Every Harry Potter movie, ranked by A.V. Club review

November 14 marks the 20th anniversary of , the Hollywood adaptation of the first book in J.K. Rowling’s almost inconceivably popular kid-lit fantasy series. Back then, the big question on everyone’s mind was whether the films could match the success of their source material—and maybe even if the first one would even prove successful enough to spawn a whole corresponding movie series. Which of course seems very quaint today, with the eighth and final Potter movie now a decade in our rearview mirror and the series now a holiday-season (and year-round cable-TV) perennial, despite the general cruddiness of both the and Rowling’s public remarks.With hindsight, it’s of course possible to see a spectrum of quality in these quality-controlled all-ages blockbusters. Our own Noel Murray, in fact, offered a a few years ago. But how did The A.V. Club feel as the franchise was still in progress, before it dove into deathly hallows?In honor of this upcoming anniversary, we’ve rounded up the contemporaneous reviews we wrote on each Potter installment and done our best to put them in order of general site preference. “Our best” because the Harry Potter franchise predates not just the A.V. Club’s adoption of letter grades for reviews but also the tenure of almost everyone who writes for the website today. Plus, they were written by no less than three AVC staffers, each with presumably different opinions about the best and worst of this smash franchise. (What they all seem to agree on: None of these movies are great, exactly.)Nonetheless, a pattern of fluctuating enthusiasm does reveal itself as you make your way through every AVC take on every new adventure at Hogwarts. Don’t tell apple-polishing Hermione, but the first couple, at least, might have struggled to earn a passing grade.

The second Potter film is a chore. Like its predecessor, Chamber Of Secrets doesn’t so much adapt Rowling’s source material as joylessly transcribe it the screen, beat by beat. And it offers more of Chris Columbus’ weightless direction of CGI action and the slightly shaky performances by its young stars, who were still coming into their own as actors. What probably clinches its status as the lowlight of the series is the fact that it lacks even the sense of discovery of a new world you could find in Columbus’ mediocre original. The A.V. Club’s Keith Phipps acknowledged that the film “works perfectly well as a cinematic corollary to J.K. Rowling’s adored children’s fantasy series,” while also cataloging the ways that it fails as anything other than fan service:Try imagining a universe in which the Harry Potter series existed only in film form. Would audiences still find themselves transported by such thinly drawn characters? Would the imaginations still leap for the nonstop assault of impressively realized but creatively pedestrian special effects? And would the two-and-a-half-hours-plus trek toward an unmasking straight out of Scooby Doo seem quite so satisfying? So far, the series has relied on viewers’ familiarity with Rowling’s characters to fill in blanks that other movies would have to fill for themselves.

Warner Bros. took no chances bringing the first of the Potter books to multiplexes. The adaptation that launched the series is the very definition of a safe play, designed to give people what they wanted—which to say, what they already read and loved. Sorcerer’s Stone stays slavishly true to the events of the novel and stages them with a kind of sub-Spielbergian twinkle; The A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias would later describe it as a “pop-up novelization.” His full review of the hugely successful first film was similarly withering:Harry Potter begins to lose its grip during an expensive-looking “Quidditch” match, a game that’s like a cross between Rollerball and the pod race in The Phantom Menace, but is about as exciting as watching someone else play a video game. At 152 minutes, the film tries to squeeze in as much of the Rowling tome as possible, but the length grows more oppressive just as it should be gaining momentum for the finale. More Potter movies are in the pipeline, but the franchise seems exhausted halfway through the first. And for a second opinion pretty similar to the first—and issued years later—read .

In a decision likely made out of both necessity (because of the length of the novel) and greed, Warner Bros. opted to divide Rowling’s final Potter novel into two movies. That left a penultimate film that sometimes feels like very expensive wheel spinning—a downbeat hangout movie, trudging through soap operatic character work and exposition before the fireworks factory offered by the rousing final movie. Deathly Hallows: Part 1 has its fans—it’s a sleeper favorite among those who appreciate its melancholic detours and eccentric touches (like a Nick Cave waltz and an animated flashback). AVC critic Tasha Robinson is not among their ranks:A long middle sequence of wandering (and grim, gloomy posing) is set against glorious, Lord Of The Rings-like natural backdrops, which unfortunately just heighten the stiffness. The pacing is endlessly aggravating: It’s just as well [director David] Yates didn’t attempt to cram the final book’s action into an eviscerated single film, and it’s admirable how he attempts to stretch out, to patiently build a mood and let audiences feel the characters’ directionless anxiety. But the result is a herky-jerky movie that alternates glacial brooding with unwieldy chunks of exposition and frenzied, rushed battles.

The Order Of The Phoenix is notable mostly for who’s standing behind the camera, not what happens in front of it: This was the first film of the series directed by David Yates, who would go on to make every installment afterwards, as well as the two Fantastic Beasts spinoff films. Narratively, it’s very much a transitional installment, bridging the tragedies of book four and book six with a… not terribly memorable story. That was the perspective, anyway, of Scott Tobias’ review of Phoenix, the first Harry Potter movie eligible for a letter grade from us. Of course, it got a very A.V. Club B-:Save for the thrilling opening sequence, there’s not much to remember about the film beyond Staunton (Vera Drake), who masks her bottomless malevolence behind a pasted-on patrician smile. During this transitional stage, Dumbledore’s Army and the Order Of The Phoenix prepare for bigger fights ahead—and presumably, more exciting movies, too..

While most of the Potter adaptations range from fairly faithful to rather exhausting in their fidelity, the fourth movie represents a rare case of the franchise making big cuts: In order to pack all the pertinent narrative of Rowling’s 700-page novel into a single movie, a whole lot of extraneous subplots had to go. It’s a choice Warner would probably make differently today, especially if it knew the money it’d later rake in by bifurcating Deathly Hallows. Nonetheless, as Tasha Robinson points out in her review, the choice lends Goblet Of Fire a breathless pace that’s hard to resist, even if it means sacrificing some of the world-building charms for once.With its slam-bang-whoosh-giggle-gasp mentality, Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire could be a halfway decent thrill ride for newbies to the series. But its less-explanation, more-momentum mentality is really aimed squarely at the fans, who’d likely rather see more well-timed business from their favorite characters than a pile of dreary exposition and reminders about the story to date. For all its length, Goblet Of Fire speeds past all too quickly. But the real accomplishment may be that for all its brevity, it still feels like it tells the important parts of Rowling’s story.. And side note: This is Noel Murray’s favorite entry in the series, as named in his .

Yates’ second Potter film is one of the franchise’s most darkly confident and mature in theme, even before its grand downer of a climax. While there are arguably better films in the series (see the next two slides), this might be the one that best balances the magic of Rowling’s world with the hormonal moodiness and melodrama that would define later installments. Tasha Robinson mostly agreed in her positive review:It takes a significant amount of investment in the Harry Potter world to make Half-Blood Prince relevant, let alone sensible; the film makes no concession to newbies, and thankfully spends virtually no time reiterating points already covered in previous installments. But those already involved will find that the series has matured much as the books did. This is the darkest, saddest, most sophisticated Harry Potter film yet..

It’s hard to understate what a breath of fresh air—what a dose of real movie magic—The Prisoner Of Azkaban felt like when it hit theaters in the summer of 2004. Grabbing the reins of the franchise after the commercially successful but largely regrettable Chris Columbus entries, director Alfonso Cuarón reinvented the world of Hogwarts for the screen by investing in both the blooming adolescent spirit of the place and the danger of the forces swirling around it. (He also added some nifty time travel to the mix, though that’s obviously straight out of the Rowling source material.) The result courses with a style that Scott Tobias describes as “simultaneously darker and more whimsical than the previous films.” Today, it’s often still cited as the best film of the series, though Tobias’ unranked review is measured enough that we can’t quite put it at the top of this particular, site-aggregated ranking.From the start, The Prisoner Of Azkaban taps into the neato fantasies that have inspired the Potter cult, but it never overemphasizes them, and it relegates many bits of magic to background noise. For the first time, the non-converted may actually see what all the fuss is about..