Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Skippable, and not a starting point despite sitting first in the chronology. It is also the best of the three, and the only one that works as a film rather than as an instalment.

What it has is a premise with no franchise obligations attached. A shy magizoologist arrives in New York with a suitcase, some of the contents escape, and he spends a day and a night recovering them with the help of a baker who has wandered into the wrong story. Dan Fogler's Kowalski is the best new character the Wizarding World produced, precisely because he is an ordinary man reacting to all of this the way anybody would.

The 1920s American setting is the other asset. A wizarding community organised as a nervous bureaucracy inside a city that would lynch them is a genuinely different world from a boarding school, and the production design is excellent.

The problem is the second plot. Grafted onto the creature story is a much darker thread about an abused child and a repressed power, and a final reveal that exists to set up a trilogy. The seams between the two films inside this one are visible, and everything that follows comes from the half that works least well.