Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in Wicked: For Good

​When director Jon M. Chu lived up to expectations and delivered a “thrillifying” Wicked: Part One, he also set the bar incredibly high for audiences, not to mention himself. Chu partly succeeded in adapting a long-running musical phenomenon into a cinematic phenomenon. He told a beautiful love story about a female friendship, one with the power to change Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (Ariana Grande) for good. Wicked: Part One took the world by storm, winning two Academy Awards and outshining Mamma Mia! to become the highest-grossing Broadway musical film adaptation. The film’s cultural impact embedded the pink and green color palette into our consciousness. Most notably, the film showcased spectacular performances by Erivo and Grande, each of whom brought deep respect, passion, and understanding to the material. Together, they built the foundation for us to feel emotionally invested in a second act, eager to follow Elphaba and Glinda down the yellow brick road. When reunited in Wicked: For Good, the best friends are divided. They fight against all odds, reckoning with the reality of their shared world melting away. This journey poses challenges for the beloved characters, and for Chu, who attempts to balance a clumsily written screenplay with new original songs and an old Kansas tale. While part two lands with an emotional goodbye that will win hearts, certain narrative and visual choices put up several roadblocks along the way.

Wicked: For Good returns to Oz on a bleaker note. The Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) is no longer an emblem of endless possibilities, but rather of limiting views and manipulative rhetoric. The stakes are higher, the tone is darker, and the political elements are more deeply woven. And the film excels at setting a shadowy mood for a changed Oz. The illusionary bubble of this world has been popped. Elphaba and Glinda are on opposing sides of public perception; the former leans into an antagonized Wicked Witch of the West after failed attempts to expose The Wizard’s lies, and the latter can’t resist waving the wand of goodness until realizing that with great power comes great responsibility. The dynamic duo have several moments to shine throughout, and they shine bright. But overall, there isn’t enough compelling material to justify this second part as a full-length feature. Co-writing duo Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox can’t quite find a consistent rhythm as they deepen some elements and gloss over others, stumbling through connections to The Wizard ofOz along the way. And Chu’s oddly distant direction feels as though he’s waving a nostalgic wand, hoping to recreate magic and not finding a spell that works. 

Wicked: For Good picks up twelve tide turns after Elphaba defied gravity and left Glinda behind. Shiz headmistress Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) continues to tarnish Elphaba’s name, and The Wizard continues to let it happen. In an abuse of power, they label Elphaba as The Wicked Witch of the West, and the Ozians live in that bubble of hate-filled propaganda while she remains ostracized. Elphaba finds solace alone in the Enchanted Forest, where many of the animals have gone into hiding, and makes it her mission to expose The Wizard’s lies. Meanwhile in the Emerald City, Glinda has half-heartedly embraced the role of the Good Witch. She’s conflicted about her position; echoed in the lyrics of ‘Thank Goodness,’ she knows that change is necessary, but she’s not ready to defy the powers that be. Glinda can’t resist seeking validation from her fellow Ozians as they look to her for goodness, nor can she contain her excitement about getting her own bubble, designed with a secret button that charms everyone into believing she has powers. Glinda also charms her way to Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), catching him off guard by announcing their engagement. But Fiyero has stepped into a new role of his own, as the newly appointed captain of the Gale Force, and he intends to use his power for good. 
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Glinda and Elphaba’s internal conflicts drive this story to a tearful conclusion, once again speaking to the casting of Erivo and Grande as the beating hearts of this adaptation. However, the two-act structure around them doesn’t feel fully formed in the hands of Chu and writers Holzman and Fox. Several story developments, namely the dynamic between Nessarose (Marissa Bode) and Boq (Ethan Slater), feel rushed and riddled with plot holes. The underlying tensity in their relationship is given no room to breathe and take shape, which leads to an underwhelming transformation into the Tin Man, whose impressive makeup is diminished by subpar cinematography. Awkward character interactions, like Glinda and Elphaba’s post-tornado fight, disrupt the momentum with strange tonal shifts. The love triangle that emerges between Elphaba, Fiyero, and Glinda also causes a ripple effect of underwhelming storytelling. Erivo and Bailey sadly lack the chemistry to convey their characters’s romance in full bloom, though they still soar in their duet, ‘As Long as You’re Mine.’ Fiyero’s love for Elphaba creates an internal conflict in Glinda, and Grande plays this penny drop moment of realization brilliantly. Out of hurt, Glinda makes a decision that leads to a whirlwind of consequences. When Elphaba gets lured to Munchkinland, the film inexplicably rushes through two pivotal moments: one involving Nessarose’s fate, and the other an introduction to beloved characters from The Wizard of Oz.

Part one’s introductory buildup to ‘No One Mourns the Wicked’ gave us teensy glimpses of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion on their way to see The Wizard. With a single image, we knew their place in the story. In part two, Chu attempts a similar level of subtlety with the clear intention of not wanting to distract from the film’s central story. However, Chu reserves that elusiveness only for Dorothy and the Scarecrow, while indulging in more backstory for the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion’s connections to Elphaba. The film wants it both ways, and as a consequence, the inclusion of The Wizard of Oz characters feels like an experimental workshop. Chu’s noticeable uncertainty around who, when, and how much to show creates a mishmash of confusing camerawork. Some characters are forced into frame (like the Tin Man transformation), while others are forced out of frame (most egregiously, Dorothy), seemingly without rhyme or reason. While it’s an entirely understandable decision not to reveal Dorothy’s face, Chu keeps such a dramatic distance from this reimagined character that her presence becomes a distraction.
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Additionally, part two is inherently at a disadvantage on the musical number front, as the majority of Wicked’s most rousing songs (‘Defying Gravity’; ‘Popular’; ‘No One Mourns the Wicked’) originate in part one. While Wicked: For Good includes gems like the poignant ‘Thank Goodness / I Couldn’t Be Happier’, the vulnerable ‘No Good Deed,’ the lovely reprise of ‘I’m Not That Girl,’ and the titular tearjerker ‘For Good,’ these numbers resonate far more as vocal showcases than as inspired visual achievements. The exception is ‘For Good,’ a stunning duet that makes excellent use of split-screen techniques to heighten the emotional parallels between Elphaba and Glinda. The new songs, ‘No Place Like Home’ and ‘The Girl in the Bubble’ have a far more subdued impact in how they are incorporated into the film. Despite carrying some thematic resonance, both numbers feel tacked on rather than thoughtfully intertwined into the story. In any case, Erivo and Grande rise above pedestrian direction and inconsistent camerawork to convey the emotional depths of their character arcs. 

‘The Girl in the Bubble’’s childhood flashback reinforces Glinda as the anchor of Wicked: For Good, in the way that Elphaba anchored part one. The screenplay works best when expanding on Glinda’s motivations, and Grande soars with the added material. She conveys a powerhouse emotional arc as we watch Glinda experience difficulty in facing herself, and gradually accept that she’s been changed for the better. She bursts the bubble of people-pleasing, allowing her to clearly address childhood insecurities and connect with Elphaba on a much deeper level. Erivo also reaches incredible new depths as Elphaba. She has so lovingly crafted the definitive version of this character, and her nuanced performance resonates across several registers, from the soul-stirring energy of ‘No Good Deed’ to the melancholy of ‘For Good.’ She delivers absolutely show stopping moments that will invite several rounds of audience applause. 

Together, Erivo and Grande vocalize a powerful friendship that knows no limits, and a vulnerable journey in which they both feel truly seen by each other, in a world that has become increasingly cruel. Much of what makes part one soar — from the heart-swelling central performances to the gorgeously immersive crafts (including Academy Award winning costume design by Paul Tazewell and production design by Nathan Crowley) continues in part two. And the emotional goodbye to Elphaba and Glinda’s characters finds a smooth landing. Though, while there’s still magic to be found in spite of the film’s flaws, Wicked: For Good fails to take flight as a whole.

Jennifer Lawrence in Die My Love

​Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, her first film in eight years since You Were Never Really Here, roars with a restless energy. It’s an all-consuming journey that demands your undivided attention. The story unfolds in a trance, peering through a woman’s soul and taking shape from inside her head. Playing in between realism and imagination, the auteur puts up a cinematic fight against the societal norms of domesticity. She turns up the volume (with exquisite needle drops) on a suffocating rural existence where unmet desires, a strained marriage, and a terrifying loss of self live.

Things weren’t always this nightmarish. Ramsay opens the film with hopes and dreams; a young couple expecting a baby move into a rundown, but promising, new house. We get an intoxicating montage of Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) dancing up a storm in their new kitchen, boogieing into parenthood. The couple are surrounded by seemingly infinite space to grow, but Ramsay lets us dance in that daydream only for a brief moment. Once the baby is born, the Montana landscape, even with all its vastness, can’t contain Grace’s inner wild child. Nor can this new environment give her the creative spark she needs to continue writing. Fearing becoming invisible, she tries to regain her identity while engulfed in a psychological void. As echoed in the film’s most poignant line, Grace is stuck between wanting to do something, and not wanting to do anything at all.

Based on Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel of the same name, Die My Love visualizes a woman’s transformative relationship to herself and her surroundings. Grace has no problem attaching to her son. “He’s perfect,” she explains to a doctor. “It’s everything else that’s fucked.” The confines of polite society, and the expectations of motherhood, close in on her, and there’s nowhere to run. Tension manifests in her body as she crawls her way around, ready to pounce at any moment. Grace’s animalistic impulses, portrayed by a transcendent Jennifer Lawrence, make for an unpredictable environment. It’s through these small, seemingly insignificant moments of spontaneity that we get the most insight about her interior world. The isolating landscape might be limiting for Grace, but Ramsay uses every inch of it to give Lawrence ample room for psychological exploration. As a result, we get stellar moments like Grace’s boredom sequence (set to the poppy Toni Basil song ‘Mickey’), as well as Grace and Jackson’s feverish wedding party, where she unleashes her truest self.

Even though Grace’s perception of reality might be unreliable, and she might be hallucinating certain moments, Ramsay and Lawrence take the character seriously in a tender embrace. They approach her from an unflinching point of view, unapologetically living inside her brain and letting all the emotions run wild. There’s never any doubt that what she’s feeling is real. Every primal expression is rooted in Grace’s perpetual search for her identity back — whether she’s rolling through the fields with a knife, licking and banging on the windows, scratching her nails against the bathroom wallpaper, or barking back at a pet dog (which Jackson randomly brings home without talking to her first). With an intimate aspect ratio, the film lives and breathes Grace’s impulses, giving us the feeling of discovering newly awakened emotions alongside her. 

Ramsay knows exactly how to set a mood and capture a vivid atmosphere, especially through the use of sound and music. Working with her longtime sound design collaborator Paul Davies, Ramsay pinpoints several places (namely an incessantly barking dog) to heighten the emotions of a scene and signify a page turning in Grace’s mind. When Grace hears a motorcycle revving outside her house, for instance, there’s a moment of escapism in Lawrence’s reaction that ultimately draws her closer to a motorcycle rider named Karl (Lakeith Stanfield). Though, the depiction of their relationship speaks to the rare occasion in this film where Ramsay’s vision loses focus. Karl’s characterization, and the extent to which he’s meant to be a figment of Grace’s imagination, becomes too much of an enigma.

Ramsay’s balance between realism and imagination shines best in the depiction of Grace’s fragmented, free flowing self. Jennifer Lawrence unlocks a fascinating character study with this character and delivers career-best work. She keeps us on the edge of our seats, and lives in compelling spontaneity. The role plays to Lawrence’s strengths in many ways — she’s funny, goofy, instinctive, and a truly natural performer. Lawrence also gets the opportunity to take an enormous creative swing, by immersing herself into the deep end of primal impulses and self-destructive tendencies. She embraces the nonlinear, unfiltered structure and takes this role beyond definitions of a postpartum experience. It’s through her raw and real portrayal that we can gather so much more, whether it’s the major creative block she’s facing or the pressures to exemplify a “good wife.” Die My Love also plays in the vein of Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! when it comes to Lawrence’s risk taking. She’s explored the indie world with Lila Neugebauer’s Causeway, the raunchy comedy with Gene Stupnitsky’s No Hard Feelings, and following up with Die My Love gives us an adrenaline rush of anticipation for what’s to come in her career. Lawrence continues to show why she’s one of the most invigorating and intuitive talents. 

The way Lawrence has defied expectations and transcended beyond her most widely known roles, namely The Hunger Games franchise and her Oscar-winning turn in Silver Linings Playbook, is very reminiscent of her Die My Love co-star Robert Pattinson’s acting journey. Since exploding onto the scene with the Twilight films, Pattinson has found an individualistic path onto becoming the actor he is today. In the span of ten years, he’s starred in films by David Cronenberg, Josh & Benny Safdie, Claire Denis, Robert Eggers, Christopher Nolan, Hayao Miyazaki, and Bong Joon Ho. Plus, he gave us a great new Batman. In Die My Love, Pattinson delivers some of his most alive and electric work. He both matches and pulls away from Lawrence’s energy, in equal measure, speaking to a transformative love story at the film’s core. Jackson and Grace are experiencing intense shifts in their relationship, and he’s bewildered at not being able to recognize her. He’s more concerned with fitting into societal moulds and satisfying his own needs than he is with attempting to understand Grace’s perspective. And yet, Pattinson doesn’t let us forget that there’s still love in their relationship, expressed most freely in the quieter moments between them.

So much of this film depicts Grace’s search for identity in a distorted reflection, where she no longer recognizes herself outside of being a mother and a wife. From the outside looking in, her mother-in-law Pam (Sissy Spacek) seems to be the only person who truly acknowledges and recognizes what’s going on. When Grace and the baby make a surprise visit to Pam’s house one day, we get a stunning conversational moment of generational resilience and survival. Pam reassures Grace that after having a baby, “everybody goes a little loopy the first year, but [she’ll] come back.” Pam identifies with the primal void and truly sees Grace, which adds incredible warmth to all of their scenes together. It’s no surprise that Sissy Spacek, personally on my Mount Rushmore of greatest actors, is absolutely phenomenal here. What strikes a radical chord is how Pam transcends what could have been a two-dimensional role, and becomes a powerful generational voice in the film. She’s a woman who has come out the other side and can impart words of wisdom. And she’s a woman who sleepwalks with a shotgun, cackling across the rural nighttime roads. 

There’s a grounding energy to Grace and Pam’s scenes that speaks to how well Ramsay keeps Die My Love firmly planted in human nature, even when visually it feels otherworldly at times. When Grace takes the baby and disappears into a forest for hours, while the song ‘Little April Shower’ from Disney’s Bambi plays, Ramsay evokes a dark fairytale. The forest seems so far away, like another dimension where she could escape. The thematic resonance of this setting would become crucial to the film’s ending, which leaves us on a question mark of where Grace has gone, exactly. Is she setting fire to her life to start anew? Perhaps a fiery flicker will light a path pack towards the parts of her that she lost after having a baby? Is she embracing the raging fire within, and never going back? Whatever the case may be, ultimately Die My Love resonates as an unapologetic love story where our relationships to ourselves, and to others, can change so radically over time.

By Nadia Dalimonte

Visionary director Wong Kar Wai has blessed our theatre screens for decades with classics like Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, and In the Mood for Love. Audiences can revisit these cinematic gems in state-of-the-art restorations thanks to The Criterion Collection, which has been dedicated to publishing films from around the world through physical media and an extensive streaming channel. The Criterion Channel, which features the stunning DIRECTED BY WONG KAR WAI collection, will soon be home to another swoon-worthy Wong Kar Wai production: his first-ever television series.

Directed and produced by Wong Kar Wai, the long-awaited Blossoms Shanghai is already a massively popular hit in China. The series originally aired on the Chinese video streaming website Tencent Video in 2023, when it became the most streamed television series nationwide. The story follows young entrepreneur Ah Bao (Hu Ge), a risk-taking businessman (compared to a Chinese Jay Gatsby) looking to make his fortune in 1990s Shanghai. As China’s economy goes into overdrive, the Shanghai Stock Exchange reopening attracts a sprawling group of entrepreneurs, stockbrokers, bureaucrats, schemers, and dreamers, all in pursuit of wealth. 

Adapted from the award-winning 2013 novel of the same title by Shanghai author Jin Yucheng, Blossoms Shanghai stars Shanghainese actors including Hu Ge, Ma Yili (as Mr. Bao’s partner, Ling Zi), Tang Yan (as Mr. Bao’s import-export liaison), and Xin Zhilei (as the glamorous femme fatale Li Li). Considering the intrigue of Yucheng’s story and the romanticism of Wong Kar Wai’s vision, it seems this series will give its cast plenty of opportunities to bloom. The Criterion Channel will also provide an exciting launchpad for more North American audiences to discover Shanghainese talent and hopefully spark greater explorations of both classic and contemporary works from different parts of the world.

Per the director’s statement to The Criterion Channel: “Blossoms Shanghai will bring you to Shanghai in the nineties, when the city was redefining itself. It is as much about looking forward as looking back. At its heart, the series is about universal human drives: the pursuit of reinvention, the intoxications of opportunity, and the tension between ambition and love.” Exuberant and intoxicating are just a few signature elements to expect from Wong Kar Wai’s work. In Blossoms Shanghai, audiences can anticipate these elements to shine across 30 episodes of rich world building, community-driven plot development, and resonant themes of idealism, reinvention, and destiny. More on Wong Kar Wai's words about the series's upcoming premiere can be enjoyed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-sJDo7H1zM 

​Beginning November 24, three new episodes of Blossoms Shanghai will be released every Monday at 8 p.m. until January 26, exclusively on the Criterion Channel:
​https://www.criterionchannel.com/blossoms-shanghai 

Mark November 24 on your calendars and tune in to the official Blossoms Shanghai trailer below:
https://www.criterionchannel.com/videos/blossoms-shanghai-trailer