AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+
Special Effects: A+

Is anyone coming to see Avatar for the story, really? I can tell you that I wasn’t. I came with the expectation of a thrill ride of heart pounding action set pieces, and heart stopping special effects. On those fronts, Avatar: The Way of Water absolutely delivers. And it delivers beyond your expectations: I can’t say that its “wow factor” surpasses that of the 2009 original, but it’s stunning to note that it easily matches it. And how does it manage this feat? By making the special effects even more impressive than they were in the previous film.

I have to admit, I went in with skepticism on that front. Indeed, I did not think Avatar was as visually stunning as millions of others did back in 2009—particularly in 3D, which never managed to impress me. In fact, I went to see that movie a second time in 2D and found it a better experience. Well, call James Cameron a megalomaniac all you want, but this is a guy who knows how to get the job he’s looking for done, and the very reason he waited 13 years to make the sequel was because he wanted to the technology he was looking for to catch up. And I am here to tell you: it was worth the wait.

It amazes even me to say this, but Avatar: The Way of Water is a stunning experience in 3D. With the exception of the relatively few human characters rendered as human onscreen, every living thing in this movie is rendered with CD effects, the fauna of Pandora all invented creatures. And they all look as real as if they were right in front of your face. If James Cameron has anything to do with it, the days of 3D as a gimmick or a price-gouging distraction are a thing of the past. Every minute of the sensory experience of this film feels organic, like you are indeed immersed into a fully realized world. More than once I watched what I was seeing onscreen and actually thought to myself, This is incredible. Truly, it may very well be that this film advanced VFX technology further in a single go than any other movie since Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park in 1993.

The key difference, of course, is that Jurassic Park also has an incredibly tight, skillfully constructed script, which was just as much a part of that movie’s success as its visual breakthroughs. The same cannot be said of James Cameron’s scripts, which these days can have the surprise effect of making us wistful for the rote romance of Titanic. Now, to give The Way of Water some credit, this outing leans less heavily on the Dances With Wolves nature of the original—on which Cameron had sole writing credit—with a team of four other writers who worked with him on the story. That part is an improvement, albeit not by a huge margin.

If there is any particular disappointment to this movie, it’s the return of Stephen Lang as the villain—he wasn’t that great a villain to begin with; why do we need him again? And, okay, you may be wondering how this is possible, if the guy (spoiler alert!) died at the end of the first one. Well: cloning to the rescue! Cameron’s “innovation” in this case is not to bring back just a clone of the character Quartich, but to revive him as a cloned version of his Na’vi avatar—he and his troupe of military goons are Na’vi grown in a lab, so they never revert to their human selves. On top of all that, the Na’vi version of Quartich has had the original’s memories implanted. Viola! I now dread the idea that Quartich will be the villain in every single one of these movies.

Another actor from the first film whose character died returns, this one on the more compelling side: Cameron loyalist Sigourney Weaver returns, not as the original Dr. Augustine, but as Kiri, the mysterious offspring of the avatar version of Augustine, father unknown, adopted into the family by Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña). Some snide remarks are made about Kiri’s father being Augustine’s colleague Norm Spellman (Joel David Moore), but I don’t think we are meant to take that at face value, not least of which because it would suggest a nature far darker on Spellman’s part than ever gets otherwise suggested in the film.

Kiri is shown sporadically through The Way of Water to have an easy, special connection to the Great Mother, the natural world around her, with abilities to control certain forms of life, particularly (of course) under water. This element of her character is never fully fleshed out in this film, only steadily revealed throughout, and I suspect this will be more directly explored in the next sequel. Presumably so will her paternal parentage.

Which is to say, even at a ridiculously long three hours and 12 minutes, Avatar: The Way of Water leaves a lot of questions unanswered. It submerges us ever deeper into the world of Pandora, after settling into this new family life with the Sullys, who now have three children aside from Kiri: sons Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), and eight-year-old daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss). Further adding to this mix is Spider, the fully human teenager who turns out to have been Quartich’s son, marooned on Pandora due to his youth precluding him from traveling back to Earth. With his special mask allowing him to breathe Pandora’s air, he’s befriended the Na’vi and integrated himself into their society as much as is possible in his human form—which includes wearing little more than a loincloth, which is all we see actor Jack Champion wearing for the duration of the film. He plays a key role, including an extended period when he’s commandeered into a sort of tour guide for Quartich and his troops. It was distracting to me that those guys never made Spider put on some clothes, rather unrealistically just accepting him as a “feral” human adopting the ways and culture of the Na’vi.

So, as always, the script in a James Cameron movie is its weakest link. Usually I place more importance on that than I will here, because nearly everything we actually see onscreen is so genuinely amazing, it goes a long way toward making up for stupid lines of dialogue like “You are not in Kansas anymore” (which Quartich literally says in both of these movies).

As it is, you could split The Way of Water into three, roughly one-hour parts. In the first, we are re-introduced into this world, and I have to give Cameron some credit here: he eases us into it instead of jolting us with an opening over-the-top action sequence, something far too many movies make the mistake of doing. We meet the expanded Sully family, and although this gets just as “bro-y” as most Cameron films (the Sully sons literally refer to each other as “bro,” too many times; we spend far too much time with trigger-happy military personnel), most of the kids each get key story arcs of their own—with the suggestion that the adopted daughter, Kiri, may yet be the most important. Cameron’s plot threads may lack the same dimension as his visual effects, but they do get surprisingly well fleshed out.

The second hour is when we get largely submerged underwater—hence the subtitle—when the Sullys, fleeing the vengeful advances of Na-vi Quartich, go into hiding in some faraway islands where a different, seawater-adapted tribe of Na’vis live. This is where a wholly unrecognizable Kate Winslet shows up, as Ronal, the wife of their chief, Tonowari (Cliff Curtis). Ronal and Tonowari have teenage children of their own, who vacillate between rivalries and friendships with the Sully children. They learn this tribe’s seafaring ways, and this is where a great deal of underwater footage is eye poppingly impressive; we also learn about their hyperintelligent, whale-like creatures, tukun, which can communicate with the Na’vi and ultimately play a pivotal role in the climactic sequence of the film.

And that sequence goes on a long while, mostly in the final hour, nearly all of it breathlessly mesmerizing. I would see this movie again just for its final third, it’s so well staged and thrilling—even though it features its own sequence of a sinking ship, which quite clearly (and deliberately?) recalls the last hour of Titanic. Still, I must mention James Cameron’s notoriously despotic attention to detail even here: we spend little time inside this particular ship when it is upright, and yet there is very attentive production design on things like floor-bolted dining tables we only ever see in passing after the ship has capsized. Which is to say, every physical setting in this film has a genuinely lived-in feeling. Although this movie has no hope of winning any top-tier awards, it’s already easy to imagine it sweeping both the technical and the creative awards.

Truly, the one and only thing that keeps Avatar: The Way of Water from being an even more stunning achievement than it is, is the fact that we’ve already gone to this world once before. Back in 2009, everything in Pandora was completely new to us (well, except for the story tropes). This time, we are returning to a world we’ve already been to, just far more vividly rendered. When it comes to how we see it, it’s a little bit like stepping out of black and white and into color, an almost Wizard of Oz moment. There was a time I always said CGI effects would become dated quickly, in a way that practical effects never did. But in this case, whatever practical effects or sets they had were integrated seamlessly. For now, at least, you can’t see the seams. It has been a long time indeed since a film transported its viewers so successfully.

It is somehow both imperfect and spectacular.

Overall: B+

TURNING RED

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: A
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Animation: B

Turning Red is simultaneously about adolescent friendship and about mother-daughter relationships, and it handles both fantastically. The premise seems simple, in which a 13-year-old discovers she transforms into a giant red panda whenver she gets too emotionally excited, but it winds up being a great allegory for multiple shared experiences at once. There’s the idea of “harnessing your inner beast.” There’s acknowledging your “messy side.” There’s the literalness of the title, when an adolescent goes beet red with embarrassment. There’s even a brief sequence in which it effectively stands in as a symbol for when a girl has her period for the first time: “I’m a gross red monster!” One might thing I’m reaching with that one—except it literally happens when Mei’s mother, not yet understanding the true nature of the situation, is trying to offer her pads.

Things like this are surely why Turning Red is rated PG. It’s also the third Pixar movie to be released directly to Disney+, although it’s arguably the first not to be done out of necessity. That said, after having watched it, this film feels right for an at-home streamer. Perhaps we’ve just been spoiled by 27 years of Pixar Animation’s visual excellence, where in many cases the animation largely made up for somewhat waning story quality. Turning Red flips the script, so to speak, and offers animation that is . . . fine. It’s the story that truly elevates it, and makes for a wonderfully cozy, adorable, funny and moving at-home watch.

This movie happens to be the second Pixar film directed by a woman (the first was Brenda Chapman, though she co-directed Brave in 2012 with two men), the first to be solo directed by a woman, and the first to be directed by a woman of color. Domee Shi, who also co-wrote this delightful script, was born in China but grew up in Toronto, and having written largely based on her own family experience, thus provides the explanation for the film’s Toronto setting. Characters mention the city of Toronto regularly, and there are many establishing shots of the Toronto skyline, always with the CN Tower figuring prominently. I just found myself wishing those shots were rendered with a little more depth and personality; instead, they sometimes feel a little like a cartoon version of old movie matte painting backdrops.

Admittedly, this sort of thing was why it took a few minutes for me to really feel hooked into the story of Turning Red. The visual design of the characters themselves are a little “cartoonier” than normal for Pixar, and for the first several minutes we see the establishment of setting and the introduction of characters, particularly Meilin (voiced by 16-year-old newcomer Rosalie Chang) and her diverse group of three best friends (voiced by Ava Morse, Hyein Park and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan). We see them quite pointedly and realistically acting like giddy, sometimes shrill, 13-year-old girls, and for a moment there I wondered if I would be able to tolerate this movie.

But, then we get introduced to Mei’s perfectionist mother, Ming (Sandra Oh), and we understand the central conflict of the story, which is a tension between Mei’s love for her mother and her love for her friends. Domee Shi and her two co-writers, Julia Cho and Sarah Streicher, write about these relationships exceedingly well, never painting anyone involved as inherently malicious. They are just people who make mistakes, who sometimes make misguided decisions in the service of the people they love.

By the time Meilin’s red panda is unleashed, Turning Red takes a quick turn, becoming equal parts entertaining and surprisingly layered, both with thematic meaning and cultural tradition. I love the diversity of both the characters and the voice cast here, not just for its own sake, but more importantly, because it accurately reflects the city in which it’s set: Toronto is one of the most multicultural and cosmopolitan cities in the world, more than half its residents belonging to a visible minority group, and just under half being immigrants born outside the country.

Mei’s family is well established, though, both her and her mother speaking with American accents; only Mei’s grandmother, Wu (voiced by Wai Ching Ho), speaks with a Chinese accent. Cantonese is regularly spoken, particularly when Grandma Wu arrived with reinforcements—both herself and other family members, presumably aunts, who have all at one point participated in a ritual that breaks the family spell of the red panda.

I also love how centered this story is on women and girls. Turning Red is written and directed by a woman, largely based on her childhood experience with several girl friends, and nearly the entire principal cast is girls or women. The most notable male character is Ming’s husband and Mei’s father, Jin (Orion Lee), and even he is written with more dimension than typically found with a part of that size. Which is to say, he doesn’t get a huge amount of screen time, but he is well woven into the fabric of the story.

The focus here, though, is on Mei’s relationship with the girls and the women in her life: her three best friends; her mother; her grandmother. The story even gets into how that mother-daughter relationship is informed by Ming’s relationship with her own mother—an idea relatable to a great many daughters and mothers, regardless of ethnic or cultural background. Were Turning Red made in an earlier cinematic era, most of the story would have revolved around Mei trying to keep her red panda spell a secret. Instead, Mei’s mother, her friends, and most of her classmates learn about it surprisingly early on. What follows is a struggle for Mei to control it, and her mother’s insistence that it needs to be locked away completely. There’s a lot to unpack here in terms of accepting ourselves—and our children—as who they really are, and not so much taming but learning to live with the beast within.

There is a climactic sequence in which an even more giant panda terrorizes a stadium during a boy-band concert, and it’s a little like a red panda version of Godzilla. If that were all it was, I might have rolled my eyes at it. But there is so much depth to this story, even a showy sequence like that works really well. Given Pixar Animation Studio’s increasingly spotty record in recent years, and the somewhat surprising choice to release straight to streaming, Turning Red exceeds expectations on nearly every level . . . except the animation itself. But, as with our relationships with our children and our parents, we can’t always expect perfection.

This is so embarrassing!

Overall: B+

DUMBO

Directing: B-
Acting: C+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Special Effects: B

Trafficking in nostalgia is one thing, but how many people are even still around to feel nostalgic about the original Disney animated feature Dumbo, which came out seventy-eight years ago? Certainly there are some; even I, as a 42-year-old, watched that 1941 movie many times as a child. But was it my favorite? And now, consider people half my age now — themselves adults — and, more importantly, kids a quarter my age. They have no context for this as a longstanding intellectual property, and plenty will see the 2019 live-action Dumbo as their introduction to the character. What reason do they have to care? Not a whole lot, honestly.

And then we get to Tim Burton, the greatest director of the eighties and nineties, whose output in the 2000s was spotty at best, and who hasn’t given us a film even close to great since Sweeney Todd in 2007. That’s twelve years ago, if any of you are counting. Since then, he has phoned it in and cashed in with pretty much every project, even Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016) only hinting at the great works of his past.

One might think Tim Burton a perfect choice to direct the live-action remake of Dumbo, which, the few people still familiar with it probably remember, had some pretty dark elements to it. And to be fair, some of the nods to the original film here work very well, not least of which is the circus bubbles show that harkens back to the “Pink Elephants On Parade” sequence.

That said, a peculiar element of this iteration of Dumbo is how, more often than not, the countless nods to the original in its first half rather drag it down rather than lift it up; and it’s the second half, with original concepts that expand on the story, that actually won me over. I’m not sure it won me over enough to make me say anyone should rush out to see this movie in the theatre, but it did win me over.

The sad thing is, Dumbo succeeds in large part in spite of itself. Because it’s got a lot dragging it down, not least of which is a first quarter or so that struggles to be even interesting, let alone genuinely compelling. And I sure hope the two kids who star in this movie never see this review, because I don’t particularly want to hurt their feelings, but frankly, as actors, they suck. In fairness to the kids, the responsibility here ultimately lies on the director, who really wanted totally wooden and emotionless delivery from them, I guess?

There is also the script, the dialogue itself, to consider. Once was a time Tim Burton worked with script writers who gave his movies an eminently quotable, dark wit — and Dumbo, which could have soared on such strengths, has no such wit. It’s also nice to see familiar Burtonian faces: Michael Keaton an Danny DeVito are both working with Burton here for the fourth time; Eva Green for the third. Clearly there is deep affection among actors for Tim Burton as a director, and vice versa. It’s too bad not one of the perormances in Dumbo stands out in any way.

It’s Dumbo himself who is the standout here, an endlessly adorable and stunningly rendered CGI baby elephant who can fly thanks to his oversized ears. But when it comes to the special effects, there remains something oddly static about the rest of the effects shots in this movie, which it has in common with all Burton films to come out in the digital age. This is a man who truly excelled back in the days of practical effects, but when digital effects exploded, his skill level did not quite blossom in the same way.

And it kind of pains me to say these things, as I said for years Tim Burton was my favorite director. Is he still? He remains the best of the eighties and nineties, and even today, in spite of his recent frequency of missteps, I will literally see anything with his name attached. That’s about loyalty more than quality, sadly.

There’s just so much unrealized potential here. From the beginning of Dumbo, Danny Elfman’s characteristically wonderful score brings high hopes. We see the circus train on its way around the American South, and the front of the engine car is rendered with a grinning grill that gives it a design element reminiscent of The Nightmare Before Christmas. That is where this potential begins and ends, as we spend about half an hour struggling to find one thing a character says interesting.

It must be reiterated, though: Dumbo himself lights up the screen, and even without any actual lines — unlike the animated feature, none of the animals talk — he proves to be by far the most adorable and expressive character. This even includes the usually very expressive Colin Farrell, as the injured WWI veteran father of the aforementioned children. Eventually there are sequences of Dumbo flying under the Big Top in circus performances, and these scenes are genuinely exciting. The problem is just how long it takes to get there.

More of this please. The rest of the movie is . . . blah.

Overall: B-

CAPTAIN MARVEL

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B+

Original comic books are one thing — I can’t speak to those because I never read them. But in cinema, Captain Marvel is clearly Marvel’s answer to DC’s Wonder Woman — and, honestly, the two films average out to being roughly equal quality. Where Wonder Woman faltered is in the areas where Captain Marvel excels, and vice versa. For instance: the opening sequence of Wonder Woman actually was wonderful, and made us all wish the entire story could have taken place on that island of Themyscira. Captain Marvel, on the other hand, is quite deliberately incomprehensible in its opening sequences, the puzzle pieces only coming together for the viewer at the same time they do for the title character.

But! Wonder Woman’s fatal flaw — and this is hardly specific to that movie; it’s a flaw of far too many superhero movies — is the so-called “climactic” battle between hero and villain causing untold collateral damage at the end. Humor, used consistently and effectively, is arguably Captain Marvel, and it very nearly turns that particular trope into a punch line.

Maybe it’s not fair to compare this to Wonder Woman so much, except for the unfortunate thing they both have in common that sets it apart from other films: not only is the superhero at its center a woman, but in both cases they were subject to ridiculously overt, sexist backlash. Well, I am happy to report that both movies are laughing all the way to the bank.

That said, Captain Marvel has less to say about so-called “girl power,” the character’s womanhood being comparatively incidental. Now, to be sure, there are feminist nods here and there: a brief scene in which some schmo on a motorcycle suggests our hero “give me a smile”; a supporting character bristling at being called “young lady”; the 90s-rock-heavy soundtrack featuring No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” during a pivotal fight scene. But nods is all they are, and they are seamlessly woven into the narrative.

Captain Marvel does have a bit of magic to it, in that it’s open to meaning whatever audiences want it to mean to them. Maybe I’m just a big softy, but I actually got slightly teary at a montage of Captain Marvel’s alter ego Carol Danvers (a well cast Brie Larson) getting up after being nearly defeated by challenges throughout her childhood and young adulthood. It was a rare moment for a superhero movie, in which it offers something truly inspiring. Few others outside of Wonder Woman or (the admittedly far superior) Black Panther have managed such a thing.

As for the actual story here — it’s . . . fine. There are no particularly huge faults within the context of what this movie is, but neither does it stand out from most vantage points. There is a fun bit of cleverness, with its setting in the mid-nineties, and thereby serving as a sort of prequel to everything we have seen so far in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We get to find out how Nick Fury got that eye patch, for example.

Speaking of which, that brings us to the special effects, which are actually pretty impressive. Samuel L. Jackson and Clark Gregg are both digitally de-aged for this movie, and that particular effect is uncanny. Some have said too much so — getting into pseudo-creepy “uncanny valley” territory — but I kept paying close attention to Samuel L. Jackson’s face in particular, the texture of his skin and how it shone in different shades of life, and found myself consistently impressed. There are other moments when characters are clearly being animated by CGI, so the overall effects job is not exactly perfect. But it veers between serviceable to amazing at times.

The same goes for Goose the cat, by far my favorite character in this movie — in fact, I would say he’s worth the price of admission alone — given my doubts when I heard some shots of the animal are CGI and in some cases it’s even a “realistic” puppet cat. Well, guess what? I could not readily see when a puppet cat was being used. And when CGI is detectable, it’s understandable, and often in service of well-used humor. And just trust me on this one: that cat has brings some delightful surprises. Especially at the end of the credits.

Getting back to the Wonder Woman parallels, there is even one for the Robin Wright role: in this movie, the “mentor woman” role is filled by Annette Bening. She is always a delight to see, although she is given so little meat to chew on here that it’s clearly just a paycheck job for her. When it comes to true nuance in performance, that pretty much all falls to Larson, although a sliver of it also goes to another character with shifting position in her life, played by a buffed up Jude Law.

Fundamentally, as in all superhero moves, it’s all just completely ridiculous, and Captain Marvel could have gone for, but has only a fraction of the deliberate cultural import of Black Panther. We’re getting to a point where even the movies that five years ago would have truly stood out for their casting and storytelling choices, are now becoming routine and less exceptional. We shan’t forget Goose the cat, however! Captain Marvel would still have been fun without him, but nowhere near as much so.

Goose is my Captain Marvel!

Overall: B

FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B

I’m of two minds about director David Yates’s sequel to 2016’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which was itself fun but inessential. The same could be said, really, of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald — perhaps just slightly less fun, and perhaps barely more essential. That is, for die-hard fans of anything in the “Potterverse,” anyway.

And therein lies the rub: How many casual fans of the Harry Potter series will even care about this? After all, in terms of U.S. domestic box office, were we to fold Fantastic Beasts into Harry Potter as part of the same franchise, the original Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them would come in dead last. To be fair, a domestic haul of $234 million is still enviable in its own right. Still, if you compare that film’s $74 million opening weekend to The Crimes of Grindelwald earning $64 million, there is no denying this endless return to the “Wizarding World” universe is yielding diminishing returns.

And now, according to reports, Fantastic Beasts is intended to be a five-film series. If all of them are released a minimum of two years apart, that’s an additional decade of films set in the same universe as the Harry Potter series — which itself took 11 years to get through, in cinema form, at least. The Fantastic Beasts films, by contrast, are original scripts as opposed to literary adaptations, albeit still written by J.K Rowling.

It may be a fair question, though, to ask if Rowling is at least slightly losing her touch, given certain convictions from the Harry Potter productions now abandoned (I still find myself distracted by British actors playing American characters, after any American actors were strictly barred from being cast in Harry Potter films), or the more recent controversy regarding the casting of an Asian woman (Claudia Kim) as Nagini, the snake creature eventually loyal to Voldemort. As far as that is concerned, I suspect many people have jumped to judgment before seeing what nuance the film actually affords the character — but then, what do I know? I’m just a white guy — and I mean that with more sincerity than flippancy.

Beyond that, it must be said that, plot-wise, The Crimes of Grindelwald is a tad overstuffed. One could make the argument that it’s unfair to make definitive judgment of a single chapter before the entire story is completed, and we still have three left to go. That said, with five films in which to tell this story, why cram so much into this one? I found it difficult to follow at times, and, although this film does have plenty of its own fun magical “beasts” and referenced in the title, they are even less relevant to the overall plot — so far, at least — than they were in the first installment. At least Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them had several extended detours focused on said creatures. In this outing, that being the exact title of the book Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne, endlessly modest charm and charisma still intact) is working on, is never even mentioned.

Furthermore, action-packed though The Crimes of Grindelwald may be, once again being a casual observer of the “Wizarding World” is potentially to the audience’s detriment. Unlike the Harry Potter series, in which each story can stand alone if necessary, anyone watching The Crimes of Grindelwald without having seen its preceding installment is apt to get lost quickly. I got lost occasionally myself, and I literally watched the first film the very morning before seeing this one.

Yet, even though the casting of Johnny Depp as the title character seems a dubious choice at best, I absolutely would recommend The Crimes of Grindelwald to existing fans of this magical world. The production design details remain fantastic; the visual effects are up to standard, if far from cutting-edge; the characters are comfortably familiar. Speaking of the characters, this is one element of the script I will commend: some of them go in very different directions from what their arc in the first film may have suggested. After this many years, there is value in the ability to surprise — even if the characters themselves may disappoint. That is the nature of human imperfection, after all.

We do meet Dumbledore as a young man, at least, and Jude Law works well in the part. We meet him back in London, the exclusive setting of the previous film of 1920s New York City now giving way to several international locations — including even the French Ministry of Magic. It’s a nice broadening of scope to the story proceedings, if also allowing for a bit of an excess in complexity.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald isn’t great, but for fans of the “Wizarding World,” it’s good enough. It’s . . . fine. It effortlessly holds your attention for well over two hours, and even if it fails to prove truly exceptional, it does leave you ready still for more. It’s like a cinema version of binge-watching a streaming television show: if the credits included a box you could click that said, “Watch next episode,” you’d still think to yourself, I still want to know what happens next! —*click*. One can only hope that, in the end, the inevitable road to Voldemort is more than just puzzle pieces clicking into place, and that the whole of this series proves better than the sum of its parts.

Newt Scamander and a surprisingly drab beast, reluctantly ready for their closeup.

Overall: B