It's the most immediately knowable: lanterned boats on their way to a castle, a snowy owl on a young boy's shoulder, a slobbery three-headed dog, letters pouring in from a fireplace.
#All harry potter movies ranked series#
The first installment in the series is such a nostalgia fest that it almost transcends a traditional ranking. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001) Toss in a befuddling mid-movie sequence where the Weasley house burns to the ground - something never referenced again, with no consequence on character or plot - and Half-Blood Prince starts unraveling. This is the film to establish our endgame couples, and Prince really misses the mark. Ron and Hermione dating horrible people to annoy one another and bury their feelings is also void of much emotion Lavender Brown is excellently cast but badly used, and the Cormac McClaggen stuff is silly and weightless. Harry and Ginny's burgeoning love is laughably bad here, with a few moments so uncomfortable they're borderline unwatchable.
#All harry potter movies ranked movie#
The movie also fails at depicting believable teenage infatuation. (It's also literally gloomier, opting for a muddy color palette that casts the film in ugly brown shadows.) With the exception of Harry drunk on Felix Felicis and Ron drunk on a love potion, the film is laboriously grim, with should-be humorous sequences like Hermione's canary attack on Ron coming off staid and bleak. But it's a gloomier movie than it needs to be considering Prince is one of the funniest Potter books. Half-Blood Prince has some of the series' best moments, and the emotion of the last act - from the cave sequence to Tom Felton's compelling development of Draco to Dumbledore's death - is top-tier. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) Ginny's possession, the petrification and near-death of a handful of students (including Hermione), "her skeleton will lie in the chamber forever" written in blood - it's pretty heavy stuff for a kids' movie. And despite its glossy exterior, Chamber of Secrets is actually a pretty dark film considering it comes so early in the series. Luckily, it's not a huge distraction, and there are other details to get excited about on a re-watch, like Hermione's Polyjuiced cat face and Lockhart's hilarious memory loss. The kids speak in a mannered, "movie kid" way, in a way that feels stiff and studio-ordered. The British quirkiness of the books is lost in translation, an issue that pops up in other Potter films but is most obvious here.
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The movie is a solid watch with a delicious central performance from Kenneth Branagh as Gilderoy Lockhart, and two excellent monsters in Aragog and the basilisk.īut the big problem with Chamber - and to a slightly lesser extent, Sorcerer's Stone - is that director Chris Columbus is an American, with American sensibilities. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)įan consensus generally puts Chamber of Secrets in last place, which is understandable if a little unfair. It’s an epic conclusion, but an empty standalone.ħ.
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It’s maybe a more cinematic sendoff, and there’s no need for slavish devotion to the book, but the sequence derails the last act, and the movie doesn’t have much else to stand on. Instead, he turns himself into ribbon, flies off a building, mind-melds with Harry, and eventually cracks apart and dissolves into the air like ash. But in the film, Harry chases Voldemort through Hogwarts in an increasingly goofy series of escapades that erodes the idea of Voldemort as the thing he fears most: a mortal man. The book ends with a confrontation between Harry and Voldemort that is chilling in its formality: Harry undresses Voldemort with words, calling him “Tom” while every student and teacher in Hogwarts watches on, and kills him with a blunt simplicity that stands in contrast to the mystical villain the world expected him to be. But did it really need (almost) a whole movie? In an effort to fill its runtime, the back half draws out certain sequences to the point of ridiculousness.
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But the fracturing of Parts I and II prove detrimental for this installment, as it’s stifled by "single location syndrome." The Battle of Hogwarts is a major part of the seventh book, and the sheer magnitude of the event is worthy of the attention Pt.