![]() When Voldemort's minions, the Death Eaters, storm the Ministry and install themselves as fascistic rulers, Harry and best friends Hermione (Watson) and Ron (Grint) go underground. Gone are the sweet hijinks at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, as well as any "hey, look at me!" magical inventions Deathly Hallows is all business – taut, fraught, and fearsome. Top to bottom, it's a thrilling piece of cinema, from the superlative digital effects and original score from Alexandre Desplat – the best movie-music maestro working today – to the saga-scoped camerawork of cinematographer Eduardo Serra and Steve Kloves' deft distillation of one-half of 784 pages. This is the first film in the series in which I didn't have to distinguish between the two, or make apologies for one to the other. Let's try it again: I came to the first six films of the Harry Potter cycle as both a fan and a film critic – two discrete personages with sometimes competing interests and expectations. To any agnostic who squirmed through the early, lightly cartoonish pictures, that may sound like qualified praise. Rowling's final book about the battle between the damaged boy-wizard Harry (Radcliffe) and the monstrous dark lord Voldemort (Fiennes), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is, as a whole, the finest Potter film yet. ![]() ![]() ![]() The first half of a two-film adaptation of J.K. Now imagine bleaker, more benighted still – witness executions, ambushes, and snakes galore – and you're somewhere in the neighborhood of Deathly Hallows' suitably end-times feel. "These are dark times," the Minister for Magic (Nighy) announces right off the bat, and this film plays positively like a limbo game of how low can you go into the dark, darker, darkest. ![]()
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