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.

Igor Bezinović uses local residents of what is now Rijeka in Croatia to re-stage the vainglorious Italian protofascist’s ragtag takeover of the Adriatic port city

This intriguing documentary from Croatian film-maker Igor Bezinović is partly a comic opera and partly a chilling message from the past. It is about Bezinović’s hometown of Rijeka, a port on the Adriatic which after the first world war was the site of one of the 20th century’s strangest episodes, whose key moments the director stages through re-enactments with locals. The film is in effect a protofascist Passport to Pimlico.

In 1918, this city, with its significant ethnic Italian population, was known as Fiume and was formerly ruled by the recently destroyed Habsburgs. After the war it was not absorbed into the victorious Italian nation as many expected but left under the control of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (whose name was later changed to Yugoslavia). Enraged by this betrayal, hothead Italian aristocrat, poet and cocaine addict Gabriele D’Annunzio led a bizarre insurgency with 186 mercenaries or “legionaries”, with whom he carried out a sub-Napoleonic landing in Fiume and established it as a kind of pro-Italian city state under his absolute control.

Sofie Benoot’s film opens out from the film-maker’s medical problem to a diverting reflection on humankind’s deep roots in ancient minerals

The elegant, humorous, susurrating Welsh voice of Siân Phillips sets the keynote for this whimsical essay documentary from Belgian film-maker Sofie Benoot about the nature of rock and stone, and the mysterious interrelation between our bodies and the landmass of Earth.

Benoot’s starting point is the kidney stone that has just been removed from her body, an intriguingly smooth and worn pebble; it’s a personal event she assigns to her offscreen alter ego, voiced by Phillips. This quasi-fictional narrator musingly notes that once upon a time she provided the voice for nature documentaries; quite true, Phillips has indeed narrated some nature documentaries, which appears to be the reason why Benoot cast her.

Philip Barantini’s single-take special follows the star mooching around Manhattan, guitar ever ready for ad hoc turns, ahead of his evening show

Ed Sheeran floats through New York on a cloud of his own sunny high spirits in this hour-long Netflix special. He is the Candide of the music business, smiling benignly, strumming and singing, seamlessly pausing for selfies and fist-bumps and high-fives; he almost visibly absorbs energy from the saucer-eyed fan-worship shown by gobsmacked passersby and radiates it back at them.

Maybe you have to be a Sheeran fan to really appreciate it, but this is another single-take bravura special from film-maker Philip Barantini (who directed Netflix’s searing single-take drama Adolescence) and his director of photography Nyk Allen. With no cuts (though there’s an allowable fast-forward bit, and the audio might have been tweaked in post-production) they follow the unselfconscious Ed as he completes a late-afternoon soundcheck at the New York theatre where he’s playing a concert later on, and then for the next hour, and with fans pretty much always swarming around him, he wanders through the city with his guitar for various encounters, some planned, some (supposedly) not.

Crowe is wittily cast as the pompous Nazi in this tale from behind the scenes at the Nuremberg trials, but Malek is deeply silly as army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley

Here is a movie promising the juiciest of real-life stories from history. Before the Nazi war-crime trials at Nuremberg that started in November 1945, an obscure US army psychiatrist called Dr Douglas Kelley was ordered to interview the prisoners, chief among whom was Hermann Göring. This was supposedly to establish their fitness for trial, but was really intended to gain inside information as to how they would conduct their defence. Russell Crowe is rather wittily cast as the portly, pompous Reichsmarschall Göring; it’s the best he’s been for a long time, a sly and cunning manipulator playing psychological cat-and-mouse with the Americans.

But there is a deeply silly performance from Rami Malek as Kelley: an eye-rolling, enigmatic-smiling, scenery-nibbling hamfest which makes it look as if Malek is auditioning for the role of Hitler in The Producers. Leo Woodall plays the American army translator Howie Triest, Michael Shannon is the US chief prosecutor Robert H Jackson and Richard E Grant is British Tory MP David Maxwell-Fyfe who (for all that his postwar career as home secretary was notorious for the homophobic persecution, which helped drive Alan Turing to his grave), is actually shown to be crucial in cross-examining the Nazis. All of these actors do their best, but the figure of Kelley himself is a ridiculous cartoon.

Having left her husband, Shaw’s daughter moves in with her at the family’s Manhattan apartment and soon tensions arise – wry, sweet, melancholic but somewhat insubstantial

Fiona Shaw finds some tremendous form in this upmarket dramedy of mother-daughter tension and first-world problems, and Katherine Waterston is (as ever) really good. There’s plenty of amusement and wry, sophisticated sadness here, though co-writer and director Gaby Dellal has confected what is, in the end, a pretty middleweight movie.

Shaw plays Kit, an elegant and wealthy widow living in a handsome apartment on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan, known for her witty disdain for those less stylish than herself and about to publish a memoir of life with her late husband, a collector of Chinese art. Out of the blue her grown up daughter Charlotte (Waterston) appears, having run out on her abusive rancher husband; she intends to stay for a while with her mother in her childhood Park Avenue home while she figures things out.

The Oscar-winning actor’s autobiography combines vulnerability with bloody-mindedness and belligerence

It’s the greatest entrance in movie history – and he doesn’t move a muscle.

FBI rookie Clarice Starling must walk along the row of cells until she reaches Dr Lecter’s reinforced glass tank, where the man himself is simply standing, his face a living skull of satanic malice, eerily immobile in his form-fitting blue prison jumpsuit – immobile, that is, until such time as he launches himself against the glass, making that extraordinary hissing-slavering sound. A billion true-crime documentaries have since revealed that actual serial killers are very boring, with nothing like Anthony Hopkins’s screen presence.