★★★1/ 2Beyond the fact that the Harry Potter saga is finished (in movies and in books), it is true that the universe created by JK Rowling – basically, a great recycling of fairy tales and various mythologies – has a lot space to invent stories. But the Fantastic Beasts thing is a kind of fight that doesn’t quite come together between the demands of a previously established “Potterian canon” and the freedom to create autonomous characters and plots that don’t entirely refer to that base. Until this third installment, they were erratic, but here it improves with the presence of Mads Mikkelsen as the villain Grindelwald. How good and versatile Miwkkelsen is: his ability to set the tone in any type of film, good work by Jude Law, an extra weight to this film. The adventure, which involves the building of a heroic group, is actually less fantasy than “political” tensions and that theme – what is done with extraordinary power – plus the personal relationship between young Dumbledore and young Grindelwald make the adventure own, the fantasy, dissolves a bit, as if it were an “accessory” to be able to “sell” the “relevant” story. Still, a good example of the good and the bad of contemporary popular cinema.
