Tuesday new releases: 25 November 2025

I’m a pro­fes­sion­al and I like to do my home­work which is why I was cel­eb­rat­ing last night my com­ple­tion of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude1 which I wanted to read — and appre­ci­ate — before we tackled the Colombian min­iser­ies2 based on it.

But I draw the line at research­ing the music­al Wicked or Gregory Maguire’s ori­gin­al nov­el. In this par­tic­u­lar case, life is very much too short and there­fore I can­not tell you wheth­er the short­com­ings of Jon Chu’s two fea­ture films3 can be laid at the door of either piece of source material.

But short­com­ings there most def­in­itely are. This altern­at­ive ver­sion of The Wizard of Oz makes hardly a lick of sense and takes its sweet time doing it. Wicked: For Good com­mences with green-skinned magic wield­er Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) van­quished from the Emerald City and con­duct­ing a cam­paign of har­ass­ment from the skies to try and per­suade the city’s cit­izens that The Great and Powerful Oz (Jeff Goldblum) is not who they think he is.

While the author­it­ies try and hunt down the ter­ror­ist, her secret bestie Galinda (Ariana Grande-Butera) becomes a fig­ure­head for the régime and the formerly ditsy Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) is pro­moted to Captain of Palace Guard des­pite — even more secretly — hold­ing a candle for Elphaba himself.

The scene is set for a break­down between all the formerly great friends and the des­per­ate meas­ures that Oz — and the inex­plic­ably motiv­ated lieu­ten­ant Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) — are pre­pared to take to cling on to power.

After the first part, I con­cluded that Wicked was a one-song music­al4, but I will allow that the whole thing is in fact a one-and-a-half song music­al, with the num­ber Wonderful ami­ably per­formed by Goldblum, Erivo and Grande. Indeed, all of the music is res­cued by the per­formers, espe­cially those with Broadway-quality pipes.

Taken togeth­er, the two halves amount to almost five hours of mind-numbing not-quite enter­tain­ment but the con­sid­er­able budget is all up there on the screen — the prac­tic­al stuff like sets and cos­tumes — and we exper­i­enced it with the biggest IMAX crowd I’ve seen for a long while, so it may turn out to be the saviour of cinema after all5.

All of the emo­tion, sens­it­iv­ity, human­ity and depth of feel­ing that’s miss­ing from Wicked: For Good appears to have landed on Clint Bentley’s ele­gi­ac­al Train Dreams which has landed at Netflix after a hand­ful of cinema screenings.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Joel Edgerton plays a tim­ber work­er in the Pacific Northwest in the first half of the last cen­tury. Forced by eco­nom­ic cir­cum­stance to be away from his fam­ily for long peri­ods, he exper­i­ences an unima­gin­able loss and some­how learns to live with that loss and con­tin­ue to go on with his life.

Based on — and rely­ing heav­ily on, thanks to extens­ive nar­ra­tion from Will Patton — a novella by the author of Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson, Train Dreams is lyr­ic­al and — thanks to cine­ma­to­graph­er Adolpho Veloso — it’s also rav­ish­ing to look at.

I wanted to res­ist it at first — for the first three quar­ters in fact — as the self-conscious image-making and what felt like Malickian pseudo-spirituality was just try­ing too hard to be mean­ing­ful, but near the end I real­ised it had suc­cess­fully snuck its way under my skin and I was in floods of genu­ine tears.

Train Dreams is a film that I need to see again — this response is very much a pre­lim­in­ary one — but I hardly say that about any­thing these days, even films I enjoy.