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Movies & TV News & Features

Harry Potter And The Ranking Order

It’s been nearly eight years since the release of the first Harry Potter movie. Here, from best to worst, is how they stack up.


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HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN (2004)

Alfonso Cuarón turns a stuffy franchise into a relatable adventure series simply by putting the characters into street clothes when they’re not in school – a reminder that these are contemporary kids who just happen to exist in a world of magic. Cuarón also gets Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint to act, rather than just hit their marks and deliver their lines, and he doesn’t overplay the alternative-lifestyle commentary in David Thewlis’s closeted Professor Lupin.


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HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX (2007)

David Yates’s first crack at the franchise – and the only chapter adapted by Michael Goldenberg rather than Steve Kloves – is a focused and efficient run through some very heavy plot, introducing one of the series’s best adversaries in Imelda Staunton’s Dolores Umbridge and giving Helena Bonham Carter the role of her career as giddy assassin Bellatrix Lestrange. Plus, Harry gets tortured.


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HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE (2005)

A very big book gets a fairly clumsy adaptation under the direction of Mike Newell, who never manages to make the seismic plot developments (Voldemort’s resurrection, the death of Cedric Diggory) feel like anything more than ticks on a box. On the upside, Brendan Gleeson’s rollicking turn as MadEye Moody gooses the movie to life whenever he’s onscreen.


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HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS (2002)

At two hours and 40 minutes, Chris Columbus’s second crack at the series is the longest film thus far. It’s also quite dull, and features the unwatchable Shirley Henderson as the vaguely dirty spirit of Moaning Myrtle. But it does offer the most Freudian sequence in Potter history, where Harry tunnels under the girls’ bathroom to wrestle with a giant snake.


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HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE (2001)

Columbus couldn’t have made a more faithful adaptation if he’d held up the pages of J.K. Rowling’s first novel and photographed them – and that’s exactly what’s wrong with this dull, stoic feature, which spends all of its time making sure we notice how closely the production designer and effects teams have adhered to Rowling’s descriptions of her world instead of bringing her story to life.

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