I am of the mind that roughly 20% of this movie shouldn’t have made it out of the writer’s room, and I always felt that the final act fell a little flat. But there are individual scenes of such overwhelming power that I would fall on the “brilliant” side of this discussion. Julianne Moore, Robards, PSH and, in…

Dobbie (and Kreacher) both had a lot more to do with the books, and I was very sad at their demises.

I revisited this when everything shut down and I was reminded of one review I read when it came out, describing it as a “beautiful mess.” That’s a perfect way of putting it. There’s some great scenes, but it’s definitely a director digging his own shit way too much. I’d love to see a version with at least a half hour…

Its biggest problem is its self importance. It has a voiceover (Giamatti) that keeps telling you things are deep and meaningful and interconnected and then they certainly are not. And this was near the height of those other awful “everything is connected” movies.

I can’t disagree with this. It’s the most faithful adaptation, and has a sense of wonder that is not present in any of the other films, except maybe Chamber.

The Neville and his parents moment is my favorite sequence in all of the books. It hits all the right emotional notes, and comes right around the time that you are learning that the prophecy could be about Neville instead of Harry and it just stays with you.

I think it’s very weird to treat the movies as the entry point into Harry Potter; they’re basically cliff’s notes versions of the books that aren’t especially entertaining or enjoyable on their own, beyond certain entries. 

I’m going to go with brilliant. There are scenes from this movie that pop into my head on a regular basis and just take my breath away. Philip Seymour Hoffman asking for help on the phone is up there with some of the best bits of craft I’ve ever seen committed to film. Also, Jason Robards’ death scene. It’s hard to do…

It also asks less of an audience because it’s clear Rowling herself isn’t that strongly influenced by the evolution of fantasy as a genre from Tolkien/Lewis through Jordan and LeGuin and into its more modern form with authors like Sanderson and GRRM.

People saying the movies get better is not enough to get me to watch past the first. There are enough good movie series that start out good rather than requiring me to endure bad ones to get to the good ones.

Your “or so” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there for books that can exceed 700 pages.

I’m not even sure if the films work when you DO know the books.  Prisoner is the only one I would go back and rewatch, the rest ranged from ‘wow that’s boring’ to ‘ok’.

The Half Blood Prince material was weird, because it really is kind of peripheral to the plot, but they couldn’t excise it entirely because “Half Blood Prince” is the title of the damn movie/book. So instead you have stuff like Shape randomly blurting out that he’s the “Half Blood Prince!” before running away at the…

Voldemort deserved to die for the horcrux thing alone. Dude had the foresight to store his soul in various magical artifacts, but instead of burying them in the side of the mountain, or enchanting an old tin can and letting it sink to the bottom of the sea, he instead chose A) objects of enormous, easily guess-able per…

There were definitely some warning signs in the books—the rampant fatphobia, the whole “house elves love to be slaves!” thing—that crop up in hindsight, but yeah, Rowling was generally perceived as “one of the good ones.” Which made the “oh by the way, transwomen are faking it so they can assault me in the bathroom”…

I believe that the margins of the Half Blood Prince textbook is the only place that Snape wrote out the specifics of his bloodletting spell that Harry used against Draco.  It’s a really nasty spell, so I guess they’re assuming if they hide that book, no one could ever learn that spell again.  Of course, it’s been a…

Dobby is a bigger character in the books. His misguided attempts to “help” Harry in the second book are portrayed in a more complicated, ultimately sympathetic light. Plus it is made much more apparent how abusive Daddy Malfoy is towards Dobby. And then he appears in most of the following books and has a lot of charact…

If you were already hunting them, Dumbledore—if you already knew that’s what we needed—then why the hell did you make such a production of unlocking a memory that just tells you what you already knew? This is driving me bananas; someone, please explain what I’m missing.

I enjoyed all the films at the time they came out (with the exception of a slight downer on DH1 which was just a bit, dull). I think what helped is the age of my kids. I think watching films with your kids helps you lean into the sense of wonder, whilst ignoring the plot holes. And what worked well about both the…

I’m going to go ahead and assume they named themselves The Kinky Wizards