After all this time and all these films, it is as though we never really knew you at all. Thus the final book in JK Rowling's ludicrously successful series has been turned into not one, but two instalments - a delight for Potter fans and a gift to the accountants at Warner Bros. So Part I is the beginning of the end, and director David Yates sets out his stall early. Were it not for the fact that the world has watched Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint grow up on screen, we might as well have spent the past decade locked up inside a waxwork museum.Part one sees Harry (Radcliffe) attempting to variously evade and defeat the dark lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes): the same mission as it ever was. There are moments when even adult film-goers will be watching through their fingers - a scene in which Hermione is tortured, albeit heard rather than seen, another in which a Hogwarts teacher comes to a very unpleasant end. We also see a great deal of Voldemort, Harry's arch-nemesis, in a bone-chilling performance by Ralph Fiennes.
– American audiences have to wait another week, but the second-last installment of the Harry Potter movies premiered in London tonight. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I sets up the grand finale, which isn't out until July 2011. Not that reviews will mean a whit to devoted fans, but two early ones out of Britain are of the love-it/hate it variety: It's the "scariest" Potter film by far, writes Anita Singh in the Telegraph. "This is also the installment that takes us deepest into the emotions of the central trio" and includes "scenes of real poignancy." Details like self-filling champagne flutes are a "delight" as usual, and the special effects are "terrific." She can't wait for next July. Xan Brooks in the Guardian is not a fan. Yeah, "it looks great, in the way that a show home looks great," he writes. But it lacks soul. "It's not so much that (it) feels at times largely indistinguishable from the six outings preceding it, nor even that part one offers so little in the way of resolution. It's simply that it's hard to mourn the demise of a franchise that was never more than half-alive to begin with." The Potter films won't stand the test of time because they "are too obviously built for purpose and too lacking in wit, warmth and humanity to survive much beyond the moment."