Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is one of those modern sequels that utilizes universe-building foreshadowing for sequels and so-forth, but it doesn't play the shared-universe thing as finely as the better MCU films pull off. It's entertaining but flawed, sufficient but lacking, visually engaging but not so much in the jumbled-up story department. It suffers from Star-Wars-prequel-itis, where you can tell exactly what they're going to cover in the story because you've already heard this stuff being overshadowed in previous installments, or because there's a recurring character whose appearance only brings up more questions than answers.

Crimes of Grindelwald is entertaining but it doesn't have the perfectly realized other-worldliness of the eight Harry Potter Saga films. THIS film demonstrates that J.K. Rowling knows how to write a story; it's just that her unfocused visual writing and exposition-heavy dialogue makes a very strong case for why she can't write screenplays on her own. The Harry Potter films benefited from professional screenwriters refining, visualizing and adding to the pre-existing novel stories, whereas Fantastic Beasts has no such leverage to adapt upon.

Crimes of Grindelwald is definitely blockbuster cinema worth seeing at the movies: it's just not a world-class example of when multi-million dollar films can be art in and of themselves (like The Godfather or The Dark Knight Trilogy) .

Grindelwald gets 3/5 stars.