Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001)
★★★ — Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001)
Let me be honest about where I stand with this one: I don't think Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is a great film. It's an important one, a foundational one, one that clearly means the world to an enormous number of people, myself included on some level. But important and great aren't the same thing, and coming back to it now, the cracks are pretty hard to ignore.
That said, I don't want to be churlish about what it gets right, because some of it it gets very right indeed. The first time the camera sweeps across the Great Hall, candles floating overhead, hundreds of students in their robes, the enchanted ceiling shifting like a living sky, there's a genuine sense of wonder. Diagon Alley feels alive and strange in exactly the way it should. John Williams's score is doing a lot of heavy lifting throughout, and fair play to it, because that theme is one of the great pieces of film music of its era. The world-building, at its best, carries the breathless excitement of the book: the idea that something extraordinary is hiding just beneath the skin of the ordinary world, and that a quiet, overlooked kid might be the one to find it.
But here's where I start to have problems. The special effects have aged badly, and I mean really badly. The Quidditch sequences, which should feel thrilling, look clunky and weightless. The CGI creatures, the troll, the three-headed dog, even the centaur, lack any real physical presence. And some of the production design, ambitious as it clearly was, tips into the theatrical in the wrong way. Not theatrical in a grand, stylised sense, but theatrical as in painted flats and studio backlots that don't quite convince you they exist beyond the frame. It's a fantasy film that arrived just before digital filmmaking had properly found its feet, and it shows.
The performances are a mixed bag too. The adult cast is largely excellent, with Alan Rickman making an immediate, indelible impression and Robbie Coltrane bringing warmth and bulk to Hagrid in equal measure. But the young leads are stiff. Endearingly stiff, in the way of children doing their best, but stiff nonetheless. Lines are delivered with a kind of careful deliberateness, like reading aloud in class when you know the teacher is listening. It worked at the time, I think, because the novelty of seeing these beloved characters brought to life papered over the awkwardness. Watching it now, you notice it more.
What's interesting is how differently the later films handle these same issues. By the time Alfonso Cuarón took over for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), the whole series felt looser, moodier, more confident in itself. The kids had grown into their roles, and the filmmaking had grown around them. Looking back, Philosopher's Stone almost functions as a prologue to the films that followed, necessary but slightly separate.
And I think that's where I land on it. It's a film I have genuine affection for, rooted partly in nostalgia and partly in the sheer scale of what it was attempting. Opening the door to Hogwarts for the first time, for a generation of children, must have felt like actual magic. I can remember that feeling, even if I can't quite recapture it now. But nostalgia isn't a review, and stripped of it, what you have is a film that's serviceable, charming in patches, and hamstrung by technical limitations it couldn't quite overcome.
Three stars. Worth revisiting for the atmosphere and the Williams score. Just don't go back expecting the Quidditch to hold up.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2001 | Watched: 2025-07-26
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Chris Columbus: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) · Home Alone (1990)
More with Daniel Radcliffe: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011) · Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) · Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010) · Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)
More from United Kingdom: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) · Blue (1993)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)
More fantasy: Viy (1967) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
