harry potter and the deathly hallows 1 review

Dumbledore is dead and most of the adults make only token appearances, the chief exception being Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange.

Now a decade in the telling, the Potter saga is getting a trifle thin, while its heroic trio are developing bags under their eyes and behave like schoolchildren wondering whether they should spend their gap year chasing dragons or hunting for the Holy Grail. These gifts will assist them in their imminent apocalyptic encounter with the evil Lord Voldemort that will settle the future of mankind. Not long after, he's presenting the orphaned messiah Harry Potter and his two wizardly chums, the upper-middle-class Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) and the lower-middle-class Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), with mysterious inheritances from Dumbledore, their mentor and former headmaster at Hogwarts School for Wizardry.

Penumbrously lit by Portuguese-born French cinematographer Eduardo Serra, the latest and penultimate film in the Harry Potter cycle (in fact the first half of JK Rowling's final book) begins with an ominous, Sergio Leone-style close-up of Bill Nighy telling us: 'These are dark times.' He sounds like any member of the coalition cabinet at the dispatch box, but he is, in fact, Rufus Scrimgeour, minister of magic.

Harry potter and the deathly hallows 1 review