Confession: I’ve never played “Dungeons & Dragons,” so I had to learn a bit about the classic fantasy role-playing game before watching “Honor Among Thieves.” If you’re also a newbie, I’d advise you to do the same.

Set on the Sword Coast of the Forgotten Realms, the comedic action/adventure revolves around a silver-tongued bard/rogue/thief, Edgin Davis (Chris Pine), whose wife was killed, leaving him to raise their young daughter, Kira (Chloe Coleman), with the help of his BFF Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez), a gruff, tattooed barbarian.

But when he and Holga are arrested and thrown in the gelid cliff-side prison of Revel’s End for a couple of years, Kira’s care fell to con-man Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant), who rules over a walled city and is under the spell of the evil Red Wizard Sofina (Daisy Head).

In the interim, Forge has persuaded Kira that her father abandoned her. Desperate to reunite his family, Edgin is convinced that if he can acquire the Tablet of Reawakening, he’ll be able to revive his wife and restore all that was lost.

Problem is: the Tablet is locked in a tall stone catacomb, so Edgin must find the Helmet of Disjunction, which can stop time, in order to accomplish this daring feat. 

So he joins up with a righteous-albeit-humorless warrior, the debonair paladin Xenk Yemdar (Rege-Jean Page), along with second-tier sorcerer Simon (Justice Smith) and the shape-shifting Tiefling Druid, Doric (Sophia Lillis). It’s a lot more complicated than that but I’m striving for simplicity here.

Scripted by co-directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, along with Michael Gilio, it’s based on the complex, immersive game created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974, popularly known as D&D which – in turn – has influenced subsequent game systems involving ‘let’s pretend’ and improvisation.  

Bradley Cooper does a cameo as Marlamin and regular players will ‘get’ the ‘insider’ references and jokes that I missed during the 2 hours 14 minutes..

On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” is a silly, swaggering, swashbuckling 7, playing in theaters.

If there were a pantheon of psychic entertainers, Asi Wind would be in the top tier. His 75-minute, one-man show “Asi Wind’s Inner Circle” has played for several months Off-Broadway and will no doubt continue for many more.

The intimate setting, resembling a small Greek amphitheater with a large, round table at its center, involves each member of the audience as soon as they take their assigned seats, writing their full names and initials on the blank back of the black-and-red playing cards that Asi will use throughout that performance.

Opening with a monologue explaining how he left Israel and changed his name to become an authentic New Yorker, Asi’s low-key charisma charms and totally disarms the audience.  Those who are seated around the center table periodically shuffle and mix the cards as Asi calls out various audience members’ names to be participants. 

According to Asi, how we respond to the sound of our names is of great importance, as he proceeds to identify various people whom, presumably, he’s never met before. Obviously, each show is different since the composition of the audience changes – but his remarkable ‘effects’ remain the same.

Asi’s hero – master magician Harry Houdini – understood that it’s not enough to fool people with magic. You have to make them care. “A playing card has information on it but – to most people – the diamonds, hearts, clubs and spades mean nothing,” he candidly explains. “But if you put your name on that card, suddenly it has significance. It’s not a card. It’s a person.”

At one point, an audience member is asked to leave the theater and go across the street to Washington Square Park to ask a random passerby for a number – any number – up to 30. When the audience member returns – after some adding and subtraction – Asi guesses the number.

I’ve seen many ‘close-up’ card magicians but none compare with Asi Wind’s simple, elegant, absolutely undetectable sleight-of-hand. He has even fooled Penn and Teller!

Bottom Line: “Asi Wind’s Inner Circle” is awesome and has been extended to September 3. It’s well worth the trek to The Gym at the Judson Theater at 243 Thompson Street in Manhattan.

Until recently, Nicolas Cage had never made a Western. Now he’s made two. “Butcher’s Crossing” – about a frontiersman searching for a hidden valley of buffalo he can slaughter – was the first, now there’s “The Old Way.”

Set in the Montana territory in the late 1870s, Cage plays coldly reformed gunslinger Colton Briggs who left his outlaw days far behind him when he married Ruth (Kerry Knuppe) and sired a daughter, Brooke (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). Living on a nearby farm, Briggs is the respectable proprietor of a small frontier town’s general store.

One day – after Colton walked 12-year-old Brooke to school – hapless Ruth finds herself surrounded by four menacing men, led by escaped convict James McCallister (Noah Le Gros). It’s no accident that they arrived there since James saw Colton kill his father 20 years ago when he was just a lad. (That incident is shown in the prologue.) 

Now, by murdering Ruth – James is out for revenge. Later, when Colton and Brooke arrive home and see the carnage, an emotionless chase is on. 

While pursuing James, Colton teaches emotionally-withdrawn Brooke how to survive by protecting herself and shooting a gun. Soon they’re joined by a local marshal (Nick Searcy) and his deputies who are also after James McAllister.

All-too-reminiscent of “Unforgiven” and “True Grit,” there’s little originality in Carl W. Lucas’s contrived, utterly predictable screenplay, blandly directed by Brett Donowho (“Acts of Violence”). 

What adds a frisson of interest, however, is that the armorer for this Western was Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was accused by the assistant director and Cage of conducting ‘unsafe firearms activities’ on the set. She was subsequently involved and is under investigation for the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins after an accidental firearms discharge on the set of Alec Baldwin’s film “Rust.” 

On the Granger Gauge, “The Old Way” is a dismal 4, streaming on Prime Video.