Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018)
Directed by David Yates
Gellert Grindelwald has escaped imprisonment and has begun gathering followers to his cause—elevating wizards above all non-magical beings. The only one capable of putting a stop to him is the wizard he once called his closest friend, Albus Dumbledore. However, Dumbledore will need to seek help from the wizard who had thwarted Grindelwald once before, his former student Newt Scamander, who agrees to help, unaware of the dangers that lie ahead. Lines are drawn as love and loyalty are tested, even among the truest friends and family, in an increasingly divided wizarding world.
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What critics say influenced Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
Or, you know, George Lucas, who retroactively destroyed a million childhoods with the abomination that was “The Phantom Menace.”
Here, the adventures of Newt Scamander are both plodding – Grindelwald’s rally resembles the trade debate sequences from The Phantom Menace – and utterly daft.
Cinematographer Philippe Rousselot (a frequent Tim Burton collaborator) frames every beautiful face with solemn clarity, letting everyone gaze directly into the camera in a way that brings to mind the work of Barry Jenkins and his intent compassion in Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk .
She would benefit from having push back from an equally strong artistic voice, reminding her to luxuriate in her world rather than jump to another reveal, and she arguably hasn’t had that since Alfonso Cuarón directed 2004’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Devoted Potter buffs may get more of a kick out of it than I did but I cannot imagine them embracing it in the same way that they did “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (2004), the first entry in the series that worked as an honest-to-goodness movie and not just as a book translation.
Redmayne licks the pavement at one point and is dead set on comparing Tina’s eyes to a salamander’s, Ezra Miller walks around like he peed on the carpet, got caught and scolded for it, and spends the rest of the film pouting, and Johnny Depp seems to borrow from Redmayne’s performance in Cloud Atlas ; barely speaking above a whisper the majority of the time and yelling for maybe a line or two.
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I saw all eight Harry Potter films, and adored them (mostly), and was even relatively entertained by the original Fantastic Beasts feature – 2016’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – so I certainly entered into Crimes of Grindelwald with relative enthusiasm; even the controversial casting of Johnny Depp wasn’t enough to deter me.
The film picks up sometime after 2016’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
Two years after the release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them , we return to the Wizarding World once again for the next, somewhat convoluted, chapter in the five planned prequel instalments, with Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.
Sadly, those fantastic beasts – which were duly delivered onscreen in 2016’s enjoyable Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – are mere bit players in this second movie about the “magizoologist” Newt Scamander ( Eddie Redmayne ).
The movie, opening Friday, is a sequel to 2016’s “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.”
Nagini (Claudia Kim: Avengers: Age of Ultron), a woman cursed to turn into a giant snake occasionally, is nothing more than one of those name-checked figures — she will, in the future, be Voldemort’s companion — and someone to stand sadly and silently next to Credence.
Along with the help of his friend, Nagini (Claudia Kim, Avengers: Age of Ultron ), he’s simply trying to track down his birth family.