Are you a Harry Potter fan but not a fan of Harry Potter himself cause he was a piece of boring white bread in a magical world you wanted to spend your entire life in? Well good because you’re about to get your knickers blown off by CGI and even more wizarding lore. Not even once, five times! Fantastic Beasts was originally a trilogy but now has been stretched out to five films. But don’t let that put you off, this film works well enough as a standalone.

It follows a lovably awkward Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) chased around by equally lovable characters who are just lovely. They tell nice little jokes and everything’s very light hearted and fun. On the other side of the film is a deeply shadowed story of child abuse and poltergeist style murders that will give your kids nightmares. This half of the film could have easily been biffed out in favour of keeping it pinned entirely on Newt having fun. But now that I know that there’s five films I can see how it’s going to be the more interesting storyline in the long run.

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The movie goes overboard near the end, trying to emulate Avengers style destruction except occasionally the CGI looks like complete garbage when they get up close. Also someone needs to call Scooby Doo, because Fantastic Beasts totally stole their ending.

Despite all that the movie is just downright fun, and you’ll be smiling along the entire way. Anyone who has more in common with playing with bugs than with people as a kid will see themselves in Newt and fall in love.

Matt, our resident professional opinion had a little problem with serial mumblers in the film “Could have done with subtitles whenever anyone talked about a creature, all I could hear was things like ‘Oh shit, here comes the –gr–mg—d-‘ “.

Buy into the hype and go see this movie.