Film Beat

Wicked: For Good picks up the darker, deeper themes laid down by 2024’s “Wicked” while connecting to the original Wizard of Oz material more overtly. The film even opens with the construction of the iconic yellow brick road, which Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) disrupts by freeing the animals being used to lay the path. The Wicked Witch of the West has now been outcast and forced to live in solitude in a treehouse while she plans to expose the Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum) as a fraud and free the animals who see their freedom threatened by his reign. Meanwhile Glinda (Ariana Grande), continues to cosy up to the Wizard as her popularity as “Glinda the Good” grows. Jonathan Bailey returns as Fiyero, now engaged to be married to Glinda, torn between his duties as Captain of the Gale Force - the team tasked with capturing the wicked Witch of the West - and his moral obligation to stand up for Elphaba. Michelle Yeoh, as Madame Morrible, continues to do the Wizard’s dirty work by pedalling propagand...

Edgar Wright takes aim at class exploitation, wealth inequality, fake news and even the Kardashians in his latest flick, that serves up a solid action-packed game of cat and mouse. The film follows Ben Richards (Glen Powell) as a working-class dad, who is desperate to provide the medicine needed to cure his sick daughter and is struggling to find the financial means to do so. His solution is to enter the titular running man - a gameshow in which contestants attempt to survive 30 days while being pursued by deadly Hunters for the reward of a life-changing sum of money. Ben is kept on his toes by Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), the show’s producer, as he persistently probes his mouthy contestant in an effort to bait him into committing actions that will drive the ratings for the show higher. It is through these interactions, that Killian morphs fully into the embodiment of the film’s antagonist; that being the network itself, exploiting the lower classes for their own benefit and using its po...