A very charming and entertaining movie! (no spoilers)

Rating: 8/10 (9 February 2018)

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a movie starring Eddie Radmayne and it's apparently a Harry Potter prequel, although I did not see those movies. This movie tells the story of Newt a wizard who carries a suitcase full of fantastic beasts and from there all sorts of complicated things can happen and so we have a movie.
I'll start by saying that for a guy who never seen a Harry Potter movie this movie made me wanna directly watch all those movies. It balances so well magic and real life story with some great set pieces that feel like you are in the 19th century or whenever this movie is set. It was a very entertaining movie with a fantastic performance by Eddie Redmayne. I don't know why this guy reminds me of Matt Smith and his 11th doctor from Doctor Who. Eddie's performance is very good in this movie and in my opinion very underrated. The other performances were also good and really gave the characters enough humanity to make them believable. The score was also excellent, once again James Newton Howard proves his a master with movie music. He scores an extremely versatile music score with comedic and dramatic music blending in so well. The story is somewhat rushed and underwhelming, although I got the overall main plot but certain sub-plots were very weird and not emphasized enough to absorb me into the story. The visuals were great although no match for The Jungle Book. If I was to have some issues i'd be that the movie is not so emotional moving when it tries to be or that some scenes and characters felt weird along with their motivations but overall I got the point of what the movies was about with them.
Overall a good movie with good performances and very good music, excellent set pieces especially the costumes (which won an oscar btw), but somewhat of a underwhelming story and some weird scenes and characters. 8/10