HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, PART. 1 – david yates – 6.1 / 10

That Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 is the first half of a two-film finale to an eight-film series makes it clear that this isn’t a movie that can be judged completely on its own.  Nor can it even really be understood outside the context of the larger film / book series.  If you sat down to watch Part 1 with no idea what came before, you’d be hopelessly lost within fifteen minutes.  That doesn’t make it a bad film, per se, but it does make it a very difficult one to critique since by almost all standards normally used to judge a film, this one is a complete failure.  It does very little to establish characters or even to advance their stories.  It has no real resolution.  And it certainly doesn’t follow any familiar story structure.  Nonetheless, the seventh film in the Harry Potter series is one of the more interesting blockbusters to come along in quite some time.  Even if it’s not exactly a good film, it is a very provocative one.