How to Write Up a Review of a Potter

''Harry Potter and the Sorcerer'south Stone" is a red-blooded adventure movie, dripping with temper, filled with the gruesome and the sublime, and surprisingly faithful to the novel. A lot of things could have gone wrong, and none of them accept: Chris Columbus' movie is an enchanting classic that does full justice to a story that was a daunting challenge. The novel by J.Thousand. Rowling was muscular and vivid, and the danger was that the movie would make things as well cute and cuddly. It doesn't. Like an "Indiana Jones" for younger viewers, it tells a rip-roaring tale of supernatural take a chance, where colorful and eccentric characters alternate with scary stuff like a three-headed canis familiaris, a pit of tendrils known as the Devil's Snare and a two-faced immortal who drinks unicorn blood. Scary, yes, but not as well scary--but scary plenty.

Three high-spirited, clear-eyed kids populate the center of the movie. Daniel Radcliffe plays Harry Potter, he with the round glasses, and similar all of the immature characters he looks much as I imagined him, simply a fiddling older. He once played David Copperfield on the BBC, and whether Harry will be the hero of his own life in this story is much in doubt at the beginning.

Deposited as a foundling on a suburban doorstep, Harry is raised past his aunt and uncle as a poor relation, then summoned by a blizzard of messages to become a educatee at Hogwarts School, an Oxbridge for magicians. Our showtime glimpse of Hogwarts sets the tone for the picture's special furnishings. Although computers can make anything await realistic, too much realism would exist the wrong option for "Harry Potter," which is a story in which everything, including the sets and locations, should wait a petty made up. The school, rise on ominous Gothic battlements from a moonlit lake, looks about equally real as Xanadu in "Citizen Kane," and its corridors, cellars and great hall, although in some cases making apply of real buildings, go along the feeling of an atmospheric book illustration. At Hogwarts, Harry makes two friends and an enemy. The friends are Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), whose merry confront and tangled curls requite Harry nudges in the direction of lightening up a little, and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), all pluck, luck and untamed talents. The enemy is Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton), who will do annihilation, and plenty besides, to be sure his firm places first at the end of the year.

The story you either already know, or do not want to know. What is adept to know is that the adult cast, a who'due south who of British actors, play their roles more or less as if they believed them. At that place is a broad way of British acting, developed in Christmas pantomimes, which would have been fatal to this material; these actors know that, and punch down to but this side of also much. Lookout man Alan Rickman cartoon out his words until they seem ready to snap, yet somehow staying in graphic symbol. Maggie Smith, still in the prime of Miss Jean Brodie, is Prof. Minerva McGonagall, who assigns newcomers like Harry to ane of the school'due south four houses. Richard Harris is headmaster Dumbledore, his beard so long that in an Edward Lear poem, birds would nest in it. Robbie Coltrane is the gamekeeper, Hagrid, who has a record of misbehavior and a way of saying very important things and then not believing that he said them.

Computers are used, exuberantly, to create a plausible look in the gravity-defying action scenes. Readers of the book will wonder how the movie visualizes the crucial game of Quidditch. The game, like so much else in the moving-picture show, is more or less every bit I visualized it, and I was reminded of Stephen Male monarch's theory that writers practice a form of telepathy, placing ideas and images in the heads of their readers. (The reason some movies don't look like their books may be that some producers don't read them.) If Quidditch is a virtuoso sequence, in that location are other fix pieces of well-nigh equal wizardry. A chess game with life-size, deadly pieces. A room filled with flying keys. The pit of tendrils, already mentioned, and a dark wood where a loathsome creature threatens Harry but is scared away by a centaur. And the dark shadows of Hogwarts library, cellars, subconscious passages and dungeons, where an invisibility cloak tin go along you out of sight but not out of trouble.

During "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," I was pretty sure I was watching a classic, i that will exist around for a long time, and make many generations of fans. It takes the time to be good. It doesn't hammer the audience with easy thrills, but cares to tell a story, and to create its characters advisedly. Like "The Wizard of Oz," "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Manufacturing plant," "Star Wars" and "East.T.," information technology isn't merely a movie but a globe with its own magical rules. And some splendid Quidditch players.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the movie critic of the Chicago Sunday-Times from 1967 until his decease in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

Film Credits

Harry Potter And The Sorcerer'southward Stone (2001)

Rated PG

152 minutes

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Source: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/harry-potter-and-the-sorcerers-stone-2001

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