Poorly translated from the book, The Half Blood Prince doesn't stand that well as a Harry Potter movie. As a simple fantasy movie, however, it kinda works. Obviously just meant as a bridge to the finale, which should be pretty epic.

This latest installment of the Harry Potter franchise may not be the most coherent, but I found it the most enjoyable one together with The Prisoner of Azkaban. Having watched it with a bunch of friends, I found it quite hilarious at many occasions and visually impressive. The screenplay however is questionable, especially at the unfortunate event, and without having read the book it probably is hard to follow. It will be interesting to see how they tackle book 7 from here on.

The Harry Potter movies keep trying to throw in two movie's worth of plot into one and it always ends up as a gigantic whirlwind of a movie, although they're still, for the most part, fun to watch. Focuses a little too heavily on the romance instead of the Voldemort plot, and focuses much too much on a whiny Malfoy, but still a fun movie.

Daniel Radcliffe is a disastrous actor. Ruins great part of the film. Still, a nice add-on to the Harry Potter franchise, despite lacking some matureness - the teen melodrama is amazingly awful.

Good razorwork - Kloves/Yates wisely removed uninteresting subplots and reduced Volde's backstory from frontstory to backstory. The chemistry between the characters is thoroughly good, the visuals are awesome, but there are still all these weaknesses: Yates resolves to cliches in the most dramatic scenes, Harry's love interest has no personality and Ron's doesn't make any sense, and, the most enduring weakness in the movie series, the filmmakers start hurrying as the end of the film approaches.

felt epically let down by this, besides becoming more like Hollyoaks with wands, this might as well have just been called Harry Potter and the death of Dumbledore.

The best Potter movie so far, mostly because of the restraint used in, well, everything. No distracting Lucas-like twirly things everywhere, but some gorgeous locales and an interesting enough plot that hinges less on random events than normal. Rickman stole every scene.

A competent and entertaining job is done with the worst of the book series, but the film-makers still can't make it hang together as a single story; it's a series of events that JK Rowling needed to happen in order to get on to her last book.

Replaces plot and narrative with poor lighting and monochrome color all in hope that you won't know the difference. Also makes the assumption that longer is better. So while the last fifteen minutes is the only plot that matters, again they hope that you don't notice that. [Rifftrax does an amazingly good job with this one considering nothing actually happens. Our boys almost seem to excel the more nothing happens on screen.]

Put it simply, this movie rocks. It just came together better than the last one. The divergences from the book are really okay by me. There's some fun humor in the story and the characters are still quite interesting. My main complaint is that they spend little to no time focusing on the titular half-blood prince. Because of that, there's almost no real feeling when the fact is finally revealed at the end.

Not stirring, but a reasonable diversion, busy enough with interesting characters that it's not a boring slog. It doesn't so much as stand on its own than serve as a live-action testimonial to Rowling's writing. Like a portfolio of Mary GrandPre's drawings or a collection of trading cards embossed with favorite quotes, it's not successful as its own entity. It's a memento, a souvenir, a way for fans to rekindle memories of happy reading without creasing the spines of any of their beloved tomes.

These are dark days at Hogwarts. The brilliance in the novels, and therefore the films, was that as Harry (and readers) matured, so did the story. Rowling never held back when she wanted to get darker, and neither does Yates. But wait, there's more! For the first time, Radcliffe has no false notes in his performance. Even better is Gambon has finally won me over with his Dumbledore. Along with Broadbent and Rickman, who reminds us why there is no other who could play Snape, it's amazing. Wow.

These films really highlight the subjectivity of the phrase, "spirit of the book". Here is an overall lack of action, which could be confused with dull. Colors are drained to Sweeney Todd levels of monochrome. But this film is completely, maybe to a fault, focused on characters - which they get mostly right - and their relationships, which felt real. Not on "events!" Action sequences, exuberance, and flow be damned if it means caring about the people we're watching.