In the very first scene of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, screenwriters J.K. Rowling and Steven Kloves make “Dumbledore is gay” canonical in the Harry Potter universe. At the far side of 142 impossibly unhurried minutes, this will turn out to have been the most consequential narrative development of the film. After three films, […]

The question I would ask, for a start, is whether Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is chiefly a Harry Potter movie, or chiefly an Alfonso Cuarón movie. This is, of course, dumb as fuck: there are people who have seen and worshiped and idolised Prisoner of Azkaban who probably haven’t even heard the […]

So, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 has opened now, and concluded an eight-film, ten-year, decade-defining franchise, and it does so in exactly the way you would expect it to do if you read the book, saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, and/or any of the six books and films […]

The decision to cut the seventh and final Harry Potter novel into two parts for its film adaptation was a damn bad choice, made for obvious financial reasons despite the filmmaker’s urgent, repetitive insistence that it was because of that book’s “density”. A transparently stupid claim: the book was already sick with padding, relative to […]

There’s a common observation that the Alien franchise is something of a director’s showcase: take one lead character, one basic concept, one highly memorable monster design, and give it to someone with some very specific ideas for story and visuals, and you end up with four extraordinarily different movies that don’t even necessarily belong to […]

It’s an odd thing about the Harry Potter franchise: given that the films are based upon a series of books noted for their formulaic structure, and given that they are massively expensive blockbusters, one would suppose, if one knew nothing about them, that each entry would be more or less indistinguishable from the others except […]