Three Films Make A Post: No experience necessary.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023): I didn’t think I needed a big budget blockbuster fantasy heist comedy in my life – in general, I prefer my secondary world fantasy with a more serious tone – but John Francis Daley’s and Jonathan Goldstein’s D&D movie is so fun and charming, turns out I do need it. Being a modern blockbuster, it can present all the incredible vistas the probably underpaid parts of the production crew could come up with, and let its merry band of rogues run through it as merrily as this suggests.

Of course, this being a contemporary movie, it’s also about found and assumed family, but it treats that trope so genuinely, it simply works in the proper wish fulfilment manner of such things. Really, the only larger flaw in the film I see is that it sometimes wants a bit too desperately to be a fantasy version of Guardians of the Galaxy, whose greatness it can’t quite reach. But then, that’s not something to be ashamed of.

Kenpei to barabara shibijin aka The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty (1957): This film by Kyotaro Namiki about a military policeman whose approach to mystery solving is rather different from that of his peers solving the case of the dismembered body of a woman who was found in the well of a military base is sometimes listed as a horror movie. However, this is really a very traditional procedural crime movie, just one set in the very problematic 1937, which it never really acknowledges one way or the other on a direct political level. If one can ignore that, this is a typically solid product of Japanese studio filmmaking, a decent mystery, well acted and solidly shot.

Surrounded (2023): Whereas this Western about a cross-dressing black woman (Letitia Wright) in the post Civil War US trying to survive the worst day ever is as openly and obviously political as they get. It’s quite the candidate for a film people will look back at in twenty years or so to see where the cultural mind was at this time. There’s nothing wrong with that, mind you, and while I find some of the very on the nose, theatrical dialogue sequences about being black a bit much, most of the time, director Anthony Mandler takes care to actually put into action what his characters can’t stop jawing about as well.

There, the film shows itself as a brutal, visually beautifully bleak Western that manages to show everything it is telling as well.