Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Review

The good film in here is a small one. Eddie Redmayne plays Newt as a mumbling zoologist who plainly prefers animals to people, Dan Fogler's baker is the best audience surrogate the Wizarding World ever cast, and the interior of the suitcase is an inventive piece of design that lets the creatures be the point rather than the obstacle. Stuart Craig's Prohibition era New York is beautiful, and the Art Deco congress building is the first magical space since Hogwarts that feels genuinely lived in.

The trouble is the second film sharing the running time. Credence and the Obscurus are a grim story about an abused child that does not belong in a comedy about a niffler stealing jewellery, and it exists mainly to deliver a villain reveal for movies that had not been made yet. Colin Farrell is excellent right up to the moment the script discards him for a cameo. Katherine Waterston is handed a character defined entirely by a career setback and given nothing else to play. Rowling's first screenplay explains too much out loud. It works whenever it forgets it is a franchise, which is roughly half the time.