Every Friday, our film critic Grace Kinsey will review a new release at the cinema. This week, she gives her verdict on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

J.K. Rowling's screenplay debut, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, details the adventures of Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), a British academic of the wizarding world, who finds himself bumbling around New York on a zoological quest.

His mission is made difficult, however, by the unexpected company of a muggle. (Or a 'No-Maj', as American wizards would apparently say.) Despite my never having been obsessed by Harry Potter as a child, Rowling's fantastical world was unavoidable as I grew up. This meant that, on first seeing Redmayne cast familiar spells in this film, I certainly felt the bitter-sweet pang of nostalgia.

Cleverly, this comforting reminiscence contrasts with the colourful, modern design of the fantastic beasts themselves. These characters are strikingly similar to those at the centre of craze-inducing video games such as Pokémon Go, and thanks to the creatures' penchant for escapology, Scamander has indeed Gotta Catch 'Em All.

But towards the end of the film, the special effects get bigger and louder and less creative. Unfortunately, they overshadow the cute and quirky scenes of magical mischief which delight the audience earlier on, moving the film more definitively and consciously into Blockbuster territory.

All this aside, though, there is a more serious note underlying Fantastic Beasts: in this fictional version of 1920s New York, Rowling has created a scenario where witches and wizards are experiencing prejudice and oppression. One scene even shows a little girl singing nonchalantly about burning witches.

This is, of course, meant as a reflection of our own social situation. And where Rowling can be certain that, in the context of her world, our sympathy lies firmly with witches and wizards, she can hope that (if we don't already) we are likely to see the error of our own society's ways.

However, I find something problematic in Rowling's social commentary: the audience's previous experience of a life of witchcraft and wizardry is by no means a negative one. Admittedly it has a dark side, but the lasting impression Harry Potter's world has on us is highly romantic – unlike the lives of those who suffer prejudice at the hands of our real-world society.

Perhaps Rowling would claim that life for witches and wizards was less than rosy in twentieth-century America, but the film does not provide us with enough context to know whether that is the case. In fact, scenes showing a witch effortlessly rustling up a strudel, for example, confirm our existing ideas of an easy life for those blessed with magic powers. This to me seems to trivialise the real issues that surround us muggles in 2016.

3/5