Review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, in the Telegraph

I've tidied up my review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, for the Daily Telegraph, which is available here.

Exclusive: Review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two: I hate giving stars, but this is definitely a ten out of ten

I was lucky enough to attend David Heyman's screening of the new Harry Potter film in Leicester Square. There was no fuss: after a brief reminder of Voldemort's taking of the Elder Wand (from a superbly modernist grave containing Dumbledore), we were straight into the action. The texture of the film itself is startlingly convincing: gone is the faint cheesiness of the first two films. We are in a world whose strangenesses and darknesses are ever-present.

Snape: not evil after all

What really sets this film apart, making it (I think) possibly the best of the series (excluding The Prisoner of Azkaban, and perhaps The Goblet of Fire), is the attention to detail. Hermione changes into Bellatrix Lestrange at one point (to go to Gringott's Bank), and Helena Bonham-Carter superbly conveyed Hermione's sulkiness and quavery expression, at one point doing such a convincing impression of Emma Watson that it spookily seemed that she might actually really have changed shape. There is wit, too, among the darkness: a bleeding Neville Longbottom, having seen off a ravening horde of Voldemort's supporters, and having almost fallen to his death, pops up cheerily with a 'well that went well.'

I must admit that, being slightly sentimental, I was weeping quietly all the way through. What this film does is enhance Rowling's slightly clunky prose (which made her last two books a disappointment for me), so that the epic touches which she was unable to convey by writing are writ large on the screen. The last battle at Hogwarts always seemed faintly ridiculous to me: here it is genuinely terrifying, with battered schoolchildren fighting desperately against screaming Death Eaters. The deficiencies of Daniel Radcliffe's plankish acting vanish as we meet what is truly the heart of the series: there is darkness in us all, and we must all fight to overcome it.

We learn, too, about the exceptional loyalty and devotion of Snape to Harry Potter's mother, Lily, and of Dumbledore's realpolitik. There is a beautiful scene, when Harry is looking in Snape's memories, which I think was the best in the film: a young Lily makes a flower grow in her hand, but her sister calls her a freak. Hiding in a tree trunk nearby is a young Severus, who blows a leaf to her. It is sun-filled and dappled and touched with a sense of wonder and loss and brimming with the sadnesses of human relationships. It delicately haunts the mind long after, and even now thinking about it I am filled with emotion.

There are some superb set pieces, too: the escape on a damaged, maddened dragon from Gringotts, whose wings and claws drive gouges into London's rooftops; an eerie, white King's Cross; and the film never lets up on energy, drive and spirit. It's an excellent piece of work, and as David Heyman himself said, it's not the end, but the end of a beginning.

Read my review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One: Review

Harry Potter Review

This, the seven-and-a-halfth in the leviathan-like franchise that the Harry Potter series has become, begins with a scene of rare poignancy. We’ve come a long way from butterbeer, Nearly Headless Nick and eleven year olds grinning open-mouthed at ‘Diagon Alley.’ Hermione Granger, as played by Emma Watson, is in the salubrious surroundings of her parents’ house. She hears them talking downstairs; goes down, and pulls out her wand. ‘Obliviate’, she says – and every single picture of herself in the house begins to fade away. She will have been as nothing to her mother and father. It works so well because all teenagers grapple with their desire to be away from their family – and yet we all know that it is only they who can ever truly love us. So Hermione departs, about to enter upon a quest that threatens the very existence of that safe, leafy street. ‘Obliviate’ echoes throughout the film: the teenage trio take on (briefly) other identities through polyjuice; they transfer affections; at one point near the beginning practically all the adolescent members of the Order of the Phoenix turn into clones of Harry: what could better express the desire for conformity and the need to forget oneself? The action of the rest of the film, too, is a remarkably good expression, too, of the boredom of teenagerdom: the characters don't do much apart from mope around fields and lie around on sofas. I certainly spent most of my adolescence doing either one or the other.

As a film, it worked remarkably well, given that the book itself is so busy. It was clean, and beautifully shot: the fragile tent of the three adventurers, with one light burning, set against enormous landscapes; the children (although not quite so childlike now) walking along a shoreline underneath a bridge; the swooping drive up to the Malfoys’ house. The characters in fact were often dominated by scenery, suggesting perhaps the titantic efforts they would have to make to achieve anything.

Things could be a little confusing at times, even for someone who’s read the book (like me – I read it the day it came out, but have forgotten most of its details.) Hence I did not know why Bellatrix Lestrange thought that Godric’s sword had been in her vault; nor could I at first distinguish what Jamie Campbell Bower’s character was doing – he was Grindelwald, as it turned out. And things could be a little embarrassing too (I won’t mention the hallucinatory silver-body-suit sex scene between an imaginary Harry and Hermione, as witnessed by a Horcruxed Ron Weasley). Also, the sign for the deathly hallows reminded me of the tube advert for a sperm bank, where a d and b are placed back to back to indicate - well, you can guess. But the tone of the film as a whole was remarkably consistent. A scene in the Ministry of Magic was particularly effective, as pamphlets calling for the elimination and control of Muggles swept magically off desks, and Dolores Umbridge and the new, Fascist Minister for Magic surveyed everything with grim glee. The highlight, though, was the shadow-puppet play which told the story of ‘The Deathly Hallows’. The fable itself comes off as rather dry in the book, without the power or depth of folklore. But on screen it appeared as an eerie, haunting tale about morality and our acceptance of death. Even wizards have no power over death. A Socratesian message, in the end: learn to accept, and greet death like an old friend. Except we know that we won’t be obliviated – we’ll stay in memories, photos, films, for as long as is humanly possible. This was a fine, thoughtful and challenging work, which sets us up fittingly for the epic possibilities of the next and final part.

The Liberators by Philip Womack: Times Critic Amanda Craig's Children's Books of the Year

So out of some weird synchronous activity, I bought a copy of The Times just before I went in to see the new Harry Potter (review to follow shortly). I got home, settled in my favourite chair with some music on. I always read the Review section first; I opened it, without looking, where I imagined the first Books page might be. I saw a large picture of a cat. Ah, I thought. Children's books. And then I saw my name - The Liberators has made it into the excellent Amanda Craig's selection of Books of the Year, alongside Eva Ibbotson, Kate Saunders, Patrick Ness and many more. I was so amazed and thrilled I had to read it again to check it was true and I wasn't actually reading about some other book ('The Terminators', for instance, as some of my friends have called it.) Libations were poured all round to the god Dionysus; paeans were raised and a hecatomb offered up. Io io!

A link to the piece is HERE: you have to be a subscriber to the Times to access it.