Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

The character the series is named after is not at its centre here. Newt is sent out again, but the weight moves to Dumbledore and Grindelwald, and the creatures that gave the first film its texture are mostly reduced to plot devices. Across a hundred and thirty four minutes the film opens Credence’s parentage, Leta Lestrange’s past, Nagini’s curse, the blood pact and Queenie’s change of side, and closes almost none of them. Rowling wrote the screenplay herself, and the text is built from the start as a middle chapter. For viewers who care about Potter chronology there is a concrete problem. The film is set in 1927, yet Pottermore gives Minerva McGonagall a birth year of 1935, and Order of the Phoenix has her beginning to teach at Hogwarts in 1956; here she walks the corridors as an adult. The same strain shows in the lineage revealed in the closing scene. The two hundred million dollar production became the lowest earning entry in the Wizarding World series on release. For: viewers who want the world widened and Jude Law’s younger Dumbledore. Not for: anyone who has not seen the first film will be lost within twenty minutes, and anyone wanting a story that ends, since even the last scene is borrowed against the next instalment.