Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 Reviews
Top CriticFiennes and Rickman get the actorly moments they've been building toward for so long, and the film is most fun when it sticks to mechanics: roller coaster rides, battle scenes, close calls.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
In the 10 years since Harry's first big- screen close-up, the spell has never been broken. And we Muggles have been made better for the magic.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's a pleasant irony that, just as the first installments of Rowling's oeuvre were better suited to page than screen, the final installments have reversed the relationship.
When the movie was over, a young boy sitting behind me said, "That was great!" He was satisfied, and rightly so.
This is the way The Harry Potter saga was meant to end.
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| Original Score: A
Fasten your seat belts. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2is an emotional roller-coaster ride.
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| Original Score: A
The best possible end for the series that began a decade ago.
The final chapter ends with an epilogue that puts a lump in your throat and makes you want to watch them all again from the beginning. That's the definition of a classic.
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| Original Score: 4/4
It is not often that we can chart a series over 10 years featuring the same child stars as they grow into adults. This phenomenon gives Deathly Hallows 2 a particular poignancy.
This is a terrific, smartly designed adolescent adventure, visually rich, narratively satisfying, and bound to resonate for years to come.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Deathly Hallows Part 2 sends Harry off into the pop culture pantheon on a thrilling high note. Well played. Well played indeed.
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| Original Score: B+
Ten years and eight films after the boy wand-twirler's cinematic adventures began, the saga resolves in ways suspenseful, romantic and thrilling.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A movie with no beginning and no middle but two-plus hours of thundering, momentous ending...
Exactly what it needs to be: artfully filmed, tautly paced, just sentimental enough.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
My, how the children have grown - and the movies too.
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| Original Score: 4/5
It has been extraordinarily fun, and now the decade-long saga has reached its grand finale. The best has been saved for the last.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The Harry Potter films, like the boy wizard himself, have had their creative ups and downs, so it's especially satisfying that this final film, ungainly title and all, has been worth the wait.
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| Original Score: 4/5
With its heartening final note of hope and renewal, Deathly Hallows -- Part 2 provides an altogether fitting finale to a series that has prized the fans above all.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Cinematographer Eduardo Serra underscores the sense of dread with a rich charcoal palette, and the outstanding CGI and 3D effects make the otherworldly threats more corporeal.
Tears are shed for the lost, cheers are raised for the (often unexpectedly) brave and noble, and, in the movie's final moments, there is a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment rarely achieved in filmmaking.
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| Original Score: 4/4
It's always hard to predict how a work of art will age over time, but I have the feeling that, like its three young leads, the Harry Potter series will turn out just fine.
It's virtually non-stop action, though director David Yates, who has taken good care of these final four, ever-meaner Potter adventures, does a very crafty thing, following adapter Steve Kloves' screenplay.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
This movie is impressively staged, the dialogue is given proper weight and not hurried through, there are surprises which, in hindsight, seem fair enough, and "Harry Potter" now possesses an end that befits the most profitable series in movie history.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
This is a masterful and worthy final chapter in one of the best franchises ever put to film.
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| Original Score: 5/5
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 puts a triumphant capper on a decade of Pottermania.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's almost impossible for the convergence of good and evil to meet inflated expectations. What matters here is that the story is told clearly and with faithfulness to the book, and that it resolves a conflict that has simmered for a decade.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A fitting, expertly made final chapter, freighted with hard-won emotions, shot through with a sense of farewell, and fully aware of the epic stakes involved.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Be sure to arrive at your seat with plenty of popcorn -- and tissues. You're going to need both.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
What fun to feel like a kid again. I had a marvelous time.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Part 2 is a magnificent finale for this fantasy opus, one that pays ample justice to Harry's long-in-the-making showdown with He Who Must Not Be Named, a battle in which life and death, the past and the future, precariously hang in the balance.
The final Harry Potter movie, above all others, supplies Radcliffe with the gravitas of not just an epic story come to completion, but some real dramatic heft. Not so bad for a Hogwarts dropout.
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| Original Score: 5/5
We'll miss you, Harry. But oh, what a way to go out.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
While it's unfolding, this is just terrific fun: eye-scorching, ear-battering, heart-pounding cinema of pure spectacle.
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| Original Score: 4/5
It's wonderful. Epic and heartbreaking and just as grand as it needs to be.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Everything a summer blockbuster should be but rarely is - a whip-smart, slam-bang piece of entertainment where we deeply care about the fate of the central characters (and many subsidiary ones who return for their last bows).
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| Original Score: 4/4
With shifting loyalties, unlikely heroes, truths revealed and a little help from friends, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2" winds the series up in a most-satisfying fashion.
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| Original Score: 4/5
The sublime supporting cast, brought back if only for glimpses here, remind us that the series is a luscious, perhaps unparalleled showcase for this generation's most endearing British actors.
The thrilling conclusion to a phenomenal cinematic story 10 years in the telling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 is proof that authentic movie excitement is its own form of magic.
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| Original Score: A-
While "Deathly Hallows: Part 2" offers long-promised answers, it also dares to pose some eternal questions, and it'll stay with you after the final chapter has closed.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
HPATDH 2 works like a charm. A funereal charm, to be sure, but then, there's no time left for larks.
If you've been a devoted follower of the Potter saga in print and at the movies, you'll come away from this final chapter with a feeling of catharsis and, perhaps, a slightly damp handkerchief.
With its accelerated rhythm, relentless flow of incident and wizard-war endgame, Part 2 will strike many viewers as a much more exciting, involving picture than the slower, more atmospheric Part 1.
An outstanding capper to the most lucrative film franchise of all time.
