Harry pitter chamber of secrets cast movie#
Harry pitter chamber of secrets cast code#

Don't get me wrong: many of the sequences are thrilling. After the boisterous clowning of the opening set piece - which involves the ritual humiliation of the Dursleys, Harry's swinish Muggle guardians - the picture settles down into a plodding, heavy rhythm. Columbus, in contrast, is a master of the obvious and the emphatic. Rowling is capable of remarkable shifts in tone, gliding from comic observations of daily life at Hogwarts to tremors of absolute evil with a sure, deft touch. Much of the fun in the books comes from how swiftly they move, and how much detail and information they carry along in their eddying, tumbling narrative currents. (Too bad Erich von Stroheim isn't around to direct it.)īut for now the length is less of a problem than the pacing. At this rate ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,'' the 752-page fourth volume, is likely to spawn the highest-grossing seven-hour film epic in history. Columbus may soon be credited with curing its notoriously short attention span. Rowling has been loudly praised for sparking the younger generation's renewed interest in reading, and Mr. Rowling's novelistic skills have grown, along with her ambitions, with each successive volume - and partly because the director shows more dexterity and imagination of his own, ''Chamber of Secrets,'' which opens nationwide today, is a little better than ''Sorcerer's Stone.''Īnd at 2 hours 41 minutes, quite a bit longer. Because it is based on a richer, more interesting book - so far Ms. But passing grades will at least earn them their allowances. Until the filmmakers absorb this lesson and show themselves willing to risk getting into trouble, no special awards are likely to be forthcoming for them.

Harry pitter chamber of secrets cast code#

Near the end of this one, Albus Dumbledore (Richard Harris, in his last screen performance) sternly notes that Harry and Ron have broken at least a dozen rules in the code book of their school, Hogwarts, and then gives them a special award for service to the institution.

Harry pitter chamber of secrets cast movie#

Rowling, inhibit this movie as it did the first Potter film. Their presumed demands, and the hovering spirit of Harry's creator, J.

My fellow critics and I may occasionally fault a movie for departing, in detail or in spirit, from its literary source, but the grousing of a few adult pedants is nothing compared to the wrath of several million bookish 10-year-olds. Columbus (who is also an executive producer of the films) has faced the unenviable and unusual challenge of adapting books most of the audience will have read closely and recently. ''Sorcerer's Stone,'' while far from a great movie, was good enough.

Columbus, once again working with the screenwriter Steve Kloves and a cast of talented children (especially Emma Watson, who plays the brainy and intrepid Hermione) and grown-up British luminaries, has acquitted himself honorably. Cuarón also directed a superb adaptation of ''The Little Princess.'' Cuarón, whose most recent film was the moving and irrepressible teenage sex comedy ''Y Tu Mamá También,'' may be the perfect man for the job, though parents worried about an unrated, sexually explicit ''Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban'' should remember that Mr. Radcliffe remains smooth-faced and wide-eyed, his voice (like that of Rupert Grint, who plays Harry's pal Ron Weasley, and Tom Felton, as the odious Draco Malfoy), has begun to break, and he speaks in the unmistakable, awkward tongue of adolescence.īut ''Harry Potter and the Onset of Puberty'' may have to wait for the next installment, when Alfonso Cuarón takes over the franchise from Chris Columbus, who directed this episode and its predecessor, ''Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.'' Mr. For the audience, a similar shock arrives much earlier, the very first time Daniel Radcliffe, the young English actor who plays everybody's favorite English schoolboy wizard, opens his mouth. Potter or the Famous Harry Potter) discovers, much to his amazement, that he can speak the slithery, sibilant language of snakes, which is called Parseltongue. ABOUT an hour into ''Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,'' Harry (more often referred to as Mr.