David Yates’s Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore was marginally better than the previous entry in the Fantastic Beasts series – mostly likely because a competent screenwriter was brought in to give it a semblance of a story. However, it still suffers from many of the same issues that have plagued this prequel series since its beginning. Once again, characters are reset back to their previous state, and any pretense of growth has been magically erased – this may be the greatest magic spell of all in the franchise. Once again, the CGI is sloppy, and the action sequences are chaotic and poorly constructed. And once again, we have more of the series’ sexism on prominent display here. The entire film feels like an attempt to play on the nostalgia viewers have for the original Harry Potter franchise – from the overuse of the theme music to the reliance on “saintly” Dumbledore to the many CGI shots of Hogwarts. That said, Mads Mikkelson is wonderful as the villain (taking over the role in this installment) and brings more to the table than he’s given to work with. Likewise, Jessica Williams understands the assignment she’s been given as a performer and is delightful as a screwball comedy-era witch. The two central settings for this film are rather distasteful – Germany during the rise of Nazism especially feels inappropriate given how unwilling the film is to engage with the gravity of this situation, just using it as fascistic window dressing. And the use of Bhutan as the location for the final scenes also carries an air of white, European filmmakers exploiting and exoticizing the locale and making it into a “magical paradise.” This is a franchise that continues devolve into tedium and self-importance.