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

Driving beauty! Danica Patrick landed on a treatment that brightened and tightened her skin and she loved it so much, she partnered with the company. The 41-year-old stunner sat down with Us Weekly to dish the deets.

Still country strong! Carrie Underwood “has so much to look forward to” with husband Mike Fisher after turning 40.

Prince George is set to have a special role at his grandfather King Charles III’s upcoming coronation.

One of the most celebrated songs of the last decade had surprising origins.

Paddy McGuinness announced he and Christine McGuinness were separating in July last year - and after opening up about experiencing homesickness, the Top Gear star is said to be "struggling". The 49 year old previously discussed being away from his family, as he continues to live with his estranged partner, 35, and their three children - Penelope and Leo, nine, and Felicity, seven. And now a source has told OK! that the aftermath of the split is "hitting Paddy hard", with Christine being busy with her career projects.

Cat Deeley looked incredible during a recent beach trip with her son James, four.The 46 year old TV presenter showed off her stunning figure in a red bikini as she built sandcastles with her youngest son during a trip to the seaside. Cat still oozed glamour during the beach day as she wore a straw sun hat with her blonde hair tucked back in a bun.

After King Charles acceded the throne in September following the death of his mother Queen Elizabeth II, key members of the royal family were instantly promoted and took on new responsibilities. From Prince William now being next in line for the crown to the younger royals gaining their Prince and Princess titles, Kate Middleton also advanced one step further to becoming the future Queen.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Tanya Tucker did not let much time slip away after the Country Music Hall of Fame announced her impending induction this week before coming out with an announcement of her own: She has a second album produced by the team of Brandi Carlile and Shooter Jennings coming soon, following up on a celebrated previous effort that earned Tucker her first two Grammy Awards. The album “Sweet Western Sound” will be out June 2 on Fantasy. A teaser track from the record, “Kindness” is out now. The song was written by Carlile’s bandmates Phil and Tim Hanseroth. The collection reunites the team that made Tucker’s comeback album, “While I’m Livin’,” a 2019 set that got the singer a Grammys for best country album, and its closing track, “Bring My Flowers Now,” which won best country song.

Surprise! Dustin Lance Black and Tom Daley have welcomed their second child together!

Marta Balaga Norwegian animation “Pesta,” directed by Hanne Berkaak, will head to the Frontières Platform in May. Directed at genre film professionals, the event is organized by the Fantasia International Film Festival with the Cannes’ Marché du Film. The film, set in 1349 during the outbreak of the Black Plague, will see two teenagers, Astrid and Eilev, fighting for their forbidden love among the apocalypse as Astrid, a nobleman’s daughter, struggles with her growing desire for “the outcast heathen.”  Granted development funding from the Norwegian Film Institute, “Pesta” is produced by Mikrofilm’s Tonje Skar Reiersen and Lise Fearnley. It’s also named after a shadowy figure from Norwegian folklore, a personification of the plague itself.

Ben Croll Running concurrent with the wider festival, NewImages’ mercantile section has become an event unto itself, hosting a global who’s who from the XR scene while helping in no small part to reshape the field. As it stands to welcome nearly 250 participants – roughly half divided between market participants and heavyweight decision makers – this year’s fully in-person event should do little to reverse that trend. “We’re very international,” says XR market head Ellen Kuo. “With more than half of our participants coming from outside Europe, and with several coming from the U.K., Italy, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland and Poland, I call [our network] Paris beyond Paris.”

Olivia Wilde wants the court to intervene in her dispute with Jason Sudeikis.

Marta Balaga Nina Kiri, known for her role as Alma on “The Handmaid’s Tale,” has joined the cast of dystopian sci-fi adventure “Absolution.” The title will be brought onto the market at Cannes’ Marché du Film Frontières platform, featuring in its Proof of Concept strand.    The Serbian-Canadian actor is no stranger to genre, having appeared in “The Heretics,” “The Haunted House on Kirby Road” or “Let Her Out.” Soon, she will also be spotted in Christos Nikou’s “Fingernails” alongside Jessie Buckley.  Directed by Filip Kovacevic, “Absolution” – a co-production between Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Montenegro – takes place in a barren wasteland, far removed from the mythical city of gods, with only one human settlement left. 

Ben Croll Paris’ NewImages Festival and parent organization Forum des Images have recently launched NewImages Hub, a support network offering XR professionals a set of complementary creative and mentoring programs throughout the year. Divided into three poles, the new lab will help immersive projects across development, production, and distribution, offering residencies and networking assistance at each phase. Administered by Forum des Images – a non-profit cultural organization subsidized by the City of Paris – and supported by France’s CNC, NewImages Hub will oversee international writing residencies both in Paris and abroad, while developing additional workshops with partners in Taiwan, Chile and South Africa. The new lab will also administer existing programs in Rome, Ecuador and Taipei, while making industry analysis available to all.

Ben Croll Running April 5 – 9 at Paris’ Forum des Images, this year’s NewImages Festival reflects a young medium ever on the move, an ecosystem looking backwards and ahead in order to reimagine itself for the here-and-now. “We don’t want to be limited by someone else’s vision,” festival director Michele Ziegler tells Variety. “We don’t want the metaverse of tomorrow to dictate what is art and culture today. We want to stir things up.” Encompassing VR games and documentaries to mixed media installations and AR works for social media, the 13 projects competing for the NewImages top prize collectively trace the wider currents remaking a protean industry – while this slightly smaller selection compared with previous years reflects a young festival itself undergoing some change.

Frank Rizzo Some Broadway wags might have scoffed at the idea of a cornpone musical comedy and its punny promotions. But with its exuberance, heart and non-stop yucks, “Shucked” is the surprise delight of the season. Minus stars and featuring a new Broadway composing team and an original book, this old-pro production is a throwback to the joys of lightweight musical comedy: where fresh talent is discovered, songs are catchy, jokes are plentiful and characters are appealing, fun and sweetly simple. Yet as one character in the show says, “There’s a cornfield of difference between simple and stupid. That’s a simple mistake stupid people make.”

Ben Croll Paris-based XR distributor Diversion Cinema has scooped up a pair of award-winning titles, adding director Singing Chen’s “The Man Who Couldn’t Leave,” and both director Thierry Loa’s “21-22 China” and his follow-up “21-22 USA” to a premium catalog of prestige immersive fare. Produced by The Walkers Films and Outland Film Production, “The Man Who Couldn’t Leave” won the top prize at last year’s Venice Immersive and will be presented in competition at this year’s NewImages Festival. Directed with aplomb by Singing Chen, the heartbreaking docudrama recounts the history of political repression in mid-century Taiwan, filling a 360 screen with handsome chiaroscuro compositions supporting classical film language.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Neopol Film, a production company based in Frankfurt, and Munich-based sales agency The Playmaker have teamed for a second time with writer and director Lukas Rinker, following their collaboration on his debut feature, black comedy “Holy Shit!,” which was sold by The Playmaker to multiple territories last year. Producers Tonio Kellner, Andrea Simml and Jakob Zapf will be pitching Rinker’s latest feature film project, eco-horror “Paws,” at Frontières, a market and networking platform focused on genre film financing and co-production between Europe and North America. Frontières is organized by the Fantasia Intl. Film Festival, in partnership with the Cannes Film Market, and takes place on May 20 and 21 in Cannes.

Amazon Studios’ robustly entertaining, real-life drama definitely has the makings of one. It’s far and away the most likable film released so far this year.There’s a starry cast led by Matt Damon, Viola Davis, Jason Bateman and Ben Affleck, who also directs his best movie since “Argo” 11 years ago. Running time: 112 minutes.

When we spoke to Louis Tomlinson ahead of the release of his Number 1 album Faith in the Future last year, he couldn't have been more complimentary about collaborators DMA'S.

A man says he is living every young lad’s dream after earning up to £50,000 a year by playing FIFA in his bedroom for eight hours a day. Alex Shaw, 24, first became hooked on the hit EA Sports football game when he bought FIFA 12 for his PlayStation 2 aged 13.

Drivers making journeys this Easter weekend are being warned to expect severe queues on roads, with up to 17 million leisure trips predicted to be made.

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.

Notting Hill “nauseating” while explaining a small Easter egg in the scene.The actor, who plays bookstore owner William Thacker in the 1999 rom-com opposite Julia Roberts, discussed a detail in the film’s ending during a Wired video interview.In the scene, Anna Scott (Roberts) is seen lying on William on a park bench as he reads a specific novel, which carried additional meaning for the late director Robert Michell.“In that nauseating moment on the bench at the end, I’m reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières, which was going to be his next film,” Grant said. “So it’s a little in-joke from Roger Michell, God rest his soul.”Michell died aged 65 in September 2021.

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.

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.

Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez headed straight to their fans at the 2023 SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas.

John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein return to SXSW this year with “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” which kicks off the Austin-based festival today. And in the lead-up to the film’s world premiere, the directing duo had some scoop for Variety about why they left another big-budget project due in theaters this year, DC Studios‘ “The Flash.” READ MORE: New ‘Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves’ International Trailer: Chris Pine & Co.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein have been to the SXSW Film Festival twice before — for 2013’s “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone,” which they wrote, and 2019’s “Stuber,” which they produced. But when the pair debut the action-comedy “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” as the opening film of the annual Austin event this Friday, it will be the first time they’ve done so as directors. They couldn’t be more excited. “It’s the perfect setting for this movie,” Goldstein says, sitting in the Paramount lot office he shares with Daley, for an interview with Variety about the release of their latest movie. “It feels like the quintessential South By film,” Daley adds. “It’s big and all-encompassing but there’s also something a little bit subversive about it.”