“The much-anticipated “Wicked: For Good,” based on act two of the 2003 Broadway musical by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, picks up the story years after the events of last year’s “Wicked.”
“Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo), the Wicked Witch of the West, is now a fugitive who works tirelessly to free Oz’s silenced talking animals and expose the fraudulent activities of the not so Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum). “Our Wizard lies,” she skywrites in bold letters above Emerald City for all to see…”
SYNOPSIS: In “Wicked: For Good,” Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo), a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West and sorority-girl-turned-ruler Glinda the Good (Ariana Grande), are subjected to a series of events that tests the boundaries of their relationship.
CAST: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Bowen Yang, Marissa Bode, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum. Directed by John M. Chu.
REVIEW: “Wicked: For Good,” based on act two of the 2003 Broadway musical by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, picks up the story years after the events of last year’s “Wicked.”
Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo), the Wicked Witch of the West, is now a fugitive who works tirelessly to free Oz’s silenced talking animals and expose the fraudulent activities of the not so Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum). “Our Wizard lies,” she skywrites in bold letters above Emerald City for all to see.
Her erstwhile friend Glinda the Good (Ariana Grande) is now a paragon of Goodness who floats around in a giant mechanized bubble. She is a walking, talking propaganda tool controlled by The Wizard and Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) to convince Emerald City citizens that all is well under The Wizard’s rule.
As her wedding to the handsome Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) approaches, Glinda attempts to put things right between Elphaba and The Wizard, only to deepen the rift between the Wicked Witch and the ruling class of Oz, including Glinda.
As things heat up between Elphaba and Glinda, a famous foursome—Dorothy and Co.—arrive in Oz, heralding troubled times that can only be healed by the power of friendship. “We can’t let good be just a word,” says Elphaba. “It has to mean something.”
With some new songs like, “No Place Like Home” and “The Girl in the Bubble,” “Wicked: For Good” is a heart wrenching conclusion to the story, powered by impressive performances and emotional depth.
A darker, more serious film that the original, “For Good” explores themes of friendship, identity, and sacrifice through big, booming Broadway tunes. Less visually crowded than part one—it’s still baroque; art directed from here to Oz and back—but there is more unused space which allows the performances to speak for themselves without feeling crowded by the ornamental excess of the first film. The restraint places the focus on the songs and performers, trusting the material to deliver the story’s punch with fewer distractions.
Erivo and Grande share great on-screen chemistry and have the chops to elevate songs like “For Good” to show-stopper status. They are the movie’s secret sauce, and their story of friendship and sacrifice coupled with their supersonic vocals remain the film’s most compelling aspects.
“Wicked: For Good” is not a standalone movie. You’d likely get lost in the Ozian forest without the background story from last year’s “Wicked,” but those willing to invest five hours total into Elphaba and Glinda’s relationship will be rewarded with beautiful performances woven into an uplifting story of hope, resilience and acceptance.
SYNOPSIS: “Jurassic World Rebirth,” the seventh installment in the Jurassic Park franchise now playing in theatres, plays like a love letter to Steven Spielberg’s original dino drama. Scarlett Johansson is Zora Bennett, leader of a covert operation team hired by a pharmaceutical company to secure genetic material from dinosaurs at the original Jurassic Park Island research facility. Their expedition soon uncovers more than they bargained for, including a mutant Tyrannosaurus Rex with six limbs. “The worst of the worst,” Zora says, “were left here.”
CAST: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, and Ed Skrein. Directed by Gareth Edwards.
REVIEW: Early on in “Jurassic World Rebirth” we’re told the public’s intertest in dinosaurs has waned. “Nobody cares about these animals anymore,” laments paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey). Judging by the enthusiastic audience I saw this movie with, that isn’t exactly true, but the film itself doesn’t appear to be in love with its reanimated reptiles.
The mutated dinos on display—we’re told the island is where they dumped dinosaurs that were “malformed or too hard for people to look at”—are used sparingly, as they were in the classic original, but they don’t make the same impact when they do appear. The sense of wonder that once accompanied watching the Jurassic movies has evaporated. Perhaps we’re too familiar with the roaring CGI creatures or perhaps it’s the film’s presentation.
Director Gareth Edwards conjures up fierce looking foes for the cast to interact with, but much of it feels been-there-done-that. A notable exception comes with a scene featuring a pair of “married” Titanosaurus. It’s a lovely, tender moment, for both the dinosaurs and their human counterparts, that breaks the film’s theme park ride vibe.
The dinosaurs aren’t the film’s only big stars. Oscar winners Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali headline the cast but soon get lost in a story that divides in two directions, the mercenaries lead by Johansson’s Zora Bennett and a castaway family who distract from the plot’s main thrust.
The supporting cast fares even worse. They’re so underdeveloped and uninteresting they could have been delivered to the set in a large plastic shaker labelled Dino Food.
“Jurassic World Rebirth” does have several pulse racing sequences. A raft chase featuring a fierce T-Rex, adapted directly from Michael Crichton’s original “Jurassic Park” novel, is exciting stuff and a cliff climbing scene may have you moving toward the edge of your seat, but the dopamine rush wears off very quickly.
“Jurassic World Rebirth” will likely please fans of the franchise and in some ways it is a return to form after a series of lackluster sequels, but the sense of awe that made us fans in the first place is missing.
SYNOPSIS: Set before Dorothy Gale blew into the Land of Oz, “Wicked,” the first half of the film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, chronicles the unlikely friendship between Shiz University—Where knowledge meets magic!—students Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo), before she became the Wicked Witch of the West, and Galinda Upland (Ariana Grande-Butera), who later becomes Glinda the Good Witch of the North. “Are people born wicked,” asks Glinda, “or do they have wickedness thrust on them?”
CAST: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande-Butera, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Marissa Bode, Bowen Yang, Bronwyn James, Keala Settle, and Peter Dinklage. Directed by Jon M. Chu.
REVIEW: A big, bold and brassy reimagination of the fifth longest-running show in Broadway history is an origin story that pays tribute to the beloved stage show, but also brews up its own cinematic vibe.
Fans of the show will be pleased to know the themes that made “the untold story of the witches of Oz” so popular have been maintained. As the fairy tale unfolds, it reveals commentary on identity, privilege and control woven into the story of Elphaba and Galinda’s friendship and the climatic showdown with Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) and the (not-so) Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum).
Elphaba is kind, intelligent and honest but suffers society’s slings and arrows because she looks and behaves differently than the norm. “I don’t cause a commotion,” she says. “I am one.”
She is the green-skinned outsider, misjudged by everyone from her father (Andy Nyman) to the student body of Shiz University who openly laugh at her. With powerhouse vocals (even when she’s singing a duet with a goat) Erivo guides the character along a journey from innocence to a certain kind of jadedness as she learns how the world really works. In doing so, facing racism and persecution, Elphaba, a character who is very specific to the story, turns into a universal avatar for the misunderstood.
When Madame Morrible strips her of her name, dubbing her the Wicked Witch, she is villainized by a powerful bully, but finds strength in that adversity.
Erivo’s intensity is countered by Grande-Butera’s bubbly, hair-flipping comedic take on the spoiled Galinda. “Something is wrong,” she says with wide-eyed wonder. “I didn’t get my way.” Her vocals soar, but it is the chemistry she shares with Erivo and the glittery gusto with which she attacks the role that is memorable.
Thematically and performance wise, “Wicked” gets it right. The beloved mix of lighter songs, emotional numbers and power ballads are expertly and lovingly rendered, and director Jon M. Chu fills the screen with constant movement and elaborate set design, but at 2 hours and 40 minutes—that just five minutes shy of the entire stage show’s runtime, including intermission—the movie feels overstuffed. Several scenes are overlong and over designed, despite Chu’s enthusiastic direction, as though the film is a little too in love with its own iconography.
In other words, Ain’t no rest for the “Wicked.”
Still, by the time “Wicked: Part One” gets to its finale, Elphaba’s transformation into the Wicked Witch and the rousing version of the show’s signature song, “Defying Gravity,” blows off whatever dust may have accumulated. It’s a showstopper that literally brings the curtain down until part two drops in theatres on November 21, 2025.
Based on English writer Vera Brittain’s 1933 memoir about her experiences during World War I, “Testament of Youth” is a handsomely presented, if sometimes a bit restrained story of one woman’s voyage into pacifism.
Alicia “Ex Machina” Vikander stars as Brittain, a tenacious young woman who battles against her father’s (Dominic West) wishes and the conventions of the day to take the Oxford University entrance exam. Her schooling is interrupted when WWI breaks out and brother Edward (Taron “Kingsman: The Secret Service” Egerton), her fiancé Roland Leighton (Kit “Game of Thrones “ Harington) and friends Victor (Colin Morgan) and Geoffrey (Jonathan Bailey) are sent to fight at the front lines. With her friends at risk Vera opts to join them, leaving school to enrol as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment. Tending to both German and English soldiers in London, Malta and France she learns first hand about personal loss, human suffering and the futility of war.
“Testament of Youth” offers up a different, parallel view to combat, than the usual war film. Told from the point of view of a battle nurse, it is different but no less effecting as a story of female strength. Vikander is the movie’s soul and strength, handing in a performance that is both strong willed and remarkably nimble. When Vera pretends to be the German girlfriend of a dying soldier, the performance transcends the “Downton Abbey” vibe of the production. Moments like these are almost an antidote to the melodrama that masquerades as actual emotion in other scenes. Almost but not quite.
The supporting performances work well enough, although other than Vera the emotional connection necessary for the anti-war message to be truly effective is missing. Large scale shots of dead and dying men in battle and hospitals visualize the sentiment but a real, personal connection with the characters would have been more fitting for a story about a woman so absolutely changed by the war and her experiences.
“Testament of Youth” is based on a true and well-documented story but a dose or three of melodrama—does she really have to get such bad news on her wedding day?—blunts the power of the story.
