Benedict Cumberbatch gives an honest performance, but this is too self-conscious to challenge or work through loss with same power as the book

This is a painful movie in both the right and the wrong ways; I found something fundamentally unpersuasive and unhelpful in its contrived, high-concept depiction of grief. Adapted by writer-director Dylan Southern from Max Porter’s novella Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, it stars Benedict Cumberbatch who gives an honest and well-intentioned performance as a children’s author and graphic novelist. Living a middle-class existence in London, he is suddenly widowed; one of the movie’s off-target qualities is its refusal to specify the cause of death or even show us clearly what his wife looked like, which in real life would be unbearably vivid facts. Sam Spruell has a quietly sympathetic role as Cumberbatch’s brother.

Left to look after their two young boys, he succumbs to a kind of breakdown, and hallucinates a giant nightmarish crow, which after a while the boys can sense too. The crow is derisively voiced by David Thewlis, and resembles the Ted-Hughes-ish illustrations Cumberbatch was working on. It sneeringly, ruthlessly mocks and jeers at his “sad dad” anguish; while everyone else is walking on eggshells around him, perhaps making things worse, the brutal crow jabs its beak into his psychic wound.

Wojciech Has’s slice of 1960s surrealism is set in 18th-century Spain, as an officer careens through farcical encounters and erotic episodes in a wild ride that could be a series of Monty Python sketches

This epic picaresque comedy from 1965 is a head-spinning period-costume adventure of 18th-century Spain from Polish film-maker Wojciech Has. It is a surrealist film whose surrealism resides not merely in the bizarre parched landscape of the Sierra Morena mountain range with its bleached skulls, hanged bandits, crows and mysterious inns in which seductive encounters are to be had, but also simply in the bewildering juxtaposition of individual tales and anecdotes, stories which grow out of each other. The surrealist effect (and the comedy) is in the jolt from one micro-narrative to the other, and the realisation that the overall story is thwarted and undermined.

The premise is that in the Spanish town of Saragossa during the Napoleonic wars, one officer tries to arrest another, who is apparently reading an old book – but is then distracted by the fact that this book is about his own grandfather, the nobleman Alfonse Van Worden. (Later we discover that the passages about this grandfather have been added by hand, in pen-and-ink, hence Saragossa Manuscript.) Then we flash back to this preening aristocrat-soldier himself, played by prominent Polish actor Zbigniew Cybulski.

Bringing her black-belt screen presence to the role of Elphaba, Erivo leads a fine cast in a zingily scored conclusion to the hit origin story

Director Jon M Chu pulls off quite a trick with this manageably proportioned second half to the epic musical prequel-myth inspired by The Wizard of Oz – and based, of course, on the hit stage show. It keeps the rainbow-coloured dreaminess and the Broadway show tune zinginess from part one, and we still get those periodic, surreal pronouncements given by the city’s notables to the diverse folk of Oz, those non-player characters crowding the streets. But now the focus narrows to the main players and their explosive romantic crises, essentially through two interlocking love triangles: Glinda the Good, Elphaba the Wicked and the Wizard – and Glinda, Elphaba and Prince Fiyero, the handsome young military officer with whom both witches are not so secretly in love, as well as possibly having feelings for each other.

Jeff Goldblum is excellent as the Wizard, who pretty much becomes the Darth Vader of Oz: a slippery carnival huckster who is realising that his seedy charm is corroding his soul. Jonathan Bailey pivots to a much more serious, less campy, more passionate Prince and Ariana Grande is, as ever, delicate and doll-like as Glinda, though with less opportunity for comedy. But the superstar among equals is Cynthia Erivo, bringing her black-belt screen presence to the role of Elphaba, and revealing a new vulnerability and maturity. Elsewhere, Marissa Bode returns as Nessarose, Elphaba’s wheelchair-using half-sister; Ethan Slater is Boq, the Munchkin working as her servant; and Michelle Yeoh brings stately sweetness to the role of the Wizard’s private secretary Madame Morrible.