Occasionally beautifully shot, surprisingly well-paced considering the circumstances surrounding its adaptation, and is led by a star turn from Martin Freeman

Rating: 7/10 (2 January 2013)

The fairest thing you can say about the first film of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit prequel trilogy is that it compares favourably to The Phantom Menace, its equivalent in the Star Wars franchise.
It has some of the same main problems as Menace: the viewer knows, for instance, that several characters – Gandalf and Bilbo Baggins like Yoda and Obi Wan before them – obviously survive to feature in the very films they're in the prequel to, which removes a certain sense of peril from the action sequences, and lends a redundancy to plot lines that are neatly tied-up by the beginning of the Lord of the Rings... read more at www.ravechild.co.uk