JK's fantastic new hero is just the magic we need: BRIAN VINER on the latest instalment of the Potter franchise 

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Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them (12A)

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The fantastical parallel universe created by J K Rowling never felt quite so in tune with our own as it does in this exhilarating Harry Potter spin-off.

For all its wit and spectacle, the film, which marks Rowling’s screenwriting debut, has plenty to say about racial prejudice, establishment stooges and the abuse of power.

Set in Prohibition-era New York City, it opens with a flurry of feverish newspaper headlines. ‘Anti-wizard sentiment on the rise,’ screams one. ‘Is anyone safe?’ Strange creatures are wreaking havoc around Manhattan, causing alarm among the non-magical or ‘no-maj’ population.

That’s the American term. You and I know them as muggles, and more to the point, so does Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), a shyly awkward, tousle-haired Brit educated at the wizarding school Hogwarts, where he was a favourite (long before Potter) of the headmaster, Albus Dumbledore.

The fantastical parallel universe created by J K Rowling never felt quite so in tune with our own as it does in this exhilarating Harry Potter spin-off

Scamander sneaks a suitcase full of weird and wonderful pets through US Customs and you don’t need Rowling’s powers of imagination to picture another outlandish creature, Donald J Trump, growling that it would never be allowed to happen on his watch.

In fact, our hero has come to America with the best of intentions. He wants to set free the vast eagle-like Thunderbird in its native Arizona, but he gets somewhat sidetracked having to rein in his Niffler, which has the look of a mole and the acquisitive instincts of a magpie.

There is a gloriously funny scene, which for months has loomed large in the cinema trailers, in which the naughty Niffler, while looting a jewellery store, tries to pass itself off as a shop-window mannequin. The film’s many other fantastic beasts pull off the considerable trick of making David Attenborough’s new series of Planet Earth II look almost prosaic. Yet this is much more than a digital-age Dr Dolittle.

Scamander is thrown into an unlikely alliance with a no-maj, chubby factory worker Jacob Kowalski, and a more likely one with secret agent Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston, picturd)

Scamander is thrown into an unlikely alliance with a no-maj, chubby factory worker Jacob Kowalski (delightfully played by Dan Fogler), and a more likely one with Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston), an agent with the CIA-like Magical Congress run by the unscrupulous Percival Graves (Colin Farrell).

This being a Rowling story, there are destructive forces of darkness to contend with, yielding a splendidly sinister turn by Samantha Morton as an anti-magic fundamentalist, and a fleeting appearance from Johnny Depp as rogue wizard Gellert Grindelwald.

But the emphasis throughout is on fun, and the period setting allows Rowling and director David Yates (who also directed several of the Potter films) to unleash, with manifest glee, just about every Jazz Age cliche. Twenties New York is brilliantly evoked, a city more or less run by a grotesquely powerful newspaper baron played by Jon Voight and plainly modelled, like Citizen Kane, on William Randolph Hearst. And I loved a scene in a speakeasy, where a Mae West-style femme fatale orders ‘six shots of giggle-water’.

I confess to having felt rather cynical when I heard that this is to be the first in a five-film series. The plan to spin Fantastic Beasts, the wizarding manual first referenced in Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, into a franchise of its own sounded more than a little exploitative. How much richer does Rowling want to be, I thought? But maybe she just wants to keep on telling stories, which is fine by me. She’s exceedingly good at it.

This being a Rowling story, there are destructive forces of darkness to contend with

Of course, it could also be that somewhere down the line, Redmayne’s boyish charm will begin to pall. Criticising his acting has come to seem almost as much like lese-majeste as criticising our other ER, but I don’t always care for his mannered, lip-biting diffidence.

That said, he’s just right in this film, which itself is just right on many levels, not least the regular use of the wizarding term ‘obliviate’, which means to wipe out the collective memory of something unsettling that has just happened. We could all do with a spot of that and actually Fantastic Beasts offers it. It’s marvellous escapism.

The film opens across the UK on November 18.