Grade: D
Esoteric is a word that immediately came to mind as I sat through Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them’s interminable 2 hours and 13 minutes, of which I felt every second. Here is a film that seems to be made for the group of people who are already fanatics of the Harry Potter universe. The uninitiated, however, are left out in the cold. Once in a while, a movie from a genre I dislike comes along and surprises me, and a few titles flashed into my mind tonight. I don’t like boxing movies, and had never seen any of the Rocky flicks, yet I found Creed to be a delightful breath of fresh air. Talk of stocks and shares bores me, and I literally don’t know what they are, but Boiler Room is an excellent movie that frequently enters my mind. Sci-fi is not my cup of tea, but Dark City is one of my all-time favorites. It is possible to take a piece of art and make it accessible to those who ordinarily wouldn’t enjoy it, but there’s nary a shred of anything in FB&WTFT that brought me into it and made me a convert. Eddie Redmayne is a gem, with the empathetic charm of a young Hugh Grant, and it was nice to see Samantha Morton again. I enjoyed her in a few films in the early 2000s, starting with her Oscar nominated performance in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown. Other familiar faces do not do as well. As funny as it was to see Jon Voight – whose daughter Angelina won the Oscar instead of Morton that year – in the same movie as Morton for that reason, he is wasted here in too small a role. Colin Farrell isn’t given much to do other than sulk around menacingly, as if he’s auditioning for Inspector Javert. Redmayne’s character’s surname is Scamander, which means that every utterance of “Mr. Scamander” sounds distractingly like Mistress Commander. This movie may garner a few well-deserved technical award nominations, but if you don’t already “get it,” you need not bother here. Unlike the suitcase that Mistress Commander climbs into, the movie itself never let me in.
Grade: D
Film Reviews by Mark 
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