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

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, dir. Peter Hall: review

Twelfth Night has always been one of my favourite Shakespeare plays (and not least because, at the risk of sounding like Polonius, I once played Malvolio...). It inhabits a territory that points towards the weird, late romances (which I favour over the comedies): a shipwreck, lost children, revelations. It is as full of wonder as any of the romances. It's also supremely well-knit, spare and tight, each word doing the job of three or four, its verbal dexterity and shot-silk quality embodied in the words of Feste.

The staging of Sir Peter Hall's production at the National Theatre was also spare. Viola (played by a charmingly gawky Rebecca Hall) stood at the beginning, bereft of everything she has known, her back towards the man who will help her. Orsino's (Martin Csokas) luxurious court was hinted at by three or four cushions (Orsino himself looked like a cushion, wearing a brilliantly long dressing gown of the type which I wish they still made. Barry Lyndon wears one in the Kubrick film, too.) The bare stage focused attention on the actors.

On the aristocratic side, Orsino was debauched, world-weary, commanding his group of courtiers with a languid finger. By contrast, Olivia (Amanda Drew), mourning her brother, was controlled and clearly able to run her household. It struck me that perhaps Olivia senses something missing in Viola - another lost brother - which might aid her infatuation. Drew was almost matronly, which belied her passion; my only difficulty was that one of her best lines ('lips - indifferent red') was swallowed. Sebastian (Ben Mansfield) was a fine, swashbuckling type, although with a slight femininity which maybe draws the captain to him, and helps us to understand the confusion between brother and sister.

Downstairs, Sir Toby Belch was played with malevolent sottishness by Simon Callow. This production really highlighted the cruelty of the trick they play on Malvolio (Simon Paisley Day) - played as a smooth-talking, smooth-dressing major-domo. The imprisonment scene had Malvolio in a tiny cage, blindfolded; with Feste (David Ryall) prancing around him and some sinister violin shrieking, the effect was positively hellish. Sir Andrew Aguecheek was absolutely marvellous, I thought. His foppishness and vanity were given an amiable touch, and Charles Edwards' face provoked many of the biggest laughs. When Malvolio stormed in and shouted 'do you make an alehouse of my lady's?' he nodded fervently as if he were a schoolboy who'd been caught by the headmaster.

Twelfth Night is a play with no pat ending. Malvolio's last line, 'I'll be revenged - on the whole pack of you!' resonated loudly, and pointed towards the ambiguity of the solution to everyone's problems. Only Viola gets her true love; Olivia makes do with a copy, whilst Orsino's decision is based on practicality.

And Feste - when I first saw him I thought they'd made a terrible mistake. He was old, shrivelled. But then as the play went on I realised what a masterstroke it was. To have him singing 'youth's a stuff will not endure' gains extra poignancy. Feste's wildly wisecracking wit turns everything on its head: the fool is no fool, and Ryall's wizened old man showed in bold colours quite how full of wisdom he is. He sang in a slightly-out of tune warble (though trying to get the audience to join in at the end was not a good idea, I thought.)

It was a stately production, perhaps a little lacking in energy, but that added to its sense of elegy. 'Come Away Death', let's not forget, is one of the songs in it; and the Fool's song is repeated in King Lear.

I'll never forget my school production of Twelfth Night. One of the boys in my year, Will Ings, had composed a tune for 'Come Away...' It was haunting, and beautifully effective, and I wish I had a recording. It surfaced in my mind towards the end, and I was nearly brought to tears.

[I still harbour a deep love of the film version with Helena Bonham-Carter.]

The King's Speech: review

There are many lovely moments in this film, which portrays (as surely we all know by now) the attempts to cure the future George VI of his debillitating stammer. Worthy doctors stick pebbles in his mouth ("It worked for Demosthenes"); a soldier's horse brays in the silence as the Duke of York (as he then was) attempts to make his first radio broadcast. The three main characters are played with wit and sensitivity: Colin Firth as his Royal H-H-Highness displaying temper and charm within one frame; Helena Bonham-Carter absolutely marvellously enjoying herself as the future Queen Mum ("this is rather fun, isn't it", she says as she sits on her husband in a doctor's surgery), and Geoffrey Rush as the Antipodean therapist whose unorthodox methods are to win through in the end. (The little princesses, too, are patently adorable, especially when Margaret forgets to curtsey to her father once he's become king and has to be gently reminded by her sister Elizabeth.) There is a lot of comedy, arising not just from the therapies, but also from social awkwardnesses such as coming home to find the Queen in your sitting room. (What would you do, I wonder?)

The message is clear: repression and anger are bad; we must get in touch with our inner softnesses, dispel all childhood fears, and shake off those nasty Victorian neuroses in order to become a fit and modern country. Fair dinkums, as the speech therapist himself would say.

It's as beautifully shot as the game bag at Sandringham. London emerges from wispy fog; the crown estates loom and glower; even the therapist's surgery conspires to be as enormous and daunting as the shadowy recesses of Westminster Cathedral. It is a large and terrifying world, on the knife edge of war; and George VI will come to embody Britain.

The film moves ponderously - royally, in fact - apart from a few montages of the therapy sessions at work. It's enjoyable stuff, to see a King as a man, and to see that man overcoming his weaknesses to become more than a man. What little tension there is in the story is made up for by the superb acting; my only gripe being that someone obviously felt that more tension was needed and injected it with a slightly unnecessary scene in which the therapist's credentials were questioned by a grumpy archbishop.

Its veracity, too, doesn't bother me: it is, after all, a film. One doesn't want to turn into the sort of person who, on hearing the clock strike in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, says 'but they didn't have clocks in ancient Rome.'

All in all, then, a fine filly of a film; not a work of genius, but something that British filmmaking is justly proud of.