Tuesday new releases: 25 November 2025

Wicked: For Good is in cinemas and Train Dreams is streaming on Netflix.

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 regime 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.