Movies

Every few years, a movie comes along so eager to don the tarnished crown of “epic fantasy”—to conquer, to astonish, to graft itself onto the sagging limbs of a post-Lord of the Rings landscape—that it forgets the very sinews that hold stories together. Into the Lost Lands, Paul W.S. Anderson’s latest incursion into genre upheaval, is not so much an adventure as it is a protracted reminder that the land of cinema has indeed been lost.

With a name that conjures visions of green-skinned witches and spellbinding showtunes, I walked into the theater for "Wicked" with soaring expectations. Directed by the brilliant Jon M. Chu and anchored by powerhouse performances from Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda, this film adaptation of the beloved Broadway musical promised a captivating experience.

What a joyless, magnificent mess of unintended comedy this is, a late-period fever dream so overloaded with Significance and “cinematic history” that it’s hard to know if Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis comes to us as a time capsule from the future of movies, or as the smoldering effluence of Hollywood’s oldest, dearest delusions.