A beautiful but slow and meandering movie.

Rating: 5/10 (2 December 2002)

I won't try and run against the stream of JK fans out there, but I thought this movie ran 45 minutes too long -- and without reason. The spiders in the dark wood? The quiddich (sp?) game? The teeth-pulling plodding of the opening scene with Harry's muggle family, ensuing rescue by magic-knowing people, and the trip to the place where you get outfitted for Hogwarts...(wait, weren't all those from the first movie?). Many of those (and other) scenes simply added length to the movie without providing anything new except to show that HP has a huge xf budget. I would have thought, though, that Hollywood learned something from TPM or AOTC, namely that even the most imaginative creations can't cover for a story that lacks much....story.