Let me first say that I loved the first movie. It is one of my favorite feel good movies in recent memory. The quirky characters, the world building, and the charm of it was immensely captivating to me. Crimes of Grindelwald is not that. It is a quite different kettle of fish that unfortunately spreads its focus on too many characters who all have to have their background explained in order to set up their relations or impact on each others lives. This sadly removes a lot of focus from our main characters (Newt and Tina especially) and makes what is fundamentally a rather simple story overly complicated and a bit convoluted. It also has quite a significant tonal shift from the first movie, which was a charming romp with some dark moments. Grindelwald, however, is a very dark movie with charming, lighthearted moments. Imagine watching the first Potter movie and then jumping straight to movie 6 and you get the idea. This is by no means a bad thing as the movie is very consistent and there really are no awkward tonal shifts (as for example in Last Jedi), and since I brought up Star Wars... In terms of tone, I would call this the Empire Strikes Back of Fantastic Beasts. Speaking of beasts, they have sadly taken a back seat in this movie as well, so if you, like me, enjoyed them and Newt's interaction with them (wonderfully devoid of most of the magical approach to problem solving, which understandably seems to be standard in the Potter universe, but handled through Newt's understanding and communication with said beasts) there is very little of that, but the few interactions we do see are immensely enjoyable. This may sound overly critical, but despite these things I still very much enjoyed the movie, and I have to give a special mention to Grindelwald himself who is a genuinely interesting villain. Unlike the pure evil of Voldemort (and excessive temper tantrums and evil laughs), Grindelwald is a soft spoken, intelligent, unemotional, extremely manipulative spider, pulling the strings from the center of his web. This is extremely well portrayed by Depp who plays him very straight. Yes, there is no "Depping it up" in this Depp performance, and it works very well indeed, something that can be said about all the performances. They are just really good! I would rate this movie higher if it had been more focused, rather than spreading its story out on so many different characters, but it at least manages to tie it all up in a reasonably satisfying way, that managed to peak my interest for the next one. It's basically like eating at a restaurant and getting a satisfying meal, that was marred by having too many ingredients in it, which is why I end up on a low 7.