Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Review.

Directed by – David Yates.

Screenplay – Steve Kloves

Based on – the novel by J.K.Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Staring – Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Ralph Fiennes, Bill Nighy, Julie Walters, Tom Felton.

Taglines – “It all ends here”, “No where is safe”

Part 1 run time – 146 minutes.

Part 2 run time – 130 minutes

Part 1 release date – 19/11/2010

Part 2 release date – 15/07/2011

Distributed by – Warner Bros.

Total budget (estimated) - $275,000,000

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part one.

Voldermort is growing stronger and this is clear to the 3 ex Hogwart students. They decide to carry on Dumbledore’s work to try and find the rest of the Horcrux’s, destroy them and finally destroy the Dark Lord.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part two.

The final chapter in the series where Harry, Ron and Hermione set out to find the final horcruxes. This leads onto the final battle where good versus evil.

At the end of the last Harry Potter film, this series began to succumb to a bad case of what the industry calls the "Matrix Revolutions". This is suffered by films that owe their existence purely to a marketing franchise momentum that has long since outlived the original creative excitement. The chief symptom is a mythically elaborate, spectacular, apocalyptic and fantastically dull confrontation between good and evil, about whose representatives there is nothing substantial left to learn. The Harry Potter brand was evidently set to run a grim headless-chicken marathon right through its two remaining films to the bitter end.

But it has to be said that now there are weird and, for me, rather unexpected signs of life. Simply by not being set in Hogwarts, this movie feels looser, freer. Just by not imposing on the viewer the endless routine of coming back for a new term, witnessing those cute moving portraits in the wood panelling and encountering one new British character actor in the gallery of familiar British character actors on the teaching staff – all of which had become a tiring tradition in the opening 20 minutes of aHarry Potter film – this one can breathe more easily. It saves it, just a little, from the feeling of deja vu.

DH1, as no one with the smallest self-respect is calling it, is still weighed down with the usual fidelity to the fanbase. There are some impenetrable plot quirks, and it carries the usual mythical baggage, but more nimbly than usual. As a non-fan, I found myself carrying out a thought experiment: what if you had never seen any of the previous films and knew little or nothing about them? Might you not be intrigued by the bizarre story of three teenagers, precariously possessed of magical powers, suddenly disappearing and reappearing in different landscapes, who are making a desperate attempt at survival, and who are anxiously coming to terms with the status rivalry and sexual tension between them? The answer is yes, sort of.

The film begins with an entertaining "conference of evil" chaired by the nasally-challenged Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), discussing how and where to snatch our hero, in which Voldemort's scornful gaze alights on the uneasy Lucius Malfoy (Jason Isaacs), depriving him of his wand, making this implement's Freudian implications more obvious than ever: later Hermione (Emma Watson) damages Harry's and he crossly asks to use hers. Voldemort does everything but press a Dr Evil-style button for Lucius to fall through an open trapdoor.

Potter, played by Daniel Radcliffe – once as moon-faced and round as his specs, now rangy and wiry – must make what amounts to an escape across open country, accompanied by Hermione and Ron (Rupert Grint). Watson's Hermione is still very girlish and solemn, but Grint's Ron now looks adult, slightly grizzled and bucolic. Grint's very grownup air of resignation to his second-in-command status is interesting. It is a long way from the silly face he was always having to pull in the first film.

Almost devoid of allies and weapons, the trio now have to destroy the Horcruxes, which enforce Voldemort's terrible power, and they must uncover the secret of the Deathly Hallows, a term the audience must wait until the end of the film to understand. Looking up "hallow" as a noun in the dictionary won't help.

Just as before, there is a good 90-minute story visible inside this highly decorated circus elephant of a film. An experimental, low-budget version of Harry Potter (and what unthinkable commercial heresy that would be) might feature only Harry, Ron and Hermione roaming in various Beckettian wildernesses, seedy urban bars and deserted Orwellian ministerial corridors, arguing ceaselessly among themselves. And yet it is only when these three are on their own that this film comes to life: especially in the eerie Forest of Dean or a gloomy Shaftesbury Avenue cafe in central London where they have a magic-wand shootout with two assassins.

The most striking moment comes when Ron is tormented by a paranoid, jealous fantasy of Hermione's passionate desire for Harry. It is quite a gamey scene. Something human and real is happening there, a sense of coming to the dramatic point, at last. Does Ron suspect in his heart that Hermione would prefer to play something other than Quidditch?

Well, after Lord of the Rings, we're used to the epic that ends over and over again, and when this series finally does, at the end of the next film, some retrospective shape and meaning may be conferred on all that has gone before. I have become resigned to the Harry Potter movies having only as much interest and power as one of the rides in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park. They will be efficiently made, interesting-looking entertainment. Anything more would be magic.

By Peter Bradshaw

• "It all ends," says the poster slogan. A potentially grim statement of the obvious, of course, yet the Potter saga could hardly have ended on a better note. With one miraculous flourish of its wand, the franchise has restored the essential magic to the Potter legend – which had been starting to sag and drift in recent movies – zapping us all with a cracking final chapter, which looks far superior to CS Lewis's The Last Battle or JRR Tolkien's The Return of the King. It's dramatically satisfying, spectacular and terrifically exciting, easily justifying the decision to split the last book into two.

• Here is where the Harry Potter series gets its groove back, with a final confrontation betweenVoldemort (Ralph Fiennes) and our young hero, and with the sensational revelation of Harry's destiny, which Dumbledore had been keeping secret from him. When stout-hearted young Neville Longbottom (a scene-stealer from Matthew Lewis) steps forward to denounce the dark lord in the final courtyard scene, I was on the edge of my seat. And when, in that final "coda", the middle-age Harry Potter gently hugs his little boy before sending him off for his first term at Hogwarts – well, what can I say? I think I must have had something in my eye.

• The colossal achievement of this series really is something to wonder at. The Harry Potter movies showed us their characters growing older in real time: unlike Just William or Bart Simpson, Daniel Radcliffe's Harry was going to grow up like a normal person and never before has any film – or any book – brought home to me how terribly brief childhood is. The Potter movies weren't just an adaptation of a series of books, but a living, evolving collaborative phenomenon between page and screen. The first movie, Philosopher's Stone, came out in 2001, when JK Rowlingwas working on the fifth book, Order of the Phoenix, and when no one – perhaps not even the author herself – knew precisely how it was going to end. The movies developed just behind the books, and it's surely impossible to read them without being influenced by the films. This is most true for Robbie Coltrane's endlessly lovable, definitive performance as Hagrid.

• In this final episode, Harry (Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) continue their battle to find and destroy the "horcruxes" that the sinister Voldemort needs so he can stay alive for all eternity: these are objects in which the fragments of souls are trapped and whose vital, spiritual force Voldemort, that hateful parasite, can siphon off for his own ends. Harry and his friends track down these horcruxes, but the last one is a puzzle. As the forces of good assemble at Hogwarts for the final showdown with Voldemort and his hordes, Harry knows only that the most vital horcrux is actually in the castle, very close at hand.

• There are some superb set-piece scenes – and now the plot has so much more zing, these scenes have a power that comparable moments in earlier movies did not have. When Harry, Ron and Hermione insinuate themselves into Gringotts Bank to steal the sword of Gryffindor, the effect is bizarre, surreal and macabre: drawing on the influence of Lewis Carroll and Terry Gilliam. It is a great moment when Severus Snape, played with magnificently adenoidal disdain by Alan Rickman, is attacked by Voldemort's snake Nagini, and we witness this only from behind a frosted glass screen – a nice touch from director David Yates. London-dwelling Potter fans will, as before, be intrigued to see how the ornate St Pancras railway station is used to represent King's Cross, from where the Hogwarts train traditionally departs. Millions of tourists are undoubtedly convinced that this building is, in fact, King's Cross. It may be forced simply to change its name.

• We get passionate, but somehow touchingly innocent screen kisses between Harry and Ginny (Bonnie Wright) and, of course, between Ron and Hermione. In the midst of the battle, Neville declares that he is going to find Luna (Evanna Lynch) for a snog: "I'm mad about her! About time I told her, since we're both probably going to be dead by dawn!" But these love stories are always subordinate to the all-important battle between good and evil.

• The crucial moment of the film is where, I admit, I have a quibble: it is gripping and even moving when Harry realises what his destiny is, and sets out to fulfil it. Yet the exact rationale for his ultimate survival may be a little obscure, and perhaps even Potter-diehards may suspect that in the film there is a touch of having your cake and eating it. Well, no matter. This is such an entertaining, beguiling, charming and exciting picture. It reminded me of the thrill I felt on seeing the very first one, 10 years ago. And Radcliffe's Harry Potter has emerged as a complex, confident, vulnerable, courageous character – most likable, sadly, at the point where we must leave him for ever. Wait. I've got that darn thing in my eye again ...

By Peter Bradsaw