The new, much-delayed Wicked adaptation is what many movies longer than two and a half hours are: too long. But it proves fairly easy to forgive its stretches of sluggishness because of how frequently spectacular it is, and how increasingly rare it’s become, in the last 50 or so years, to go to the movies and be exhilarated (and also made sometimes impatiently fidgety) by an epically mounted musical. 

Jon M. Chu’s cinematization of the enduringly popular The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) stage prequel — itself based on a way-darker 1995 revisionist novel by Gregory Maguire — fills the roles made famous by the muscularly lunged Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel with the just-as-commandingly voiced Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. You probably already know that Wicked is about the circumstances that got the land of Oz’s lime-green witch of the west, Elphaba, her “wicked” badge, and also what it took for her pink-frill-covered northern counterpart, Galinda, her “good”-ness. 

Read the full review at 425.