April Movies Part 1: Dungeons & Dragons, A Thousand and One, Air

There doesn't seem to be a slow season in Hollywood anymore - April has been jam packed with new films coming out at a constant clip and I've been churning through them. Whether you want a blockbuster or an indie, your local theater has plenty to offer this month.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: I am not a D&D person, so I cannot comment on the worthiness of this film from that standpoint. But as a filmgoer, I was plenty entertained. The cast alone is worth it, with Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Justice Smith, Chloe Coleman, Daisy Head, and Hugh Grant all playing a band of thieves who get into trouble and end up turning on each other. Sophia Lillis and Rege-Jean Page eventually round out the cast and bring their own spin to the proceedings. There are jim jams and McGuffins galore, and lots of references to people, places, and things that were way over my head but I'm sure were a delight to D&D afficionados. But at the end of the day, directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein (who also wrote the screenplay with Michael Gilio) have put together a rollicking adventure movie that has the requisite amount of comedy and plenty of great action sequences.

One part of the film functions as a heist movie, and lord knows I love a heist movie. All the machinations were inventive and fun, and the CGI was mostly well done, though some parts of the film did get a bit too video-gamey. The actors all have great chemistry and camaraderie with each other and it was great to see them bond and fight against magic and treachery and all manner of mischief. This is a fun popcorn film that doesn't overstay its welcome. I do feel like one was enough, but we are bound to get sequels, so we'll see if my enthusiasm for the franchise wanes over the years. But for now, this is a fine start.

A Thousand and One: Nothing pleases me more than when a woman of color gets to write and direct her first feature film. Here we have the brilliant A.V. Rockwell who has created a movie that sticks with you even after you walk out of the theater. As I was watching it, I was perfectly engaged and on board, enjoying the story. I thought it was a fine and interesting film that featured one major twist I certainly didn't see coming. But the more I reflect on it, the more pleased I am that it exists in the world, and the more convinced I am that it deserves to be seen by a wide audience.

Teyana Taylor stars as Inez, a young woman in 1994 New York who has just gotten out of Riker's Prison after doing some time for helping her boyfriend in petty larceny. Her six-year-old son, Terry, is in the foster system, but she still checks up on him when she sees him on the streets and visits him in the hospital when he has an accident and needs to be patched up for a few days. That's when she makes the fateful decision to kidnap him and raise him on her own. And what follows is a tale about a woman who desperately wants to do right by this boy, but is facing all the challenges of poverty and a rapidly gentrifying New York City. 

This movie is a portrait of this family, but also an astonishing portrait of the changing city from 1994 to 2005. It manages to capture so much about this world, feeling both expansive and intimate at the same time. And the dialogue is always crisp and on point, with none of these characters mincing their words. Terry is played by three actors at different stages of his childhood, Aaron Kingsley, Aven Courtney, and Josiah Cross, who all perfectly convey how Terry is a quiet, reserved young man who is clearly still hurting from all the trauma of his early life but also trying to take advantage of new opportunities. This is also such a woman's picture, with so much emphasis placed on the emotional labor as well as very real labor Inez performs every day to take care of her son and her on-again, off-again partner, Lucky (Will Catlett). She is this constant, a force to be reckoned with, and Taylor's performance is riveting from the first scene to the last. This movie and its characters leave you with a bit of an ache. You must make every effort to watch it.

Air: This movie is directed by Ben Affleck but written by first time screenwriter Alex Convery. This distinction matters because when we left the theater, my fiance and his friend and I had to puzzle through our feelings about this film and why it had seemed good but weirdly choppy. What we landed on is that while this movie has an incredible cast who are all putting their best feet forward, they are let down by a script that seems more fascinated with trivia about Nike and basketball than putting together a cohesive storyline.

A true story set in 1984, Matt Damon stars as Sonny Vaccaro, a talent scout for Nike's basketball division who was convinced that Michael Jordan was about to be an explosive talent. He set about convincing everyone at Nike that they needed to spend all their money on signing Jordan to the company and promising him an exclusive sneaker deal. Naturally, the CEO, Phil Knight (Ben Affleck) didn't love this idea, and neither did marketing VPs Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) or Howard White (Chris Tucker). But possessed by his gut feeling, Vaccaro decided to bypass Jordan's agent, David Falk (played with crass excellence by Chris Messina) and directly approach Jordan's parents, namely his powerhouse of a mother, Deloris (Viola Davis). Davis gives a bravura performance and I would be willing to give her a Supporting Actress nomination right away for the fiery strength with which she advocates for her son and ends up changing the entire business model for athletic sponsorships.

A small thing that bothered me throughout the movie was how we would get a few seconds of some iconic 80s song, but it would abruptly stop before we could really get to the main chorus. It was emblematic of this script, where the scenes play like brief sketches that don't fully cohere into one narrative. It feels like the screenwriter learned a lot about these different people and got enamored with the idea of telling us these amazing facts about them, but then sacrificed the whole movie as a result. As we neared the finale, however, scenes were allowed to breathe and the full songs could play out, crescendoing to keep time with the action onscreen. This is still a fun film, and I do recommend you watch it. But the whole time I was watching it, and particularly when Viola Davis came into her own, I couldn't help thinking that it could have been better.