ago, had the inspiration to team Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston as Nick and Audrey Spitz, a dweeby-sweet New York couple — he was a cop trying, and failing, to get promoted to detective; she was a hairdresser — whose marriage-on-auto-pilot needed a dose of shock therapy. They got it when they went on the European getaway that Nick, a compulsive cheapskate, had been promising Audrey for 15 years. The two wound up on a yacht, at a geezer aristocrat’s party, which turned out to be his death sentence as the moment he cut everyone there out of his will.

Paramount and Hasbro eOne with the greatest of intentions have created an extremely fun, broad-audience appealing feature take on the classic roleplaying game, entitled Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which already is 90% certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes –not an easy feat with a genre movie of this caliber– and 94% with moviegoers.

watch one of those here, in case you need to see it again (you do). Instead, it hilariously reunites three of the stars of “Freaks and Geeks” to finally finish up that game of “Dungeons & Dragons” they played all the way back in the show’s final episode.Now, we assume if you’re reading this you know what the previous paragraph is talking about, but just in case, “Freaks and Geeks” was a hugely influential single camera comedy-drama that ran for a single season from 1999-2000.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Imagine an on-the-road concert documentary shot in the anything-goes days of 1970 — a hurly-burly vérité jamboree like “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” or “Elvis on Tour.” It’s about the biggest rock band in the world. It encompasses 11 shows in 26 days, with headlines and controversies and a film crew out to capture it all. We see the band members backstage, on planes, in their nightly lodgings, and onstage. The crowds are rapturous. “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?” is, in a way, that movie. The band that’s on tour, the mighty but fraught Blood, Sweat & Tears, was full of great musicians who most people didn’t know by name. Yet as fronted by the intoxicating huskiness of lead singer David Clayton-Thomas, they emerged from the embers of the counterculture to become one of the first true supergroups. By the time their 1970 tour arrived, Blood, Sweat & Tears were the most popular rock band in America, with a number-one album and a trio of hit singles that remain iconic: “And When I Die,” “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” and the joyfully bombastic and lurchy ear worm that was “Spinning Wheel.”

The cast of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves has landed in Los Angeles for the latest premiere!

Chris Pine hits the red carpet for the latest premiere of his new movie, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, held at Le Grand Rex on Wednesday (March 22) in Paris, France.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The drama of addiction and recovery, as it takes place in the movies, tends to come at us like a series of rituals. There’s the rule-by-rule, day-by-day protocol of 12-step programs (the meetings, the showing up, the sharing, the calls to sponsors); a lot of us may feel we know it well from movies, even if we’ve never personally undergone the experience. There are the deeply engraved patterns of addiction itself: the highs, the lows, the cravings, the exploitation of friends and family members, the descent to the bottom, the grasping for the drink or the pill or the fix (or the one that isn’t there) and, in some cases, the criminal behavior. The reaching out to save oneself is also a kind of ritual — one that some addicts would say God built into us.

Naman Ramachandran New York-based film and TV studio and streaming network FilmRise has acquired North American distribution rights to true-crime documentary feature film “The Thief Collector.” Directed by Emmy winner Allison Otto (“The Love Bugs”), the film follows one of the most audacious and puzzling art thefts of a generation. In 1985, Willem de Kooning’s seminal work, “Woman-Ochre,” was sliced from its frame and stolen off the walls of the University of Arizona Museum of Art, disappearing into the desert. Over 30 years later, in a remote town in New Mexico, the $160 million dollar painting was rediscovered in the unlikeliest of places – the home of an eccentric married couple, both schoolteachers, with a keen eye for great works but a very unconventional method of collecting them. The film features Glenn Howerton co-creator, director, writer and star of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”

Chris Pine and Hugh Grant hit the red carpet with their co-stars for the premiere of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves held at Zoopalast on Monday night (March 20) in Berlin, Germany.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “You Can Call Me Bill” is the latest documentary from director Alexandre O. Philippe, who specializes in plucking tasty subjects out of the pop cosmos and doing deep-dive meditations on them. Philippe often leans into horror (“Memory: The Origins of Alien,” “Doc of the Dead,” and his greatest film, “78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene”), but even with other subjects (“The People vs. George Lucas,” “Lynch/Oz”), what he’s always looking for is the heady ineffable curveball insight. So if you go into his new movie, which is all about William Shatner, presuming that it’s going to be something other than a conventional portrait of William Shatner, you’d be quite correct. The movie is built around an interview with the legendary 91-year-old actor, still vigorous and voluble, with a seize-the-day cornball glow to him. In “You Can Call Me Bill,” Shatner sits under the hot lights, with the camera close to his face, talking, talking, and talking — about life, death, acting, fame, love, desolation, and trees.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Why did they give Zachary Levi a haircut for “Shazam! Fury of the Gods”? Four years ago, in the first “Shazam,” Levi played a kid in a superhero’s body, and the movie was smart and witty enough to be a caped version of “Big.” Levi’s look was a major part of it. Shazam, with that cheesy lightning bolt and gold belt and white Italian-restaurant tablecloth of a cape, didn’t resemble other recent comic-book-film heroes; he was more like something out of the ’40s. And Levi sealed the deal was his big popping eyes and ingenuous gee-whiz grin (he was, after all, playing a 14-year-old inside), as well as the hair that topped off his boyish spirit. It was dark and shiny and stood up an inch-and-a-half from his head — a ‘do as superhero stylized, in its way, as the old Superman’s.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Sometimes, when a documentary has a great subject, it can explore that subject with an intimacy that’s arresting, only to treat other aspects of the story with a kind of cavalier casualness. “Love to Love You Donna Summer” is that kind of documentary. Co-directed by Roger Ross Williams and Brooklyn Sudano (who is Summer’s daughter), it’s full of home movies and photographs and archival footage of Donna Summer, and it creates an eye-opening portrait of the ambitious yet deeply disconsolate woman she was. We see her when she was growing up in Boston, where she sang gospel in church and felt a gift passing through her, knowing that she was going to be famous, or when she moved to Munich in 1968, at 19, to be in the German production of “Hair” (there’s a startling clip of her onstage, in long dark pigtails, singing “Aquarius” in German), or later on, after she’d become a pop star, at home with her daughters, lost in the empty mirror of fame.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “John Wick: Chapter 4,” the epic culmination of the flamboyantly brutal death-wish-meets-video-game-meets-the-zen-of-Keanu-Reeves action series, our hero finds himself in a Berlin nightclub that resembles a pulsating Bauhaus Eurodisco by way of “Fellini Satyricon.” The place is like a concrete cathedral, with giant mosh pits of dancers throwing their arms up to the heavens as waterfalls cascade down the side walls (it almost looks like it’s raining). But Reeves’ John Wick, as he makes his way through the neon wetness, isn’t dancing. He’s getting ready to start shooting — which, for him, is more or less the same thing. As he skulks forward, oily hair hanging down the sides of his face, the camera glides just ahead of him, framing him like the renegade action demigod he is. We might be in the middle of the world’s most cutting-edge cologne commercial.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Just as the Coca-Cola company, after smudging a perfect product in 1985 with the New Coke, brought that product back and called it Coca-Cola Classic, the 95th Academy Awards telecast made a game attempt to rectify the mishaps of the past few years — the ratings slippage, the pared-down-like-a-skeleton-in-a-train-station 2021 edition, the debacle of The Slap — by bringing back something that we might call Oscar Classic. It was safe, it was familiar, it was tasteful, it was reassuring. It didn’t rock the boat, it didn’t overstay its welcome (actually, that marks sort of a break from Oscar Classic), and it left you feeling that the world’s preeminent awards show, all doom-saying punditry to the contrary, is still, on balance, a very good thing.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Bottoms,” a high-school comedy that is brazenly gonzo, scaldingly and at times even dementedly over-the-top, and actually about something, PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) have been best friends since the first grade, but in their senior year at Rock Ridge High they’re at the end of their tether. They’re losers, they’re lonely, they’re lesbians — and in their eyes, that puts them beneath the bottom of the food chain. So they do what anyone in their position might do. They decide to start a fight club! It’s modeled (sort of) on the one in “Fight Club,” though the movie isn’t particularly interested in that film, where the characters staged bare-knuckle brawls out of a kind of self-serious macho romantic doomsday nihilism. In “Bottoms,” PJ and Josie, in the time-honored tradition of teen-movie protagonists out to lose their virginity, are just looking for a way to sleep with the cheerleaders they have crushes on. They build the club around a scurrilous and rather ridiculous lie: that they’ve both spent time in “juvie.” Sitting around in the gym, with a handful of the “normal” girls they’ve roped into joining the club, all of them share stories about the men they’ve had to fend off (stalkers, pervy stepfathers, you name it). And when they get to the fight-club part, letting out their aggression, the jabs are shockingly violent. We laugh, but we also think: What’s going on here?

Atom Tickets. The event also marks Prime’s first early-access screening partnership since before the pandemic.

adores it. The beloved table-top game, which was introduced nearly 50 years ago, is just that: beloved — which is why it might be puzzling that it took so many years for the property to be adapted for the screen.

With Hollywood now turning to franchises like “The Last of Us” and “Borderlands” in the search for new audiences, it might be safe to say that video games are no longer the untapped frontier of adaptations. And that might mean it is the tabletop industry’s time to shine.

I have friends who’ve played table-top, role playing, and fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons (DnD), but I haven’t played ever. My friends tell me I’m missing out by not playing, but none of them will explain and teach me how to play, but what I’ve learned is that players can create their own characters and adventures. Whether Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves keeps true to the spirit of the game, I can’t say. However,  as a film, John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein’s execution pays off in a major way. Written by Daley, Goldstein, and Michael Gilio, the movie has an all-star cast including Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Hugh Grant, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, and Daisy Head.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer “Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” stole the hearts of the audience at its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival on March 10, no matter whether or not they’d played the 50-year old role playing game that shares its title. The action comedy stars Chris Pine as a rakish bard named Edgin and Michelle Rodriguez as his platonic life-partner, the tough-as-nails warrior, Holga. The two set off on a quest to reunite Edgin with his estranged daughter, Kira (Chloe Coleman), and they wind up working with Xenk (Regé-Jean Page), a valorous paladin; Simon (Justice Smith), a sorcerer with an inferiority complex; and Doric (Sophia Lillis), a no-nonsense shapeshifting druid. Rounding out the cast are Hugh Grant as Forge Fitzwilliam, Edgin and Holga’s untrustworthy former compatriot; and Daisy Head as Sofina, a powerful wizard who is more than she initially seems.