Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore

Skippable, and the important practical fact is that this trilogy was planned as five films and stopped at three. It is not an ending. Threads opened in the first two are closed hastily or quietly dropped, and the last scene is a pause rather than a conclusion.

It is, within that, a clear correction. Steve Kloves, who adapted seven of the eight Potter films, came back to co-write, and the result is far more legible: one objective, a team assembled to achieve it, and a plot you can follow without a chart. The previous film's most contested revelation is reversed in a line.

Mads Mikkelsen replaced Johnny Depp after a change in the production's circumstances, and plays Grindelwald as a cold political operator rather than a theatrical one, which suits the material better. The election sequence and the creature that chooses a candidate are a decent idea. Jude Law and Mikkelsen get the confrontation the second film kept deferring.

What it lacks is any reason to care. Newt is still peripheral in his own series, the stakes are institutional, and the film is competent and inert. It underperformed badly and the series stopped. Watch it only to see where the trilogy left off, and expect no resolution.