I had a longer review for this but it was lost, grr. What I wrote was something along the lines of how it’s been a long time since I saw either of the first two movies and I’ve got into the awful habit of referring to them as if they’re some kind of abomination of cinema. It’s true that Azkaban and Goblet of Fire are technically and artfully far better movies, but while watching this first installment again I found that it benefits from one thing that has been rapidly disappearing from the series as it progresses, and that’s a more relaxed, laidback … complete approach to the storytelling. This makes sense – while the movies’ lengths have mostly floated around the 2 and a half hour mark, the books vary from 300 to 800 pages in length. Since the books continue to get longer (though Half-Blood Prince is shorter than the doorstop Order of the Phoenix, I imagine Book 7 to be a monster with all it needs to address), it’s hard to imagine how any screenwriter could ever bring back this quality to the movies. It remains something that this installment does perhaps better than any of the others to date. Love the ending, too – scary how tiny the kids look and sound, though!

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