A thing to know about the Fantastic Beasts sequel is, it has no sympathy if you don’t particularly remember (or especially none if you didn’t see) the first movie. This message brought to you by my attempts to penetrate the main focus of the action for about the first half of the movie.

See, there’s this guy that everyone is trying to find (Grindelwald and cronies, American and British aurors, young Dumbledore and our hero Newt) in Paris, and that was fine as far as it went, but it would have been nice to have any idea why he mattered. Eventually, I remembered dim spoilers for the previous movie that brought it into focus, but like I said, the script for The Crimes of Grindelwald did absolutely nothing to help me in that quest.

In the pros column, I enjoyed seeing the wizarding world of France, more beasts = cool, and the picture was beautiful (thanks, new 4K TV!). Also, the movie was significantly better than I expected. In the cons column, to form a real opinion, I need to rewatch it with a better idea of what’s going on the whole time, and probably to rewatch the first one right before that. Which is annoying, but not the worst thing that has ever happened.

Anyway, if you’re still into Harry Potter and especially if you liked the first movie of this… trilogy? Let’s say trilogy. Well, if those things apply to you, you already saw this, since it came out months ago. But, you were correct to do so! (And you’re welcome for the validation.)