I saw the stage play several years ago in Chicago and was lukewarm about the show. So, I was not excited about going to the screening. Wow, was I pleasantly surprised. The movie is very different from the stage play. If you are not a fan of the stage play, you owe it to yourself to try the movie.

“Wicked” is the story of Glinda, the good witch of the North, telling the troubled story of Elphaba’s life to the people of Munchkin land. Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, is rejected most of her life because of her green skin. At Shiz University, she forms an unlikely friendship with a beautiful young woman named Galinda, another student who is filled with an undaunted desire to be popular. Following an encounter with the Wizard of Oz, their relationship soon reaches a crossroad as their lives begin to take different paths.

Academy Award nominee Cynthia Erivo stars as Elphaba. Ariana Grande costars as Glinda/Galinda. Academy Award nominee Jeff Goldblum is the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Academy Award winner Michelle Yeoh is Madame Morrible. Jonathan Bailey is Fiyero, the love interest. Ethan Slater is Boq. Marissa Bode is Elphaba’s sister Nessa. Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth, the original Elphaba and Glinda in the 2003 stage play hit have cameo roles in “Wicked” the movie as Wiz-O-Mania super stars.

The performances of Erivo, Grande and Bailey are outstanding. Both have gorgeous voices that is a joy to listen to even though I thought the music was beautiful but there wasn’t an outstanding song.

Jon M. Chu directed.  He also directed one of my favorite movies, “Crazy Rich Asians.” Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox wrote the screenplay based on the book “Wicked” by Gregory Maguire that was based on the L. Frank Baum classic book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” The movie was so much more detailed than the stage play and the story made more sense.

The Choreography by Christopher Scott was reminiscent of the Busby Berkeley movies of the 1930s.

Cinematographer Alice Brooks does a phenomenal job of emphasizing the beauty of the choreography, the sets and the costumes.

Paul Tazewell’s costumes are colorful, beautiful and add so much to the beauty of the movie.

I expect that “Wicked, Part One” will be nominated for all sorts of Academy Awards, Critics Choice Awards, and Golden Globes. It is a beautiful entertaining film for the whole family.

“Wicked Part One” rated PG is now showing in Edwardsville, Alton, Granite City, Jerseyville and Carlinville. I give it 5 stars. The sequel, “Wicked Part Two,” is scheduled for release on November 21, 2025. 

Parents of young children should let loose a hearty “chee hoo” upon the Thanksgiving-timed release of “Moana 2.” That’s the long weekend’s entertainment sorted, with a sequel that comes close to the soaring storytelling and exhilarating anthems of the first film, which delighted young audiences eight years ago, resulting in countless Halloween costumes and babies belting about how far they’ll go.

That first film, which celebrates the strength and power of young girls — as well as Polynesian culture with reverence and specificity — was a balm in the uncertain November of 2016. It was a massive box office hit and was nominated for two Academy Awards — for animated film and for original song for a tune by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

“Moana” felt revolutionary within the Disney canon because our spunky protagonist is decidedly not a princess (she’ll be the first to tell you that). She felt radical, especially for older generations that grew up on passive heroes whose lives were dictated by weddings or resistance to them. That Moana was a girl of action, an explorer — strong, capable, brave, family-oriented and empathetic — made her a remarkable role model, and the character has lost none of her moxie in the sequel.

Although the impressive voice cast of Pacific Islanders, including original Moana voicer Auliʻi Cravalho and Dwayne Johnson, has returned (with a few additions), a new creative team has been assembled for the sequel, which was originally developed as a series and then reworked into a feature-length film. The good news is that the seams don’t show on the finished movie, which is as visually dazzling and culturally rich as the first and an apt continuation of Moana’s story. She is now a revered “wayfinder” in her community on a tiny Pacific island.

Moana has a desire to explore even farther into the ocean, to go beyond where she’s ever gone before — specifically to connect with other people. During a ritual ceremony, she receives a vision of an island, Motufetu, that once connected all the people of the ocean but that has since been cursed by a god named Nalo. Moana puts together a crew that includes her friend and historian Moni (Hualalai Chung), boatmaker Loto (Rose Matafeo) and farmer Kele (David Fane), in order to find Motofetu.

Along the way, they’ll have to scoop up the demigod Maui (Johnson), who has been waylaid inside a giant clam by Nalo, with only the company of a mysterious and nefarious bat-woman, Matangi (Awhimai Fraser). The entire team will have to collaborate — even with the feisty bunch of coconut warriors known as the Kakamora — in order to break Nalo’s curse, achieve their goal and assemble the community of Moana’s dream.

David G. Derrick Jr., Jason Hand and Dana Ledoux Miller are the trio of directors on the film, with Miller and Jared Bush writing the screenplay. But the biggest creative difference that audiences will notice is the songs. With Miranda moving on, the songwriters known as Barlow & Bear (Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear) have written all the numbers for the sequel, collaborating with returning composers Mark Mancina and Opetaia Foa’i. Barlow & Bear went viral in 2021 with their “Unofficial Bridgerton Musical” album, which eventually won a musical theater Grammy.

The songs in “Moana 2” are good, to be sure. They’re just not as addictive as Miranda’s ear worms — the man has an uncanny skill for sprinkling seriously habit-forming syncopations into his songwriting — and while the big ballad “Beyond” and the jazzy rock number “Get Lost” are certainly stirring, they don’t quite stick in the brain like “You’re Welcome” or tug on the heartstrings like “How Far I’ll Go.”

But “Moana 2” is a worthy sequel, with gorgeous animation, a thoughtful representation of Polynesian culture and another exciting adventure for our inspiring Moana. Does it go beyond the first film? No, but that would have been a tall order. That it stands up as a sturdy and satisfying follow-up is more than enough.

Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

Even if he doesn’t exactly go there in his cinema, Pablo Larraín often obliquely flirts with horror. The hints were there in the fanatical nature of the titular “Tony Manero” character, a dancer unnervingly obsessed with John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever.” And they were all the more obvious in his gorgeous political satire “El Conde”—one of 2023’s boldest cinematic outings that imagined Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire. To the careful eye, the director’s genre exploits elevated much of his ingenious, gradually heartbreaking psychodramas “Jackie” and “Spencer,” too, his pair of otherworldly films on the troubled lives of legendary 20^th century women.

Now with “Maria,” about the final days of the iconic American-Greek soprano Maria Callas, Larraín turns his “historic women” movies into a near-perfect trilogy, giving us a stunning conclusion to his series. Upon seeing “Maria” for the first time months ago at the Telluride Film Festival (and revisiting it several times thereafter), this critic pondered what made “Maria” not only the gentlest, but the best of the three. And the answer was perhaps always obvious—as an opera connoisseur, Larraín is proudly (and often, sentimentally) protective of one of the artform’s most groundbreaking singers throughout “Maria,” a feature that was prominent neither in “Jackie,” nor “Spencer.”

It’s not that the psycho-dramatic dreads we feel in those former two films aren’t a part of “Maria.” For everyone who’s ever feared losing a big part of what defines them, and for everyone who’s opened their hearts to something they love so widely and unrestrictedly, only to see various forms of cruelty sneak in, this generous and beautiful picture ought to be a gut-punch. But you can often sense that Larraín, among the most intuitive filmmakers working today, almost wants to shield Callas from the harmful grip of those cruelties. While her end is inevitable in the film—Callas died in 1977 at the young age of 53—you will be disarmed, even moved to tears, experiencing Larraín’s care for her in “Maria,” which is essentially a compassionate ghost story on the beloved things we lose, as they continue to deteriorate and slip through our fingers against our will.

In a queenly performance of poise and mystique, Angelina Jolie plays Callas with an ethereal presence, grasping the intense grief of the once-in-a-generation singer who’s been losing her voice. In the beginning, Jolie—through Ed Lachman’s glorious, high-contrast black-and-white lensing—looks straight at the camera, as her defiant Callas sings “Ave Maria” from Verdi’s Otello, perhaps both as a little prayer to her past, and as a reckoning with her present. The voice we hear (both in this scene, and in the several arias we’d get to hear later on) belongs to Callas for sure. (At least for the most past, as Larraín reportedly has mixed in drips of Jolie’s voice in there, too.) But that doesn’t mean Jolie isn’t doing her own singing—she is, as evidenced in the way that she stretches her facial muscles and engages her entire body in the process. But she is subtle in those signifiers, as one has to be while embodying Callas. The famed soprano was effortless in navigating her range and hitting some impossibly high notes—music simply and silkily poured out of her, an artistic flair stylishly internalized and portrayed by Jolie. 

A perceptive performer who can sometimes be a tad cold-to-the-touch, Jolie gives her career-best performance as she steers Callas’s ups and downs during the singer’s final days, almost all of it empathetically imagined by Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight. She floats around her grand Paris apartment, an elegant and expansive space of gothic hues that envelopes Callas in a cocoon of claustrophobia. (Production Designer Guy Hendrix Dyas miraculously marries realism with wistfulness in his work.) She seeks the acceptance of her devoted staff, particularly Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) and Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino), who bring much warmth and humor into the movie. She turns inward and has conversations with her own self when on a cocktail of medications—chiefly, Mandrax, inventively personified by Kodi Smit-McPhee. Elsewhere, she fends off nosy press and entitled fans. Meanwhile, she remembers both the glamor and the pain that she felt through a thunderous, rewarding, and sometimes heartbreaking past, one that eventually launched her into a rocky romance with the Greek-Argentine tycoon Aristotle Onassis (the terrific Turkish actor Haluk Bilginer). And she does all that sporting Massimo Cantini Parrini’s breathtaking costumes, both exact replicas of her known pieces, and custom designs made for the movie.

In honoring her journey, Larraín contrasts the film’s Paris scenes of gorgeous colors and locales with Maria’s black-and-white remembrances—not only trying to get to know La Callas but also hoping to infuse anyone who might be watching with the kind of affection he clearly feels for the diva. Dare to open your heart to his quest, and you might just feel that tenderness in a deep sense, even if you aren’t an opera connoisseur. And that’s perhaps the grandest miracle of this film—like Callas herself aimed to do, “Maria” brings opera to the masses, not as a gimmick or high-minded endeavor, but as an act of generosity and understanding that art belongs to everyone who wants to appreciate it. In that, as Larraín purposely and studiously braids in arias into his narrative—full songs for the most part, and not frustratingly chopped up snippets—and gives you a taste of everything from Bellini to Puccini to Donizetti, you’ll feel like you’ve had a full musical meal, with a hunger for a second helping.

Will you get to know Callas by the end of “Maria”? Or will she remain as a complete mystery? Rest assured that’s hardly the point of Larraín’s cinematic ode. The reward is the beautiful and heart-swelling two hours you’ll have the privilege of spending with La Callas, alongside a director who wants nothing more than to share his immense love for her. 

In theaters now, on Netflix December 11th.