Monstros Fantásticos e Onde Encontrá-los

The film strains considerably under the weight of all its plot lines-it's never fun to be the movie with the origin story.

Rowling has a voluminous imagination and Yates keeps things humming along, although, as was also true of many Potter movies, there is often too much of a good thing.

A lavish visual feast that nonetheless fails to cast any new spells over its audience.

The film exists resolutely outside of salience and doggedly within the comfort of escapism.

Fantastic Beasts is a charm, excelling when it's allowed to be its own creature and falling short only when it's forced to pay its franchise dues.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them may not offer up the depth and the complexity of Rowling's other wizarding tales, but that doesn't make it any less of a good time.

Whimsical but never wondrous, amusing but never affecting...[The] HP films showed us things we had never seen before. Fantastic Beasts just made me wish I were watching Doctor Strange again.

The next Harry Potterfranchise kicks off with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which tries to combine a light-hearted heist with the rise of dark fascism. The combination doesn't quite work.

Much of the film's rapid-fire entertainment value and slick filmmaking style do a lot towards covering up the weak narrative excuses.

Rowling imbues Fantastic Beasts from start to finish with a sense of discovery.

[It] will make for a marvelous theme park attraction someday. But as a movie, as a vessel for narrative and ideas enacted by recognizably human characters, it fails to tap into the same simple potency that Harry and Co. wielded from book one.

In all, the movie is a cunning and peppy surprise, dulled only by the news that no less than four sequels await.

To its considerable credit, Fantastic Beasts is not the Potter retread it could easily-and very profitably-have been.

If nothing else, it's fun to see that there's a Potterverse outside Harry Potter himself. His world has always been big enough to sustain other stories. Finally, it has a chance to.

Every time Fantastic Beasts has to move the story forward, it stumbles along like a restless kid dragging herself to school when all she wants to do is play with her coloring books.

Extravagant creatures of digital descent can't sustain a story that does little more than set the scene for a long string of sequels.

Set against all the thunderous themes are the antics of a bunch of uninspired imaginary animals - sorry, fantastic beasts - and an astonishingly winning cast that very nearly atones for everything else.

Yates has fresh tricks up his sleeve as he preps for four more planned films. Five years after the last Potter movie, his 20-something fans can age alongside wizards and witches again. Magical.

Rowling and her studio are not so much telling a story as erecting another "tentpole," the Hollywood name for a "franchise" that becomes a virus - but is nonetheless regarded as a remedy for red ink. I only wish there were a vaccine.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them turns out to be a hyperbolic name for a pretty so-so movie -- one with entertaining passages, but which mostly feels like a big-budget prequel to the better, more cohesive film that's yet to come.