The costume vault

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the first of the planned spin-off/prequel series of the Harry Potter Saga and the screenwriting debut of J.K.Rowling, the mind behind the Harry Potter  books. This new installment is an ambitious attempt, both in scale and in narrative, as it tries to tell both a brand new story with brand new characters and also be linked to the original saga through the character of Grindelwald. The problem is that this juggling act forces the movie to fit in together two stories that have little to do with each other. On the one hand, there's Grindenwald and the Obscurial's story and on the other, the bizarre adventures of Newt Scamander as he tries to fetch back his creatures. Separately, these two stories, could have made for two entertaining movies, but the problem is that, together, they just don't mix  very well. On top of that, the radical changes in tone throughout the movie only manage to drag the final product further down. ...

The complexities of gender-fluidity are nothing new to humanity (even though the vocabulary for it is still being coined). So it's only logical that cinema would, throughout its history, touch upon it at some point. And so, The Danish Girl is hardly the first movie to deal with a man feeling like a woman or wanting to be one. But it's one of the most visible. Why? Perhaps because it bases itself on a true story or perhaps because it's also the most recent one dealing with the subject. It's a competent movie coined by a competent director, but its main problem is that it's not very memorable. It's a movie that we've seen a million times over: the inspirational biopic (which, by now, it's a genre in and on itself). You know what's going to happen, and how everything is going to transpire from the get-go. So it's hard to be truly interested. This is terribly unfortunate because it IS a subject matter that deserves more visibility. S...